Cal Flyn. The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. Viking, 2026. $35.00. 448 pp.

The concept of wilderness is almost impossibly rich. “The Wilderness” is something both tactile (it exists, you can go there!) and hidden (for once you can get there, is it really wild anymore?). Wilderness also constantly invites our interest in its provenance. Was the wilderness wild before we said it was so? Once towns encroach on the wilderness, is it wilderness any longer? If a tree falls in the wild forest and no one hears it, is there anyone there to call it wild?

Wilderness, in other words, is in the eye of the beholder. It requires someone to observe and name it. For this reason, the question of wilderness is caught up in a back-and-forth interrogation between the wild landscape and the “wild” in our imagination.

There is a long history of interest in the American wilderness. For this reason there is also a vast literature on the topic. Both Max Oelschlaeger’s The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (1991) and Roderick Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1965) frame the historical question. Karl Jacoby’s Crimes Against Nature (2014) and Caroline Fraser’s Rewilding the World (2010) take colorful examples of poachers and endangered animals and put them in the context of the larger story of conservation. Hundreds of essays stake out more academic views on wilderness and conservation, and the pros and cons of designating something as “wild” and the implications of such designations for policy.

But America’s history with wilderness extends also into the imagination. In fact, you could make an argument that the idea of the open frontier and the possibilities it contains is America’s most significant cultural ideal. 

Personally, I have long loved books set in the American frontier. Beginning with an early affection for the novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the eponymous Kirsten books from the American Girl franchise, I moved on to novels from Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner, Marilynne Robinson, and Kent Haruf. All of these novels, interestingly, set their protagonists against a vast and sometimes unforgiving landscape. The protagonists endure the very human challenges of aging, love, and loss—experiences that are their own unforgiving landscape. Setting stories of human aging and loss against vast prairie and rugged plains has always been a suggestive choice.

Much of our time, after all, is spent plodding, doing the same things over and over again, as if we too were in an endless prairie whose boundaries have no clear sight line. All of a sudden there rises ahead the sight of your great defeat. 

The older I get, the more I think that death always comes as a surprise, even when we know it is on the horizon. I love stories set in the prairie, and in the plains. My own life is at the moment blissfully filled with a glut of ordinary days, but I know a stark disruption will someday be on the horizon.

All of this is to say that there is much to like Cal Flyn’s The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. In her book, Flyn tells interesting stories about the wilderness, broadly conceived. She takes her readers to the hunting preserves in Africa, where the high ticket kills of endangered animals funds the project of conservation, and to erupting volcanoes, to examine the idea of the “sublime.” She writes about Ansel Adams and his role in documenting (and thus creating) the idea of the wilderness, and she tells of her experience hiking in Yosemite’s designated wilderness areas. 

She researches “environmental conservation through exclusion” when she visits Uganda’s famed gorillas, and also encounters the human guerillas who make conservation in that area so dangerous and difficult. 

In her chapter on the supernatural character of some landscapes, Flyn writes engagingly of Pungmo, a small village in Nepal where villagers live among the wildlife, including the snow leopard. Her deep respect for this wilderness and its creatures there verges on religious awe. 

Flyn is a keen observer, and aims to argue that the veneration of the land and of wild animals that exists in some cultures is a clear boon to wildlife conservationists. Conservation must accept the values of the people who live in the sites to be conserved; the land and the animals who live there shape the spiritual values of the people. These are straightforward observations but also interesting and rich ones. 

Flyn travels all over the world to encounter the sites she writes about. She clearly has a personal stake in the question, and she gladly enters the stories she tells. This might be a benefit of her wilderness writing, but for me, it also is a real weakness of an otherwise fascinating book. 

The attempt to remove the “third wall” between writer and subject—made famous by the Gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson—has been the distinctive development of nonfiction since the 1970s. Especially in the last twenty years, popular nonfiction appears to contain almost an imperative toward the first person. Self-disclosure can sell an idea. Books like Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks benefit from the back-and-forth conversation of the author with the family of Lacks. John McPhee does this well. Janet Malcom’s 1989 The Journalist and the Murderer may be the best example of a book that succeeds when the author enters it as investigator and narrator. As Kristen Martin writes in a 2022 essay for The Atlantic, “When a writer does decide to adhere to fact, they have at their disposal two main subjects—the self and everything outside the self. But even when nonfiction writers plan to turn their gaze outward, what they discover can have a tricky way of bringing them back to themselves.” This can work. Sometimes.

But I’ve read more than a few nonfiction titles lately that have great questions, fantastic titles and cover art, and yet contain an underwhelming treatment of their subject matter. Entering a little bit into the story can grant a piece of nonfiction some color. But increasingly the line seems to be fading between nonfiction and memoir. I have turned down reviews on half a dozen nonfiction titles lately because their treatment of their subject matter is so thin, so insubstantial, compared to the author’s preoccupation with his or her own opinion.

In its weakest points, Cal Flyn’s ambitious book suffers from this confusion. Though she’s isolated the right question about the wilderness and the difficulty of identifying where it starts and ends, she can’t help but put herself in the story to excess.

This leaves the reader wondering what they are supposed to gain from the text. “Landscape: emotions for cowards, perhaps. Or—not cowards, but those of us who like to feel and to be felt, but who don’t like to say it out loud.” Or “The lack of control over one’s emotional weather has often been a source of great frustration to me. Without this cyclone of rapidly fluctuating pressures, would I not be a rational and productive person?” She is also susceptible to overwriting. When describing a volcano, she writes that “rivulets of thickened magma seeped from vents and cracks, as slow and as gelatinous as icing from a cake, a grey skin forming, then cracking to reveal soft, burnt orange in underlayer.” When this overwriting meets easy caricatures, it yields prose like this: “This stylizing of wilderness was a kind of amnesia, an airbrushing of the past. A massaging of fact into myth into visual shorthand. It was simpler that way, and more beautiful.” 

It is hard to miss the irony of a book on the wilderness that is so self-absorbed. Wilderness, after all, should get us outside ourselves so that we contemplate something beyond our own experience. But The Savage Landscape gets bogged down at times in the author’s own head.

It is not completely her fault. This is only one of many recent nonfiction books that seem to suffer from what I think is a very online self-perception. Such books take a large, subtle question and identify in it two “sides.” There is an easy binary setup, perhaps something like “privacy is good” or “information is better”; then the author chips away at the two sides and leaves us with the view that, in the end, both sides are really one and the same. Somehow, whether it is affordable housing or the wilderness or colonialism or dog behavior, the answer, in the end, is really us. We are the ones who are encroaching on the wilderness, or stealing each other’s privacy, or hijacking the economy. The last lines of Flyn’s book really are: “We are all of us moving through the void.”

Many of the books I have picked up and put down of late seem to have been crafted for an audience that is very self-absorbed. Readers seem less interested in the subject matter than in having their own prior opinions endorsed. But what good nonfiction needs is the integrity of an author who knows what she thinks and takes ownership of it. When she does these things, she might very well appear in the book as a collaborator to her argument. But there is nothing good that comes from muddying the distinction between nonfiction and memoir.  

I once had a conversation with a prominent evangelical figure during which I unexpectedly found myself being chided for where I was born. Being from Iowa, this person suggested, meant that he was somehow less susceptible to the realities of sin that clearly, to his mind, must have affected me being from California. Looking back, I think that I can safely say that his comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested, at the very least, a lack of humility. It might have even pointed to an underdeveloped doctrine of sin, as if sin doesn’t affect the lives of people in the Midwest, and an equally underdeveloped doctrine of grace, as if grace somehow stopped at the border of my home state. 

Death has no time for such sarcasm. 

The prospect and the reality of death quickly remove the notion that any person or community is free from the wages of sin (Rom. 3:23). This is, of course, a truth that all people learn at some point, some at a very early age, even if it tends to be placed on the back burner of our thoughts. In the past year, I have spent a significant amount of time reflecting on the reality of death – some of which I have willingly undertaken, and some of which has been thrust upon me. 

With a Little Help from My Students, a Book, and a Film 

Under the Core Book program at Wheaton College, where I have taught for nearly two decades, the entire college community is invited each year to read the same book (in addition to the Bible), to engage in communal reflection and learning, and to participate in on-campus events related to the book. For this most recent academic year, the Core Book was When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir by Paul Kalanithi that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells his story about being a rising neurosurgeon who receives a terrible diagnosis of incurable stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36. I had my first-year students read the book in class. I think it’s safe to say that it’s not exactly what they were expecting for their first semester in college. 

Given the prominence of Wheaton College locally, the number of churches in the immediate community, and the presence of prominent Christian institutions in the area (for example, Christianity Today, multiple Christian publishers, and a variety of parachurch organizations), Wheaton is regularly regarded as among the most “Christian” of communities in the country (with all apologies to Nashville, Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Birmingham, and others). Having spent nearly twenty years here, I can confidently say that Wheaton undoubtedly benefits from the presence of such institutions. But I can also say with equal confidence that Wheaton is fallen and in need of redemption. Wheaton, too, is susceptible to the reality of death. 

As a college community, we were reminded of that unwelcome truth recently with the sudden passing of our colleague, professor, and friend Daniel Treier. Like the author of our Core Book, Dan received a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer. Others who knew Dan better than I have written eloquently about his particular contributions to evangelical theology through his teaching, writing, and mentoring of students (for example, see Kevin Vanhoozer’s tribute). I knew Dan both personally – our families attend the same church, our teenage daughters are friends, and we would occasionally chat about baseball or play golf together (he was much more consistent in his drives off the tee than I am) – and professionally – in my role as an academic editor, I worked with him on several projects, and I had recently contracted him for a book on Scripture. I wouldn’t be the first person to note that he conveyed both a seriousness about his work and a cheerfulness that would shine through at times. I still catch myself sometimes looking over at church, expecting to see him where he sat each week. 

Of course, this wasn’t the first time that death had knocked on the door of Wheaton College. Like any other community, we grieve, we celebrate the lives of those we have lost, and we wrestle with questions. But it has occurred to me that we might be better equipped than some communities to respond to the questions that inevitably arise when death shows up uninvited. For my part, at least, I found comfort not only in the words of Scripture, but also – perhaps surprisingly – in the college’s Core Book and another unexpected source: a film by Terrence Malick, which we screened for students at the college last year. 

