The following excerpt from Eco-Anxiety and the Cross: Face Climate Fear with Gospel Hope (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.

“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. 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. 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. 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, “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. 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 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, 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. 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.

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 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 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 Focus on the Family. “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.

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.

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, 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, 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, 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 by Adriel Sanchez. ©2026 by Adriel Avram Sanchez. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

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 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.

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 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 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 21^st Century,’ emphasizes both our embodiment and 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. 

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: “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 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.

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 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: 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
• Katelyn Walls Shelton
• Hayden Nesbit
• Elizabeth Stice
• Amy Mantravadi
• Myles Werntz
• Brewer Eberly
• Daniel K. Williams
• Haley Baumeister
• Sarah Reardon
• Joshua Heavin
• Eddie LaRow
• Cameron Shaffer
• Wyatt Graham
• Rachel Aldhizer
• John Ehrett
• Jeff Bilbro
• 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.

Stephen J. Chester. Paul Through the Eyes of the Reformers: Living Under Grace. 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 20^th 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 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.

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. 

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 18^th 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 21^st 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 20^th 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 20^th 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 20^th 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. 

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 every Christian 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 (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 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.

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.

Thanks to YouTube (here or here), 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 convincing network executives to produce 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, 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 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.