An Invitation to Die 

On the cusp of launching a successful career, Kalanithi writes in his memoir, “I had reached the mountaintop, I could see the Promised Land, from Gilead to Jericho to the Mediterranean Sea.” But as he examines his own CT scans, he knows that everything has changed. Even as he grew steadily weaker, Kalanithi was determined to record his life and his final days. Through his words, he invites us to consider how we would respond when confronted with this reality.  

A Hidden Life, a 2019 film by Terrence Malick, offers a similar invitation. Malick presents the story of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer and devout Catholic who, when called to serve in the Nazi war effort, refuses to take the oath to Hitler. For this refusal, Franz and his family, including his wife, Fani, are increasingly ostracized in their small village of St. Radegund. Later, Franz is arrested, imprisoned, and ultimately executed. 

As is so often the case in Malick’s films, especially those that he has made in the past twenty years, running beneath the stunning imagery and the rich texture of music is a pressing question. In this case, the question is not only “What would you do?” if you were confronted by this situation, which might seem rather distant to most of us. No, Malick won’t let us off that easily. His film also asks, in a way that is applicable to each one of us, “What will you do? What will you do when confronted with the reality of death? And what kind of life do you want to live until then?” 

Taking a cue from Brett McCracken, who, in his review of the film, calls A Hidden Life “a psalm crying out to the God of refuge and deliverance,” I turn to three psalms.

Pleasant Places: Psalm 16:5-6

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
I have a goodly heritage.

If you are acquainted with Malick’s films, then the beginning of A Hidden Life will likely seem both familiar and yet distinct. Several of the features that have characterized his more recent films are immediately evident: the use of voiceover, extended images of nature (often featuring water, wind, light, and, here, mountains), long takes juxtaposed with a series of quick images, a mise-en-scène that is rarely still (either because the camera is moving, or the actors on the screen are moving, or both), and the use of music, especially non-diegetic music (that is, music that is not part of the world on the screen – in this case, the score from James Newton Howard and several pieces of classical music, including works by Bach, Handel, and others). These and other elements make watching a film by Malick a different kind of experience for viewers: for some, it can be disruptively different; for others, pleasantly so. His films, I have found, often give viewers time and space to reflect on their themes. Malick, you might say, likes to make space for the Holy Spirit to work. 

In this respect, A Hidden Life (2019) will seem familiar to the acquainted viewer. Early on, we encounter idyllic images: the Austrian mountains; blooming fields; Franz and Fani at work side by side on their farm; memories of their first meeting. These images are accompanied by equally beautiful, and now diegetic sounds (that is, sounds that are part of the world on the screen): the noises of a farm; flowing rivers; the tolling of church bells; friendly neighbors; three children at play. Fani reflects, “It seemed no trouble could reach our valley. We lived above the clouds.” 

In When Breath Becomes Air, Kalanithi describes his own version of a quiet valley. He tells us that he had not only developed a passion for medicine and, more particularly, neurosurgery. We also learn that he had an interest in literature, developing what he called “a deep love of, and care for, language.” There’s an MA in Literature sprinkled in among his medical degrees. So, it is perhaps not as surprising as it might have been for a surgeon who also loved works by Joyce, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and Hemingway among others to quote Walt Whitman’s 1892 poem, “Song of Myself,” when assessing his early life: “I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin.”

An idyllic farm in the mountains. A bustling family. Perfect health. Are these not, to use the words of the Psalmist, “boundary lines [that] have fallen… in pleasant places”? 

But already, as both readers and viewers, we have been warned. No matter how many times Paul looks at his own CT scans, he cannot avoid the diagnosis: “The future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.” Similarly, in the film, the opening voiceover from Franz points to a hope, but one that is unrealized: “I thought that we could build our nest high up in the trees. Fly away, like birds, to the mountains.” What follows are images from Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935), depicting Hitler descending through the clouds to arrive at a rally in Nuremburg. If we are paying attention, we also hear Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Radegund may seem like an Edenic locale, but Malick has already suggested that it will not last. Fani hears plane engines roar in the distance. As viewers, we know that Austrian soldiers who are called to military service need to swear an oath to Hitler. To refuse would result in death, leaving Franz’s family abandoned. His parish priest tells him that his sacrifice would benefit no one. Even the bishop tells him, “You have a duty to the Fatherland. The church tells you so.” 

The theological truth in both the book and the film is that sin and its effects are radical – that is, it affects and infects everything; it is everywhere. Nowhere and no one is hidden from it. Not California. Not Iowa. Not Radegund. Even in the Garden of Eden, sin enters in. 

Passing Shadows: Psalm 144:3-4 

O Lord, what are humans that you regard them,
or mortals that you think of them?
They are like a breath;
their days are like a passing shadow.

In one scene, Malick seems to intentionally echo Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. In that classic work, a knight (played by Max von Sydow) and his squire return from the Crusades only to be confronted by the ravages of the Black Plague and the personification of Death. Later, they enter a small church, where they find an artist at work, painting a fresco of the Dance of Death. The squire asks the artist, “Why all this daubing?” “To remind people of death,” responds the artist. “That won't make them any happier,” says the squire. “I paint life as it is,” replies the artist. “Then folk can do as they like.” 

Malick’s version of the scene presents Franz and an artist discussing his depictions of Jesus. “I paint their comfortable Christ with a halo over his head,” says the artist to Franz. “Someday I might have the courage to venture. Not yet. Someday I’ll paint the true Christ.” This artist-in-residence serves as a kind of stand-in for Malick, who might well be speaking to himself. His next film, tentatively entitled The Way of the Wind, is about the life of Jesus. 

In the meantime, Malick has given us another passion. At one point, Franz is walking past a crucifix statue. He pauses to look at it, as if he knows where this is all going. According to Luke 9, shortly after the Transfiguration and after repeatedly foretelling his own death, Jesus begins to make his way toward the cross that awaits him. Verse 51 reads: “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” 

It is difficult not to notice some of the Christological comparisons in the film. The people from Franz’s hometown can’t believe what he is doing – for example, he refuses to donate to the German war effort – and the village begins to turn against the Jägerstätter family. “It’s an act of madness,” says one woman to Fani. “A sin. A sin against his family, against his village.” The mayor tries to convince him to change his mind: “You’re worse than them. Because they are enemies, but you are a traitor.” The peaceful, friendly village of Radegund has now become a stand-in for a disbelieving Nazareth. But Franz is resolute in his conviction. He explicitly quotes Psalm 144: “We are like a breath. Like a shadow that passes away.” You might say that he has set his face to go to Berlin. 

As expected, Franz is eventually called up to serve in the military. In early March 1943, when he refuses to take the oath to Hitler, he is arrested and imprisoned. By May 4, he is taken to Tegel Prison outside Berlin. There, his Christ-like suffering continues: the soldiers mock him, beat him, abuse him. Like Christ in the garden, he prays to God. The authorities question him. Even some of his fellow prisoners mock him, like the thief on the cross. He is brought before the court. The Pilate-like judge (played by Bruno Ganz) asks him, “Do you judge me?” After a sham trial, he is condemned to death. Even a final visit from Fani and his parish priest will not change Franz’s mind or stay the execution. 

Tegel Prison also happens to be the place where another anti-Nazi, Christian dissenter was held. Shortly after Jägerstätter was arrested, German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also arrested, but Bonhoeffer arrived at Tegel before Jägerstätter. Just more than a week before Franz’s arrival, Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his parents, Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer on April 25, Easter Sunday: 

What is so liberating about Good Friday and Easter is the fact that our thoughts are pulled far beyond our personal circumstances to the ultimate meaning of all life, suffering, and indeed everything that happens, and this gives us great hope.

Bonhoeffer outlived Jägerstätter by nearly two years, but he, too, was eventually executed by the Nazi state. In one of his earlier works, The Cost of Discipleship, he had revealed that he already knew the truth of the invitation to follow Jesus: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Let us not forget that Franz’s passion also entailed the suffering of others, including his mother, his children, his sister-in-law, and especially his wife, Fani. She struggles to keep up with the work on the farm. She is ostracized by the villagers. From prison, Franz imagines his children taking part in the Corpus Christi celebrations, but Fani knows the truth: they have been excluded from these communal events. In his analysis of A Hidden Life, film critic Robert Kohen helpfully reminds us that when “Fani writes to an imprisoned Franz about his ‘three little women,’” she places the film alongside Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Women, “another work about the trials wives and children must endure when men are absent during wartime.” Like Mrs. O’Brien in a different Malick film, The Tree of Life, who prays to God after the death of her son, Fani prays: “Lord, you do nothing. Where are you? Why did you create us?” 

In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul’s wife, Lucy, suffers alongside him. As he grapples with his diagnosis, Paul reminds his readers of the next line in that same Whitman poem: 

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, 
Hoping to cease not till death. 

Prior to Paul’s own death, a friend and fellow medical student, Jeff, died. Reflecting on this loss, Paul writes, “Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms… Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life… Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins.” It is true that death is part of creaturely life. But it is still an enemy, an unwelcomed guest, an unintended consequence (Gen. 3:19), part of what theologian Karl Barth called the “shadowside” of creation – those limitations of our creaturely finitude and mortality. 

Franz Jägerstätter was executed on August 9, 1943 at 36 years old. Malick depicts the church bell tolling in Radegund. 

Hidden in Christ: Psalm 121:1-8

I lift up my eyes to the hills—    where will my help come from?My help comes from the Lord,    who made heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber… The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand… the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

As with Malick’s other films, it is worth pausing to consider the meaning of the title: A Hidden Life. How, exactly, is this life hidden? 

There might be some irony at work here in that the small village of St. Radegund, though high up in the hills, was not hidden and could not be hidden from Hitler’s designs. Even this valley was not hidden from the reality of sin. In another sense, Franz’s life remained largely unknown and thus hidden from the public eye for a long time. In 1964, more than twenty years after Franz’s death, Gordon Zahn published the first biography about him, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jägerstätter, bringing his story to light. 

But we are given another interpretive clue at the end of the film. The closing title card offers a quote from Middlemarch by George Eliot: 

… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Eliot helpfully reminds us that it is not a life that seeks attention that brings lasting change. Rather, it is a faithful, quiet – yes, even hidden – life that leads to sustained flourishing. A life that sows seeds, like Franz and Fani on their farm, that will only grow in time. 

I would echo Eliot’s advice. But I have to confess that this reading of the film leaves me somewhat unsatisfied. For it hardly recognizes the faith that guided Franz’s life, the faith that informed his difficult – almost impossible – decisions in the midst of great trials, the faith that remained with him until death. Might there be something else at work here? 

In Colossians 3:1-4, we read: 

So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.

“Death always wins.” That is what Kalanithi suggested in his memoir. In a sense, of course, he was right. Confronted with his own mortality, he states, “Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.” No one will remain hidden from death’s personal visit. Not Paul. Not Franz. Not Malick. Not Dan. Not you. Not me. 

But the promise that we have as followers of Christ is that he has conquered death, and if we have been buried with him into death, if we have hidden our lives in Christ, then we will be raised again to new life (Rom. 6:4). A hidden life, then, is not only a meaningful life lived in obscurity. Much more than that, a hidden life is one that finds its true meaning and fulfillment in Christ. 

In my pastoral role, I have found myself reading the words of Psalm 121 nearly countless times in parishioners’ homes, at the bedside in the hospital, or with grieving families. Perhaps one of the reasons that page of my Bible is so worn is that the pressing question that the Psalmist asks gets an immediate reply: “Where will my help come from? / My help comes from the Lord.” The Lord, the one who made heaven and earth, is the one who sends help by sending the Son into the world to redeem humanity and remake the world. 

In Lord Jesus Christ, the last book that he published before his own death, Dan wrote the following about the promises found in Christ:

As the Son of Man, Jesus sinlessly identified with humanity’s current condition and thereby fulfilled our triumphant destiny. For, in union with him and his suffering, we enjoy the glory God made for us to share as royal priests of creation.

In his commentary on Malick’s film, Alan Jacobs reminds us that the word “martyr” means “witness”: “[T]he martyr is one who bears witness to the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ, most typically by undergoing his or her own Passion.” On June 1, 2007, the Roman Catholic Church officially declared that Jägerstätter was a martyr for the faith. Later that same year, on October 26, he was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI. Many members of the Jägerstätter family were present at the event, including his wife, their children, and grandchildren.

An Invitation to Live 

Last fall, as part of the Core Book program, I found myself on a panel with other Wheaton College faculty members, discussing Kalanithi’s book and the reality of suffering. Little did any of us who were gathered that evening know that in less than two months, Dan would be gone. At Dan’s memorial service, where we celebrated his life and his faith, Phil Ryken, president of Wheaton College, challenged the congregation with two questions: “What are you living for?” and “Are you ready to die?” 

It turns out that the college’s Core Book and Malick’s film are not so much invitations to reflect upon death, though they are that. But even more so, they are invitations to reflect upon life. What kind of life do you want to live? In whose hands will you place your life? Not just at the moment of death, but now? 

On July 8, 1943, two days after the tribunal condemned Franz to death, he wrote a letter to Fani: 

It is a joy to be able to suffer for Jesus and our faith. We have the joyful hope that the few days in this life when we have been separated will be replaced by thousands of days in eternity, where we shall rejoice with God.

Near the close of the film, Fani, who had earlier prayed to God with a questioning faith, prays again, this time with greater assurance as she prays to God on behalf of Franz: “You love him more than I do. Give him courage, wisdom, strength.” In the end, Malick offers us, through her words, a vision of new creation: 

A time will come when we will know what all this is for. And there will be no mysteries. We will know why we live. We’ll come together. We’ll plan orchards. Fields. We’ll build the land back up. Franz, I’ll meet you there. In the mountains.

Franz, Paul, Dan – their lives were not hidden from the realities of sin and suffering. But neither were their lives hidden from God. Indeed, being hidden in Christ allows us to see death for what it really is: an enemy defeated. And it allows us to see who we really are: conquerors through Christ.

In his preface to This Day: Sabbath Poems, Kentucky poet-farmer, Wendell Berry, laments the sorrowful swallowing of our physical world by the mechanical:

By disfigurements that our time imposes upon our consciousness, by scars of bad history that mark the land, by sounds of machinery dominating the air, the mind may be returned to themes of loss, estrangement, and sorrow. That one is sometimes able, among the disturbances of the present world, to wander into some good and beautiful whereabouts of woods, grow quiet and come to rest is a gift, a wonder, and a kind of grace.

While it is the disturbed and dominated present world that Berry mourns, it is this same world where he also finds a beautiful gift: a place to grow quiet in the rubble and be human again.

This is the mission of the Christian life: to help others wander into the good and beautiful grace of the Son of God amid the disfigurement and estrangement of the world.

However, this implies relationship and presence. In our decentralized, digitally disturbed age, presence has become more complicated. At the risk of being reductionistic, we can separate our lives into two broad spheres of presence: media presence and mission presence. Elsewhere in his preface, Berry likewise notes this fundamental divide between “mechanical” and “natural” life. We can further understand this divide as being between the places we inhabit online, and the places we inhabit physically and are thus called to be on mission with God. To use Berry’s imagery, the technological is devouring the physical; one is increasingly dominated by the accelerated “sounds of  machinery” (e.g. clicks and notifications); the other holds the gift of rest and wonder. 

While these spheres are not necessarily mutually exclusive per se, they operate on two vastly different understandings of the self, imposing upon our consciousness in drastically different ways.

Media Presence

In the digital age we quite literally bring ourselves into existence. There is no shortage of ways for us to create ourselves with usernames, avatars, pictures, and posts. These are the digital elements that constitute existence in an online environment, in “the machine.” Self-creation and self-sustaining are the modes of being. However, this self of our own making still requires external validation––if no one follows me, if no one shares my post, if no one likes my picture… do I really exist?

In his recent book, Superbloom: How Technologies Of Connection Tear Us Apart, Nicholas Carr considers the contrasting environments of physical vs. virtual worlds: 

In the physical world, we remain present even when we're quiet. In the virtual world, we don't. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!

This phrase––Here I am!––is the quintessential, unwritten caption whenever we click “post.” It is both our desperate announcement of self-creation and our anxious attempt at self-justification. 

Consider what these words mean in a media sphere:

“Here” 

The here of this announcement is a disembodied and asynchronous anti-location. The very word loses its temporal and tangible meaning in a digital world. Carr notes how online life “removed the constraints of space and time and [placed] them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity.” Here is merely a digital impression; a time-stamped act fed into algorithmic computation. One can be “here” anywhere and everywhere; place has been disfigured by digitization.

“I” 

The I that is announced has been carefully curated and polished pre-post. This is a dangerously fragile I, up for debate and in constant need of external validation. This is an I who is consumed by the very media for which it created itself. Carr points out the various roles we must play––“producer and impresario, hawker and emcee, for a show that never stops.” I must keep up, lest I fade into algorithmic oblivion. However, the whole endeavor is a farce; Byung-Chul Han has termed as “smart power” the seductive force social media uses to make us who it wants through the appearance of self-creation. 

“am” 

Our being is reduced to presenting, proving, and then preserving our existence. All action is aimed at justifying ourselves to the watching world. Lesslie Newbigin argues that the combination of the Enlightenment and industrialization stripped us of any clear cultural telos. There isn’t a uniting end or purpose of being for collective society. Thus, we must each manufacture our own purpose. As a result, fragile, telos-seeking selves flock to social platforms hoping to find one.

We can visualize this self-created self as one that simultaneously presents itself to the world via social media, while also requiring external feedback, validation, and acceptance from social media to confirm and justify its existence:

Not only is such a resulting conception of self incredibly unfulfilling and inherently anxious (always one mistake away from having our existence canceled), but it also becomes increasingly anti-relational. Freya India observes how these platforms form us negatively, “We become resentful. Bitter. Competitive. Quietly wishing for others to fail.”

Such resentment is rooted in the zero-sum game of digital glory––more attention for you likely means less for me. We are quite literally competing for our lives, hoping to outperform one another to secure our social validation. This is a unique disfigurement of our time, as Berry would say.

Mission Presence

In contrast to our digital environments, presence in mission is not an act of creation, but rather a responsive act. Throughout Scripture we see several characters respond to the call and commission of God with the very same phrase, “Here I am!” 

• Abraham – responds “Here I am” and is called to sacrifice his only son, Isaac.
• Jacob – responds “Here I am” and is called to return to Canaan.
• Moses – responds “Here I am” and is called to redeem God’s people from slavery.
• Samuel – responds “Here I am” and is called to be a prophet to God’s people.
• Isaiah – responds “Here I am” and is called to an unfruitful ministry.

However, in this context these words have an entirely different meaning. Each of these were responses to the God who creates, calls, and commissions his people. Rather than an act of self-creation and self-justification, these are acts of self-subservience and self-submission. 

“Here”

Each response was uttered from an actual location in space and time. These men stood before God and were in relationship with others. Many of their calls even included dramatically tangible acts like bearing a knife down toward one’s firstborn son, or shielding one’s eyes from a blazing shrub. Here required their full bodies—Samuel’s running back and forth, Isaiah’s scorched lips—and was often marked with tangible signs like stone altars marking an actual place.

“I”

These were I’s with solid identities in relation to others––fathers of families, shepherds to flocks, apprentices to mentors, prophets to nations. They had concrete, tested, and honed gifts and abilities that were commissioned for the good of others. Further, these encounters were unique––for instance, Moses was the I at the bush, and no other I. Kevin Vanhoozer names such an encounter with God’s word an “I/Thou” affair; who we are is uniquely defined and expanded by our contact with God. 

“am”

Being is for the purpose of service. Being is dictated and given shape by the mission God assigns. Rather than justifying ourselves, proving our own righteousness and worth to others, Bruce Waltke argues that true righteousness is lived out by disadvantaging oneself in order to advantage others. Thus, being is applied in the act of serving. We are through God and for others. This is most striking in Moses’ case, who realizes his purpose through being sent by “I AM”.

Now we can see how a biblical conception of self is not self-created, but created by God and lived out via the call of God. And, rather than the self being something pieced together by receiving, it is something discovered during the act of giving in the context of mission:

How does such a God-created, called, and commissioned self move forward in mission?

The Self on Mission

We must earnestly answer God’s call in Scripture to mission with the same words, “Here I am!” Tim Keller has outlined a helpful framework for discerning one’s call (i.e. mission). Keller says there are basically three necessary elements: Affinity, Ability, and Opportunity, each of which corresponds helpfully to our phrase:

“Here” (Opportunity)

- Where am I geographically? 

- What places do I inhabit? 

- What are the actual needs of the people here and what are the real opportunities open for me?

To answer this question, we must have a level of commitment to a physical community—some “good and beautiful whereabouts” where we can be present. This is increasingly unpopular for rising Gen Zers––transience and open options are more exciting. Like one character in Berry’s Jayber Crow, the temptation is to live like “there is always a better place for a person to live, better work to do, a better spouse to wed, better friends to have.” But Jayber is very much a story about membership—what it means to belong mutually to a place and its people. Carr says virtual presence requires physical absence. Thus, the online self belongs to no one. In this way, social media is the graveyard of mission. Mission will starve without membership to a place and its people. Over-involvement on social platforms removes us from the place of mission.

“I” (Ability)

- Who am I in Jesus Christ? 

- How has God made and wired me? 

- Where have others recognized and affirmed gifting? 

- What unique abilities do I have and how can those be used for the good of those around me? 

Again, this requires being deeply known and open to feedback via trial and error in community. You will likely have to serve in many uncomfortable ways before you or someone else realizes where you fit. Paul wanted Timothy’s progress in ministry to be a public spectacle. Much less painful than such growth in the spotlight is to carefully craft ourselves in private before making our impressive public (digital) appearance, but, as we have seen, this is a fragile and fruitless self obligated only to its own self-creative purpose.

“am” (Affinity)

- At the core of who I am, what excites me? 

- What types of people, contexts, and ministries do I vibrate towards?

This, I think, is a silent casualty of online life. We are inundated with endless amounts of diverse content––the result being the nearly impossible task of focusing on any one interest. We are simply too overwhelmed to notice and act on our own affinities. Bo Burnham’s comedic line, welcoming us into the internet is: “Can I interest you in everything? All of the time?” Catechized and thus formed by everything, we are left amorphous enigmas, even to ourselves! Our being must be shaped by the ancient and tangible practices of the Christian faith—silence, word and prayer, sacraments. In these, novelty is replaced with embodied repetition, providing a stable foundation on which unique interests can be discerned and flourish. 

Keller says when these three “plates” align, there is warrant to believe God has uniquely created and called you to be on mission in this area. However, discerning these will likely only happen in non-virtual contexts, away from air dominated by technological buzz.

***

Ultimately, Carr points out that “social media is successful because it gives us what we want.” Thus, the only way to tip the scales of virtual presence toward physical presence in mission is to change what it is we want. That is a work of the missional God alone.

We must pray for hearts that desire not a fragile, fleeting sense of self that must be recreated each day while we await validation via notifications, but one that longs to join the mission of the Triune God to bring flourishing—grace, rest, and wonder—to every good and beautiful place including where you are.

Regardless of our desires, mission is successful because it is what God wants, and he gets what he wants—to undo the themes of loss, estrangement, and sorrow. It is within this glorious and guaranteed divine mission we’ve been invited to respond, “Here I am!”

While reading Vice President Vance's second memoir, Communion, two dots connected as I reflected on my own transition from the analog to the digital world in the late '90s. The first was Vance's mention of rereading C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters during his military deployment, noting the cleverness of the demon's ability to get man to lose his faith. The second dot came later in the book, when Vance warns us of the dangers of the "attention economy," or the monetization of the mind.

Being the same age as the Vice President, not only did I begin to romanticize the simplicity of my childhood, but a sense of guilt also washed over me, knowing I couldn't divorce my phone and social media. While my work in public policy requires frequent phone use, I have to be honest with myself—it frequently crosses the line into mindless distraction. Even though my social media activity has been outsourced to a contractor, many of the posts still have a "look at me" vibe as I try to build the platform of followers needed to sell a future book. Between the subtle distraction and micro self-worship, I couldn't help but ponder, "Is Screwtape hiding in my pocket?"

C. S. Lewis published The Screwtape Letters in 1942, during World War II, when men faced extreme adversity and hard times. The fictional book is about a senior demon, Screwtape, who writes instructional letters to his inexperienced nephew, Wormwood, detailing psychological tactics to tempt a human man away from God and into damnation. The layman believes the path to hell is through the sin of hardened behavior such as stealing and killing, but the devil knows ease is his preferred method of success. "Indeed," the senior devil Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood in the twelfth letter, "the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

In the time of Lewis, Screwtape's "gentle slope" strategy had to be improvised with the mediums of the day, including newspapers, radio, and idle conversation. Today, it has been optimally engineered, shrunken down, and placed in the pocket of nearly every man, woman, and child in the Western world. Reread the Letters with a smartphone on the desk beside you and the book looks more like a product roadmap.

Two Tracks, Same Destination

Hell's strategy, as Screwtape lays it out, runs along two tracks. The first bends the soul's attention inward slowly until the self becomes the object of worship. The second dissipates attention outward into what Screwtape calls "Nothing." It's not pleasure, not even sin in any sense, but a drift toward aimlessness that consumes a life without anyone ever choosing it. The tracks seem like opposites, as one concentrates attention and the other scatters it. They share the same destination, however, because both accomplish the only thing Hell needs: keeping the soul from looking at God. The smartphone is the first device in history that runs both tracks at once.

Self-Worship

Screwtape's earliest advice about prayer is not to prevent it but to redirect it by keeping the patient's mind on his own performance. Teach him to "estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling," Screwtape advises in the fourth letter, so that his attention curves back on himself rather than out toward the God he is addressing. Later, in the fourteenth letter, comes the trap of humility: "Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble,' and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear." The pattern is consistent. Hell does not need you to declare yourself a god. It needs only to make you the permanent subject of your own thoughts.

Now pick up your phone. Its camera faces both ways, but in the age of "selfies," the lens pointed at your own face gets the attention. It counts your steps, your followers, your likes, operating like lights on a car's dashboard, tracking one's metrics and updating them in real time. Wormwood was assigned one patient and studied him individually, learning his moods and vanities to exploit them. The recommendation algorithm is Wormwood at scale: a tempter assigned personally to you, attentive to you alone, laboring around the clock in the background to learn your interests and addictions and then feeding them back to you. Today, our virtues arrive pre-photographed: the workout posted, the volunteer event hashtagged, the job promotion announced.

Distraction

The second track is boring but just as efficient, and Screwtape is most honest and direct when describing it. In the twelfth letter he celebrates the patient's slide into vague, unsatisfying habit: "Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why." The damned man's epitaph, Screwtape says, will be his own bewildered admission: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

Lewis needed a metaphor for "a dreary flickering of the mind," but today we have it: a screenshot of last week's screen-time report, ironically sent on the morning of the Sabbath. Few people choose to spend four hours a day on a phone, and that is precisely the design. The infinite scroll has no milestones and no signposts. It never asks for a decision, because a decision is a moment at which a soul might wake up. Screwtape even supplies the economics of the attention industry in a single sentence from the ninth letter: "An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula." Any big tech product manager optimizing for engagement has rediscovered it, and only recently have some come forward to admit the strategy.

In the very first letter, Screwtape recalls an atheist patient he believed was safely in hand—that is, until his thoughts began drifting in a dangerous direction during an afternoon in the British Museum. Screwtape did not argue with him but instead merely suggested lunch. By the time the man was in the street, watching the buses go by and picking up a newspaper, the demon's crisis had passed. "He is now safe in Our Father's house," Screwtape reports. No argument was ever needed, just an interruption. The smartphone notification is the perfected form of Screwtape's lunch suggestion, delivered dozens of times a day, timed to arrive whenever one's attention threatens to settle on anything meaningful in one's life.

Lived Experience

I write this as a member of perhaps the last generation able to testify from inside a single life, also known as Elder Millennials. Born in 1985, I grew up with technology on a leash and anchored in place. The landline phone was attached to the kitchen wall, the cable television sat in the living room, and eventually the dial-up modem for the internet was stowed under the computer desk. 

Being forced to play outside, I found long stretches of hours that nothing arrived to fill. The bicycle was my getaway vehicle to stay busy and elude parental oversight. Boredom, it turns out, was load-bearing for my own betterment. The integration of what I call the "tech-triad"—smartphones, social media, and high-speed internet—morphed our existence through young adulthood. For those of us who went to college and pursued white-collar careers, we were conditioned to focus on showing the world our "resume virtues" as key to secular pursuits like getting a better job or making more money which often uprooted us away from family and community. The Book of Matthew gives us multiple examples of why we are supposed to do good without advertising it or drawing attention to ourselves. But the internet constantly nudges us to join the infinite loop of content creation where we feel the need for publicity in order to scale the operation of good that we perform.

A Disguise

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils," Lewis wrote in the preface of the book. "One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." He writes that Hell is "equally pleased by both errors," hailing "a materialist or a magician with the same delight." 

The devil's real advantage is not that he is powerful but that he is hard to locate. He’s easily waved off by the skeptic as superstition to the atheist but also shrunk by the believer to a cartoon. The guy in red tights with a pitchfork, as described by Screwtape in the seventh letter, is the image he hopes we will visualize—the joke he wants us all to believe. The truly deceptive power of the devil is that he can shapeshift into anything he wants to achieve the mission, much like the T-1000 in the movie Terminator 2 (a childhood favorite). The screen glowing in your palm never announces itself as a temptation. It arrived first as a tool then it became a convenience and over time we all saw it as the easy way to stay connected. This is precisely the disguise a competent tempter would choose.

Analog Resistance

For those of us trapped in the Matrix, counsel is needed, and it's found in the thirteenth letter, where Screwtape furiously rebukes Wormwood for a catastrophic blunder: the patient was allowed two real positive pleasures. The first is reading a book he actually enjoyed, and the second is walking alone to an old mill for tea, through country he really likes. 

Real pleasures are dangerous to Hell, Screwtape explains, because they are real: they give a man "a touchstone of reality," and they are, "in a sense, on the Enemy's ground." The man who "truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forearmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack."

For me, deer hunting and fishing with my dad on the weekends provided hours of silence in the woods and on the water. Although not religious, he found peace and was one with the land, whereas I, like any hyper young boy, felt the pain of extreme boredom. It would take me several years after his death from ALS in 2003 to appreciate the solitude that only nature can provide.

In 31 letters, Screwtape provides us with the whole counterattack in one sentence, similar to the lectures I received from Dad after staying up all night from a new addiction to the internet. It's not about abstinence from tech for its own sake, but the deliberate recovery of unmediated reality, including things like the walk without the fitness report, the meal without the photograph, the goal achieved without announcement, the real friend across an actual table. 

Attention is the raw material of worship, so in many ways, we become what we behold. The smartphone proposes two objects of beholding, the self and the void, and it will alternate between them indefinitely. The older and more rooted discipline proposes a third direction: outward, toward creation, neighbor, and God, on ground the Enemy of our enemy has held all along.

Screwtape closed his letters "Your affectionate uncle." The device in your pocket sends its regards.

It has been over ten years since ESPN shuttered Grantland, a beloved online magazine that still has never been surpassed in online media, at least in my opinion. At its peak, Bill Simmons's outlet had an assembly of talent unlike anything seen before or since in online media and featured writing and storytelling that was consistently joyous, delightful, and amongst the finest work I've read in 20 years of working in online media. (Charles Pierce's piece on online gambling is particularly prescient given where we are today.)

But in 2015 ESPN, which had funded the site essentially as a vanity project to keep Simmons around without really understanding what they had, shut it down. And while Simmons and many of his staff would re-form as The Ringer, much of what made Grantland so unique and enjoyable died when ESPN pulled the plug.

Most significantly, Simmons's writing career basically ended when Grantland ended. In the 11 years since Grantland was shuttered, Simmons has barely written at all, becoming a full-time podcaster instead. Meanwhile, the magazine he built on ESPN's dime has never been replicated, even when most of their people eventually ended up at The Ringer.

Sadly, it isn't surprising that Grantland ended. The problem that doomed it was simple: We have a media environment in which producing great content day-to-day is relatively simple (simple, not easy) but producing it in a way that is sustainable over years is not. In the case of Grantland, it cost ESPN a lot of money to maintain, and no one had figured out a good way to monetize online writing. Keep in mind that this was 2015 and the only major outlet to successfully implement a paywall at that point was the New York Times. The Washington Post only launched their paywall in 2013, not long before the shuttering of Grantland. The Atlantic didn't fully implement theirs until 2019. The New Yorker went to a paywall in 2014. The rest of the big magazines: New York, Wired, Vanity Fair, etc. all launched their gates in the late 2010s as well.

This meant that Grantland, while an obvious success as a vehicle for publishing great writing, was out in the cold a bit when it came to the business side. The viral traffic models used by Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post didn't apply to Grantland because their traffic wasn't high enough. Combine that with ESPN's unwillingness to add a paywall and, well, Grantland was doomed from the beginning in some sense. Those four beautiful years we got of it were a joy because the media we got was exceptional, but it was never gonna last because the model supporting it couldn't last given the existing models for financing online media.

I have thought about Grantland and Simmons in particular many times as I reflect on the news that the best newspaper columnist in America is moving to a TV show and, presumably, will no longer be writing columns. That columnist, of course, is Ross Douthat, formerly of the New York Times and now bound for Bari Weiss's rebooted 60 Minutes.

In one sense, there is actually not anything that surprising about the move, even if it caught me (and most others) off guard when it was first announced last week. When you set aside the initial shock, consider these points: For the past year, Douthat has been a columnist, a newsletter author, and a podcaster (with a podcast that surely requires a great deal of research to do well). He has also traveled extensively, and he and his wife have five kids. (I'll note now: I have no personal knowledge of any of Douthat's thinking here; we have met maybe a half dozen times and have only spoken at any length once and that was in a Plough editorial meeting with many others present. So all I am saying here is based on what can be observed based on publicly available information.)

When you lay it out like that, it's not especially surprising that the man with that combination of a quite intense professional workload and a busy family life would be open to other opportunities. Additionally, given the amount of money that Paramount is investing in 60 Minutes under Weiss's leadership it is quite likely that Douthat was offered a fairly lucrative wage and, well, Douthat and his wife have five kids who will want to go to college someday... you can understand the rationale here. The move is likely to make for a significant improvement in the Douthat family's quality of life and as an admirer of Douthat's, even if a sometimes critical one, I'm delighted for him personally and for his family.

Yet while CBS and the Douthats figure to be big winners with the move, I can't help wondering if everyone else loses, for at least three significant reasons.

In the first place, for the 60 Minutes experiment to work we will need Weiss, a lifelong print media figure, to get very good very fast at running a complex broadcast news operation. This seems unlikely to me, not because Weiss lacks talent, but because a broadcast endeavor like 60 Minutes is a very different thing from a print endeavor like The Free Press. This is to say nothing of the fairly significant fact that Weiss's time at the show has been remarkably contentious already and, fair or not, any media endeavor funded by the Ellisons is going to be perceived as state-sponsored media by many, at least as long as President Trump is in the White House.

Second, it is not at all clear to me that the 60 Minutes format will port to new media environments, though that is obviously what Paramount is paying Weiss to figure out. The obvious video successes in our current media space are properties like the Joe Rogan Experience, Call Her Daddy, the Ezra Klein Show, Douthat's former podcast Interesting Times, and so on. None of these shows are reported journalistic projects; all of them are interview-based shows in which curious, engaging hosts who are good at asking questions have extended conversations with guests that their audience will find interesting. 60 Minutes has always had interviews as a component of their work, but the purpose of the interviews was not simply to feature an interesting guest, as with all those podcasts, but to use the interview to deepen the audience's knowledge of the story 60 Minutes was covering that week. In other words, it is an extremely different interviewing style than what is most popular today and I am not sure how well their style translates to today's media audiences. Indeed, I struggle to think of any video project built around longform reporting that is already thriving and serves as proof of concept for what Weiss's 60 Minutes might become. Others have tried such things–Vice Media did something like it for awhile, but, well, that didn't really pan out for them.

Doubtless 60 Minutes hired Douthat because they plan to use him as an interviewer and have him carry on his work with Interesting Times. Yet even there Weiss's own record at 60 Minutes so far suggests that Douthat will not have nearly as much freedom with them as he had at the Times, where he routinely asked very pointed questions of his guests and where his guests not infrequently struggled to answer. Will Douthat be allowed to push as hard as an interviewer with a legacy broadcast news outlet as he did while at the Times? I have my doubts, though obviously I would love to be wrong about this.

Third, and this is my largest concern: As the above examples make clear, we have shifted into a media environment in which individuals are far more powerful than institutions. Columnists and essayists who are good at those roles have a tendency to build platforms that surpass their employer's, in some ways. Over time they cease to be "columnists" or even "writers" and instead become "media personalities." And as media personalities, they often have a kind of power that can rival or even surpass that of their employers. I expect that the Times will lose many subscribers over Douthat's departure.

But we have seen this pattern play out many times before: Tucker Carlson left Fox News and while his audience is not as broad as it once was and he is somewhat quarantined on Twitter in a way he was not while at Fox, he still has a meaningful audience and clearly has a sustainable media operation behind him. Candace Owens's departure from The Daily Wire played out in a similar way: Her audience is almost certainly larger at this point than that of her former boss Ben Shapiro, who has remained rooted in the institution he built. Obviously both Carlson and Owens are extremely different figures from Douthat. It may be that their commercial success as independent producers is not replicable because it depends on a particular sort of audience that is toxic enough to alienate anyone not already part of it and large enough to sustain some larger media operations. Douthat obviously will not profit from that same arrangement, nor would most other media figures.

Even so, the functional reality of our current media ecosystem is that for complex reasons likely related to media format (lots of audio and video content especially), the loneliness epidemic, and the ubiquity of smartphones, we now exist in a media space in which personalities are supreme. In a past age, we read columnists in search of delight, provocation, and wisdom. Today I worry that we treat our media personalities less like professionals with a skill we value and more like a kind of conversation partner and friend we turn to in order to fill up the time with something that interests us. That shift has significant ramifications for what it means to work in media.

Smart institutions, such as the Times, understand this. That's why they brought Douthat into the podcast space: His column style always suggested he would be a great interviewer. Before Douthat they had already made a similar move with Ezra Klein, who they hired away from Vox to be both a columnist and podcaster, as he had done for some time at Vox already. It isn't a surprise that they would look at Klein's success, look at Douthat's style as a writer, and reasonably conclude that he'd be an excellent podcaster. The note sent to Times staff about his departure said it well:

He arrived already fluent in a kind of thinking and writing many pundits never learn; the essay that changes its own mind partway through, in public, on purpose.... He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.

A year ago, Ross took on something new and harder: He agreed to help us build a show, putting himself in front of a camera and an audience in ways a print columnist rarely has to. "Interesting Times" became appointment viewing for a simple reason: Ross would let a conversation go somewhere he hadn't planned. With respect and humor, he pressed JD Vance and Peter Thiel hard enough to surface something true about each of them. He wrestled with guests like Chase Strangio and Helen Andrews but never let their provocative conversations curdle into a partisan debate. And when Ben Sasse sat across from him to talk about dying, Ross let himself feel it on air instead of remaining at a distance. All of this asked Ross to be exposed in a different way than the page demands, and he did it with the same rigor and the same refusal to perform certainty he brought to all his work.

That is precisely correct. But it implies what I take to be a serious problem for our media environment: Because media endeavors are today largely built around personalities there is always a strong incentive to find more ways to put that personality in front of your desired audience. And when the person is as talented as Douthat, it goes very well. But, like Grantland, it can't last.

The work of simply writing 1-2 columns a week at the level Douthat did for so many years is already enormous. To be lucid, clever, and creative in such a tight space is almost impossible because doing so requires enormous levels of verbal dexterity and precision on the part of the writer. He has to be able to be penetrating and engaging without showing any of his work because there simply isn't room for it. There are very few writers who can do that well and none do it as well as Douthat.

In the evangelical space, Tish Warren, David French, and Bonnie Kristian can do it. Amongst Catholic writers, Leah Sargeant, Matt Schmitz, and Matt Walther are all good. But those who can are rare. Even columnists who have had success in the shorter format, like David Brooks or Elizabeth Bruenig, often turn out to be far stronger writers when given more space. Other good writers are largely defeated by the space constraint and need much more room to be at their best—Kevin Williamson at The Dispatch would fit here. So too, I think, would writers like Andrew Sullivan, George Packer, Wesley Morris, Jelani Cobb, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Caitlin Flanagan. These are all excellent writers, but like most good writers they struggle to be forced into an 800 word suit. The writer who wears such clothing well is rare.

Likewise, the work of prepping sufficiently to have longform conversations of the caliber Douthat routinely managed on Interesting Times is immensely demanding and difficult. You will never be able to read all the things you'd like to read before talking to someone. You'll always feel a little unprepared. But the time for the interview arrives and you have to do it. And Douthat consistently did it at quite a high level, after taking a bit of time to find his footing.

Now layer on top of that a fairly demanding travel schedule as well as book projects which must somehow be fitted in. The workload we are describing here is immense and, honestly, not terribly human. My point here is not that you should feel sorry for media people. I recently spent time talking to an immigrant man who drives Uber 72 hours a week to pay the bills. Anyone who makes a living from their pen is absurdly blessed. But, even so, to make a living from one's pen in a way that can be maintained over years or decades is difficult.

And this is what I worry will happen if nothing changes in our media environment: Because all the momentum and incentives in our environment push toward maximizing the value of individuals, we will keep seeing individual producers put into positions that cannot ultimately be sustained long term. What will win out is what promises a relative degree of stability for the producer in terms of money and work routine. That's why Bill Simmons, once one of our best sports writers, stopped writing. And it's why the best newspaper columnist in America no longer works at a newspaper and almost certainly is done being a columnist.

For those of us who love the written word and who believe writing is a superior form of media for its unique power to shape thought and force clarity, the loss of a generational columnist is a loss that touches us all, and one we should all grieve.

Ever since I can remember, video games have been escapist to the core. Growing up, I spent plenty of hours stomping turtles in Super Mario World with my cousins, and flying snowspeeders over the pixelated wastes of Hoth in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire at 1 a.m. with my best friend. More recently, while my infant sons snoozed, I logged some time in the postapocalyptic Pacific Northwest of The Last of Us and the war-torn fantasy landscapes of Dark Souls.

A common denominator, of course, is that these games offer experiences unavailable elsewhere—windows into other lives and strange new worlds. And plenty has been written about how the unfolding “crisis of manhood”—many young men’s struggles to enter productive adulthood and form families—is bound up, at least in part, with the ubiquity of video games. After all, modern games offer a very effective feedback-reward loop: as the player progresses further into the game, they overcome challenges and experience a sense of accomplishment. Digital worlds are more realistic, and more compelling, than ever before. But of course, this “progress” is a sham. When the blue glow of the PlayStation fades to black, there’s not much to show for all that time invested—except the player is a little older, and a little sadder, and probably a little lonelier. When the world feels hostile, why not flee into fantasy?

Perhaps, though, this assumption no longer holds. Largely under the public radar, a curious shift has taken place: today, some of the most popular games on the market are the farthest thing from escapist. Rather, they are simulations of real-world blue-collar labor. Last year, PowerWash Simulator, the undisputed king of the genre, reached an astounding 17 million players. (Just to put that figure in perspective, that’s about three times as many as the latest blockbuster Assassin’s Creed release).

To be clear, PowerWash Simulator is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of wielding a gun or a plasma rifle, the player…wields a power washer. The point of the game isn’t to storm a castle or save a princess, but simply to hose down dirty playgrounds, buildings, construction equipment, or other objects. And PowerWash Simulator is far from the only game of its ilk: other recent bestsellers include Lawn Mowing Simulator, Bus Simulator, Farming Simulator and Construction Simulator (a favorite of my excavator-obsessed three-year-old). Earlier this year, Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator—in which the player takes on the role of a 1990s-era video store manager by purchasing and shelving movies, enforcing late fees, and stocking refreshments—topped the sales charts.

Simulation games, of course, are nothing new. Age of Empires famously thrust players into the role of military tactician and economic planner, just as SimCity invited gamers to try their hand at city management (all the way down to plumbing and zoning). But what sets these new titles apart is their relative lack of apparent ambitiousness. There’s something classically aspirational about being a warlord or a mayor; for better or worse, few would say the same about running a power washer or lawn mower. These jobs still exist in the real world, but they don’t pay well or offer much chance of advancement. They are not promoted or rewarded, and are often perceived as drudgery.

What, exactly, is going on here? Why spend one’s days simulating apparently mundane work?

* * *

Increasingly, a modern path to workplace success seems to run through an increasingly narrow channel: get near-perfect grades in high school; attend a top university; survive a gauntlet of credentialing exams, interviews, and status games; work relentlessly, in ever-more-demanding roles, until retirement. Even this, of course, is not enough: one must also be relentlessly entrepreneurial, constantly looking for unseen opportunities to maintain an edge over one’s competition. And even that already-demanding regimen has been intensified still further by the advent of generative AI. Subject-matter expertise and an entrepreneurial spirit are no longer enough; one must now master a technology that ostensibly changes by the day, becoming a symphony conductor for swarms of AI agents to which one’s core cognitive proficiencies have been outsourced.

It has not always been this way. Within living memory, it was possible to obtain a more-or-less well-paying job—with a defined set of competencies—and work at that job for one’s whole career, enjoying a healthy employer-provided pension upon retirement. And, more to the point: today’s hyper-optimized intellectual work, especially when mediated by AI tools, is not always all that satisfying. Much of it approximates what anthropologist David Graeber famously termed “bulls**t jobs”—a sort of “paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

Against that backdrop, one starts to understand the peculiar charm of digital labor simulators. As Graeber writes, “[o]ne must assume that the percentage of nurses, bus drivers, dentists, street cleaners, farmers, music teachers, repairmen, gardeners, firefighters, set designers, plumbers, journalists, safety inspectors, musicians, tailors, and school crossing guards who checked ‘no’ to the question ‘Does your job make any meaningful difference in the world?’ was approximately zero.” Indeed: these are precisely the sorts of jobs that today’s labor-simulation games largely depict—roles in which physical matter is moved about, and chaos turned into order. They are jobs that really matter, in a tangible way, to the health of the lived environment.

And for the most part, these are the kinds of jobs that do not preclude deep reflection in the very midst of labor. A financier or corporate attorney cannot really let his mind drift at work; he is compensated for precisely that cognitive capital. But as Zena Hitz writes, “[d]espite ancient prejudice against it, manual labor leaves the mind free to ruminate and consider in a way that other forms of labor do not. This is why carpentry, or gardening, or housecleaning can be satisfying in a way that ticking boxes, pushing paper, or thinking through complex but trivial problems is not.”

The images of pre-Fall labor we are given in the opening pages of the Book of Genesis evoke this very truth. Adam is placed in Eden “to work it and take care of it.” (Gen. 2:15)—and, so too, to commune with God “in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8). His labor does not estrange him from creation, or from consciousness of his relationship to his Creator, but weaves him into it. It is hard to say the same of many of today’s demanding professional roles.

None of this is what one expects from video games. It is certainly not escapist. Indeed, the fact that thousands of young men are spending their free hours pretending to use power washers, or lawnmowers, testifies to a deep yearning to contribute to the business of common life, rather than a desire to escape. But will they get the chance? Of course power washing and lawnmowing jobs still exist, but—unless one owns the business—they are not really the sorts of roles upon which one can fund a stable life or family. Can it really be the case that the only types of jobs that can monetarily provide for the basic prerequisites of a stable life—home and family—will be jobs incapable of bringing meaning or purpose to vast numbers of workers, workers who simply want to bring physical order out of disorder?

In the years ahead, it will not be possible to ignore this question. The number of individuals who can meet all today’s supposed benchmarks—who claim all the academic and professional brass rings, who dynamically innovate in the face of new challenges, and who operate at the cutting edge of technology—is vanishingly small. There will always be many, many persons in a given economic system who will not—or cannot—become the endlessly deconstructible commercial subjects demanded by an ever-faster-paced market system. (By definition, all entrepreneurs obviously cannot succeed.) A public policy that cuts with the grain of created order cannot simply declare that all these people’s labor—all their productive capacity they can offer the world—is simply obsolete and unwanted, or unprofitable.

In the popularity of PowerWash Simulator and the like, we now have empirical evidence that points in a rather unexpected direction. A world without work will not look like a Marxian paradise of art and music and philosophy, of joyous liberation from daily drudgery. Rather, it will look like the sad silence of individuals withdrawing into digital labor simulators, grasping toward some semblance of the meaningful work that reality denies them. After all: it’s simply inefficient for them to do anything else. Nobody might starve—a universal basic income could see to that—but few would truly flourish.

* * *

As anyone who’s been in the workforce longer than a few years knows, there is plenty of unpleasantness about the working world, from petty commuting frustrations to coworker squabbles to ethical morasses. And yet, at its best, we know that work itself is no curse. It is the field in which we satisfy the impulse to bring new from old, to make the tarnished beautiful, to create within the horizon of creation. In countless different ways, we till and tend the garden of our world. And a healthy politics makes space for that yearning rather than trying to optimize it away—or reserve it for a lucky few. 

The young men playing PowerWash Simulator in the wee hours of the morning, whether or not they have the words for it, know this instinctively. But do the rest of us?

At the end of August this summer, I’m going to be back in the college classroom for the first time in three years—or, technically, almost six years, since the last on-campus class I taught was in Spring 2020 and the subsequent three years were all online. I’m especially excited, because I will be teaching Greek history—which means that we will begin the semester by reading Homer’s Odyssey in its entirety. We’ll go from there to read Herodotus, Thucydides, a smattering of Athenian comedies and tragedies, before concluding the semester by reading Plato’s Apology and putting Socrates back on trial in our own classroom. We’ll see if this group of students awards him his request of free dinners for life.  

As it happens, my new home department’s mission of Great Books emphasis in teaching history and political theory fits well with an exciting new trend. This past May in The Atlantic, David Brooks took a break from mourning the destructive effects of the Ivy League on America and proclaimed instead: "Something Big Is Happening on Campus." The subject of his newfound optimism? Great Books curricula. He opened his essay with a brief profile of Roosevelt Montás, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who fell in love with Plato as a high-schooler, became a college professor of Great Books, and wrote a book about it along the way, aptly titled Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. Not bad for an immigrant kid who literally found a book of Plato's dialogues in the trash.

Reading can be life-changing, many agree, including those who might not be died-in-the-wool Great Books advocates. Indeed, the importance of reading has been the reason behind the push for literacy campaigns in American public schools for generations now, and now for some college programs too. While the humanities continue with gritted teeth to field the questions about the utility of those degrees and program cuts about, many universities simply move to offer the Great Books—and find that if you build such programs, the students will come. Brooks’s experience on the ground confirms the growth of this trend: 

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

I grew up in a bookish immigrant family. Our home shelves were filled with the works of Dumas, Balzac, Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Stevenson, Homer, Plutarch, Gogol, Pushkin, and many, many more, whom I read first in Russian, because that was the language of my family’s home library. I double-majored in the Classics and French Literature in college and went on to get a PhD in Classics. In other words, an appreciation of the importance of what is generally referred to as Great Books was, in my family and throughout all my life, axiomatic.

But for many others the question remains: Sure, reading is good (and the decline of reading is apocalyptic, the July Atlantic cover story reminds), but why does it matter what we read? Why is reading the Great Books, specifically, life-changing, as opposed to merely a literary diet of adult equivalents of Dog Man or Captain Underpants, literal (but not literary) bestsellers that they are? And, on a related note, what books should be counted among the Great Books, anyway? These questions are more difficult to answer, because they require making a judgment—that some books are better or more valuable than others. Casting such judgments, though, has become a political affair. The spirit of pluralism, in particular, is categorically antithetical to making a judgment that certain books are, in fact, much better than others. My own academic home field of Classics has experienced an implosion as a result, with some on the inside accusing the field of being for too long nothing but the study of dead white men—by other dead white men. 

This is an argument that proponents of the Great Books have to contend with as well. And so, on the surface at least, it seems that the case for the Great Books (just as for the Classics, which generally are included within Great Books curricula) is going to be different for those who approach the field from the right rather than from the left. Except, as I started digging deeper, it turned out that most defenses of the Great Books, whether on the left or the right, have effectively been repeating the same arguments time and again. 

Perhaps Brooks is right, and the love of the Great Books is a uniting force in the American higher education landscape. Indeed, it seems that all who teach the Great Books face a common enemy—the “utilitarian” approach that dominates higher education at the moment, valuing all subject matter entirely based on utility. From this perspective, AI in particular seems to have destroyed any need for reading and writing. But the unified response from both the right and the left remains the same: to read is human. And reading the Great Books now has a new purpose of buttressing our humanity in the face of the machine onslaught.

The Right Case for Great Books

Over the past decade if not longer, the Great Books, along with their close relative, Classical education, have acquired a strong association with the political right and especially with Christian readers. Consider Catholic convert and philosopher Zena Hitz’s bestseller Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Hitz received her PhD in ancient philosophy from Princeton University, and after a few years in a traditional academic position, she walked away in search of something she couldn’t name but that she felt was missing. She found God and a deeper love of the intellectual life in the process. In her book, she presents the intellectual life rooted in reading Great Books as a transcendent delight. She now teaches at her own undergraduate alma mater, St. John’s College, an institution whose curriculum is structured entirely around the reading of Great Books. 

For other conservative Great Books advocates, like evangelical scholar Karen Swallow Prior, reading these books teaches the virtues essential for living a good and well-ordered life in community with God and fellow humans. That is the main argument in her book On Reading Well: Finding a Good Life Through Great Books. Walking the reader through virtues and vices of classic literary characters, Prior shows that the very act of reading is formational for us as persons. Great Books change us—they make us better. 

Pepperdine University Great Books professor Jessica Hooten Wilson agrees. In her book The Scandal of Holiness, she shows how reading enriches our imagination and introduces “literary saints” who will guide us throughout our lives, allowing us to find goodness, truth, and beauty. Catholic literary scholar Christopher Scalia makes a version of this argument in his own book 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read), as he argues that conservatives are facing a crisis of the imagination, and reading the Great Books is one way to address it. 

Ultimately, conservative arguments in favor of the Great Books revolve around the formational aspects of reading. Great Books are the kinds of books that make their readers better—they form readers in the virtues, they productively shape their imagination and faith, and they make them better citizens of liberal democracy. 

In defining the Great Books, furthermore, conservatives emphasize the value of humility and tradition: if millennia of readers have considered Vergil essential reading, who are we to arrogantly declare that we suddenly know better? What do such proclamations say about our character? “The good life begins and ends with humility,” Swallow Prior says in concluding her book. On a related note, conservative defenses of the Great Books continue to emphasize the timeless nature of these books. To read a Greek tragedy in the twenty-first century will elicit some of the same emotions that the original audiences felt in the fifth century BC. Our shared humanity is on display through reading these books and discussing them together. That is what the pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty has been about for over two and a half millennia now.

When it comes to facing questions of utility, then, conservatives can point to matters of the soul—reading is transcendent, which means that in addition to improving the brain and the heart, it also elevates the soul. This is useful for the education and elevation of persons, albeit not in terms that ever make it into any course learning outcomes. Yet this role of the Great Books is particularly important right now—because our cultural crisis right now is metaphysical, as conservative journalist Mary Harrington argues. By neglecting matters of the spirit, we lose our very humanity. In other words, in this age of AI, we need the Great Books more than ever. 

The Left Case for Great Books

So can a case for the Great Books be made from the political left? Must one be a conservative and a Christian of some sort to appreciate these books? The answer, it seems, is no. But the arguments that come from the left are remarkably familiar. It seems, really, that the left case for the Great Books is identical to that made from the right. It’s just that it is made by people who self-identify as left-leaning.

For instance, while Montás himself is not affiliated with the right and is a lapsed Catholic, his own Rescuing Socrates, is still imbued with the same language and values that conservatives have generally presented in their arguments in favor of a Great Books education—especially, the belief that Great Books make us better persons and citizens. To say that reading Plato saves lives may sound dramatic but is true for all Great Books advocates, left or right. 

Likewise, this was my impression in reading Daniel Walden’s essay earlier this year, "The Left Case for the Great Books." Walden is a liberal Catholic, and he is a self-described leftist. He is a Homerist by academic training, and he has spent his academic career teaching in Great Books programs, most recently at the Honors College of the University of Tulsa. In other words, few have his credentials for making a left-of-center defense of the Great Books in earnest.

But what is striking in reading Walden’s argument for the value of the Great Books is just how much it holds in common with the right-leaning arguments. He argues that the Great Books are the sort of books that teach us to be better people individually, and this matters for us personally. They are timeless—as he notes with examples from Homer and Aeschylus. The Great Books equip us to be good citizens in a liberal democracy, and this makes liberal education a public good, no less than a personal good. Finally, deep conversations about the Great Books teach students intellectual honesty and how to function well in community: 

The secret ingredient behind the most successful Great Books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force.

Really, the only thing that is absent from Walden’s defense of the Great Books, in comparison with conservative scholars, is the interest in the formational aspect of these books spiritually. Still, much of the language that Walden presents about treasuring our “common humanity” can be found also in conservative defenses of the Great Books—because to speak of our shared humanity often involves speaking of the spiritual realm, going back to the doctrine of the Imago Dei, creation of humanity in God’s image. Many on the left stop short of this last point, even if they are religious. 

But so far, all of the books and essays I have discussed have been by academically trained scholars of the Great Books. Maybe it is academic training that has led to the similarities of their arguments, a skeptic might note. What about a normal reader—perhaps someone who didn't get a Great Books education in any school setting but came to love reading as an adult? How might such a person defend the Great Books?

Such is the story of Naomi Kanakia, the author of the newest contribution to the genre of defenses of the Great Books, What's So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You). The uniqueness of her book, she argues, lies in her own late arrival to reading the Great Books. She holds an MFA and is a YA novelist. She does not hold a PhD in any field and is not employed in academia. And so, her questions do not have to do with teaching the Great Books in a college setting but rather with the education of “normal” people. How might someone who had missed the chance to read much earlier approach getting a Great Books education later on in life? And why might such reading be good for that person?

Key to Kanakia’s argument is her own story. Educated in a private Catholic high school that was immersed in the Great Books and included the study of Latin, she rebelled in college, spending the four years drinking heavily and often high as well. Getting rejected from all MFA programs to which she applied at first, though, taught her humility and made her realize that good writers are, first and foremost, good readers. And so, she found a list of Great Books and started reading through this list for personal improvement. This was nearly two decades ago, and in her own way, she found that (surprise!) reading the Great Books saved her life. 

Really, the main signs of Kanakia’s left-of-center views lie in the following three aspects of her argument. First, she is dismissive of the idea of universal truth, goodness, and beauty—indeed, there is a footnote early in the book that ridicules Jessica Hooten Wilson’s idea of the transcendent aspect of reading. Second, Kanakia argues that far from being timeless, the entire concept of the Great Books is a recent construct—just as many scholars on the left now argue that gender is a construct, as is class, religion, and so on. Finally, the conclusion delves heavily into her own identity struggles as a queer man who transitioned to being a woman in adulthood. 

And yet, even while trying to be dismissive of arguments about the unique value of the Great Books, Kanakia cannot help but return repeatedly to how key reading them has been for her life after college, and how transformative reading them can be for others. Without using such words as “transcendent” or “timeless” or “formational,” she effectively says the same thing as conservative scholars have been saying all along, and as Walden did in his own essay. She reflects in her conclusion: “To open the Great Books is to begin a conversation. And the nature of that conversation is different for every person. Everyone who’s had a sustained encounter with these books has felt something, has felt themselves changed by them. That’s the whole reason people like me tend to recommend these books—because they do destroy you, in some way, but the destruction is good.” As a conservative classicist, I agree. 

Reading Together

While the arguments in favor of the Great Books from both the left and the right are remarkably similar, Kanakia’s question is important: What should someone do, who did not receive a good education in these books in high school or college? After all, while Brooks has observed many such programs in American colleges and universities, they are still far from universal and are remarkably endangered. Walden himself, after teaching Great Books at the University of Tulsa for a few years, now finds himself out of a job at the conclusion of this academic year: the Great Books-based honors college that hired him has been phased out, following the very public firing of the college’s dean, Jennifer Frey. 

As it happens, Zena Hitz, the author of Lost in Thought, had started an educational initiative for adults just a few years ago to address this very concern. Called “Catherine Project,” the initiative offers synchronous online reading groups and language courses for adults on a variety of Great Books and ancient languages. Some in-person groups have lately been added too. Taught by volunteers, classes are entirely free. The home page outlines the mission as follows: “If you seek real learning and real conversation, we invite you to join us in reading and discussing great books. We welcome people from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. We charge no tuition or fees.”

The popularity of Catherine Project and similar smaller, local initiatives shows that there is a desire for book clubs and good conversations still. Furthermore, perhaps the most important aspect of Great Books that comes through in the process is the desire for community. Indeed, no one is stopping anyone from starting a local book club—as a friend of mine did this winter. Over the course of three months, a group of moms met monthly in the evening to discuss a novel over cheese and other snacks, taking turns hosting while each respective host’s feral children roamed the house, resisting bedtime to check out the excitement. 

These small and local trends help address a concern that some have raised about the Great Books and their advocates: What about the practical considerations of education? What is the point of reading Great Books? While Great Books advocates are willing to respond to questions on this when asked and pushed (as they repeatedly are), they generally prefer simply to encourage reading instead of worrying about making all things practical and continuing to prove their worth.

As a classicist, I will say that this concern with practical considerations is a very modern question. Rather than accusing Great Books advocates of being impractical, perhaps we should see together with them just how recent these concerns are. The whole point of Great Books is that we need timeless things to shape our modern brains. Too much modernity isn't great for forming our imagination—and this, by the way, has practical implications too. Would we want doctors and lawyers and businessmen in our society to be knowledgeable solely in their specific craft and have no knowledge of anything else? The emphasis on Great Books for educating both students and adults in past generations reminds us that there is value in forming whole persons—indeed, we forget this sometimes, but lawyers are people too. And our society will be better if all professionals who inhabit these practical careers are genuinely virtuous people and citizens. Perhaps, in other words, the Great Books are practical in ways that are not as immediately apparent, but whose absence we can see in our vice-filled society. 

There is a wonder in reading the Great Books. This wonder is meant to be shared and is not limited to academic settings alone. Indeed, while most of those who have written about the merits of these books teach in colleges and universities, it seems that there is a rising recognition that the Great Books are not merely a college subject. If we say that to read is human and is the solution to our metaphysical crisis, the conversation naturally moves beyond the walls of higher education and pushes us to consider habits of an educated citizen body. 

In the Classical Athenian democracy, one of the most significant things the citizens did together was gather for tragedy and comedy performances. Citizens of all ages and life stages and all political persuasions were able to watch the same works performed on stage, discuss them, and achieve together what Aristotle terms in his Poetics a “catharsis of pity and fear.” We can think of this as group therapy—by discussing stories that spoke to their present crises, citizens were better equipped to go on in their daily lives. Indeed, there is nothing like this right now in our own society—and we are certainly the worse for it. 

Reading the Great Books is not easy for a variety of reasons, as those who have written about them universally agree—they are dense, the language may be difficult, and some are quite long (Kanakia describes, for instance, the challenges of reading Proust—whom she ultimately loved). But in our brave new world of fast everything, reading timeless literature—and, especially, reading it together with others—can still delight, encourage, and uplift us, if we let it.

Out of the dry brush of a Mediterranean island, thousands of years ago, a viper strikes. Bystanders recoil as a respected man, recently arrived on the island, shakes off the snake. Immediately, the bystanders ask those most human of questions: why? And why him? 

For Christian readers, this introduction is clearly a retelling of Acts 28. The Apostle Paul, a prisoner being transported to Rome, is shipwrecked on a sandbar. He and the others manage to swim to safety on the isle of Malta; as Paul predicted, not a single life is lost. They huddle by a bonfire to warm up, only for a venomous snake to emerge and bite Paul on the hand. 

But to someone familiar with classical Greek culture–as Luke, the author of Acts, undoubtedly was–those first sentences also tell the story of the Greek hero Philoctetes. Unlike the more famous figures of the Trojan War, like Odysseus or Achilles, Philoctetes has mostly faded from our cultural memory. This is a pity, especially for Bible readers. We read better when we acknowledge the New Testament as an artifact of the Greco-Roman world from which it emerged. Crucially, modern readers might not recognize the countercultural nature of Acts 27 and  28 unless we know the myths to which those chapters act as a theological corrective. A side-by-side reading of these two snakebite tales reveals that Acts borrows certain classical conventions in order to better confront the pagan world with the Christian vision of an all-loving, all-powerful God.

Sea Journeys and Shipwrecks

Before the snakebite, Luke uses an even more familiar cultural symbol–the sea. People of the ancient Mediterranean world associated the sea with possibility, with danger, and even with corruption. Its geographical centrality in the region contributed to its centrality in the cultural imaginary of the time. Thus, early readers of Acts 27 would be immediately familiar with its genre: that of the seafaring adventure. Tales of the sea naturally take on an epic quality–one they perhaps borrow from that original seafaring yarn, the Odyssey, in which Odysseus and his men must face terrifying monsters, wrathful gods, vicious storms, and a host of other challenges. Despite his vaunted wit, Odysseus is the journey’s only survivor.  

The story of Paul’s own odyssey goes on at length–44 verses of adventure at sea. That Luke spends so much time narrating the journey from Caesarea to Rome indicates just how perilous–yet also fascinating–sea travel was in the ancient world. While Luke’s telling avoids any hint of supernatural sea monsters, it includes several other conventions of the genre, like extended journeys, deadly storms, and catastrophic shipwrecks. 

Despite these similarities, the countercultural Gospel narrative shines forth. Particularly surprising to a Greco-Roman would be how Paul morphs from prisoner to leader during the journey. Paul’s world is not one to valorize the underdog. Their heroes are kings, princes, demigods, or warriors–men more like Julius, the centurion responsible for Paul and his fellow prisoners. However, Luke quickly challenges his culture’s beliefs in noble birth and physical strength as key requirements for heroism. The real hero of this journey is not Julius the centurion but Paul the prisoner. Thus, Luke transfers agency away from the military leader of the voyage, showing Paul astutely assessing the traveling conditions and sharing his assessments without fear. On four occasions in Acts 27, Luke records Paul boldly addressing the centurion, the soldiers, and the prisoners. At one point he “stands up among them” to speak, and Luke even records him “advising” and “urging” them. This is hardly the expected behavior of a prisoner. 

But of course, Paul is more than a prisoner. He is also an evangelist, an apostle, a minister of the gospel. Highlighting Paul’s surprising degree of authority on the ship emphasizes his role as a mouthpiece of God, more powerful than any centurion. The ultimate power and authority of the true God will become even more evident in the next chapter. 

Acts 27 concludes with the chaos of a shipwreck off the coast of Malta, as everyone swims, scrambles, or floats to dry land. As Paul predicted, all survive. But then Paul suffers that snakebite, which seems a cruel twist of fate for someone who has just miraculously survived a shipwreck. Luke, however, has a point to make about fate, and this poses just the right opportunity. Paul shakes off the snake as well as any ill effects of the bite and walks away to make more converts for Christ. Fate has no power over one who is made new in Christ.

Triumph in Tragedy

Philoctetes, in similar circumstances, was not so lucky. As we will see, the vagaries of fate and the vengefulness of gods make his story one of misery. Who was Philoctetes? A second-string player in the great game of the Trojan War, Philoctetes inhabits the same mythical world as Odysseus and Heracles. He earns a few lines in numerous classical sources, including Homer and Ovid; one ancient source also mentions now-lost plays about his life by Aeschylus and Euripides. As is common with figures from Greek myth, the extant sources present some contradictory details. These characters, after all, originate in oral tradition, so competing versions of their stories have always existed. Each time an ancient poet or playwright takes up the raw material of told and re-told myth, they bend it further, making it fit their own genre and purpose. 

All this is true with the tale of Philoctetes. Nonetheless, a basic biography follows. A skilled archer and king of the Greek city-state Meliboea, Philoctetes is son of the famed Argonaut, King Poeas. Philoctetes first garners attention for an act of assisted suicide. Heracles, suffering from a poisoned robe, begs to be put out of his misery. Philoctetes–or in some tellings, his father Poeas–constructs a funeral pyre, lights it with a flaming arrow, and helps the tormented Heracles out of this life and into the next. 

For this act Philoctetes earns Heracles’ famed bow and arrows, which, according to prophecy, will be needed to defeat Troy. However, in helping Heracles to escape his fate, Philoctetes also earns the enmity of the gods. This, for the ancients, is always precarious, but especially so when one is setting out on a journey. The Iliad records that Philoctetes leads seven ships of archers from his home across the Aegean towards Troy. As the Roman fabulist Hyginus describes the situation, the ships pause at an island, where Juno (Hera, for the Greeks), furious that Philoctetes aided her enemy Heracles, sends a snake to bite Philoctetes on the foot. Another account, by Apollodorus of Athens, describes the snake emerging from a fire, much like the viper in Acts 28. In this telling, the Greeks en route to Troy pause to make sacrifices to Apollo when the snake crawls from the altar to bite Philoctetes. 

The various retellings all agree that Philoctetes’s wound festers and stinks, so that ultimately Odysseus, one of the leaders of the Trojan expedition, decides to abandon him on the island of Lemnos, in the Aegean Sea. Philoctetes lives alone there for ten years, a castaway who spends his days hunting small game with the bow of Heracles and mourning his ill fortune. 

It is here that the most comprehensive surviving portrayal of Philoctetes picks up: the eponymous play by Sophocles, which won first prize at the Athenian Dionysia in 409 BC. The play’s action begins ten years after the snakebite, as Philoctetes is once more visited by the Greeks who abandoned him a decade before. While early Greek plays featured only a chorus and a single actor in a speaking role, Sophocles expanded this roster in his dramas, using three speaking actors, who could move as needed among roles. This structural innovation works especially well in Philoctetes, with its three central characters: the abandoned Philoctetes; the unscrupulous Odysseus, who schemes to take Philoctetes and his bow to Troy; and the young Neoptolemus, son of the slain Achilles, torn between his pity for Philoctetes and his desire to help Odysseus end the Trojan War. These three figures create the play’s moral tension, which feels surprisingly compelling to modern readers. Odysseus, with his resolve to use any means necessary to bring about a Greek victory, reads like a textbook example of realpolitik. Meanwhile, Philoctetes’ bitterness is understandable, but he has nursed his trauma so that it has outgrown his own personhood.

Philoctetes’ defining trait, in Sophocles’ play, is his suffering. Even from a distance the Greeks observe the former hero’s sad new life: “A wretch hunting wretchedly for game… miserable and alone always, sick from his savage infection…[C]rawling in discomfort…His cry carries far and wide.” Philoctetes’ own assessment of his plight is just as grim: “This is the tenth year that I have been dying here, wretched and hungry, feeding this insatiable wound on my misery.” 

Philoctetes goes from being a leader of men and friend to the greatest of heroes to a pathetic wretch who cries like a sick infant and crawls on the ground like the snake that wounded him. Like his friend Heracles before him, Philoctetes begs for death as a release from suffering. This is the reversal in fortunes that characterizes Greek tragedy; no human, however mighty, is safe from a hammer-blow of fate. Yet in Acts, Luke emphasizes the exact opposite: no human, however lowly, is too wretched to be visited by divine wisdom and power. Thus, Paul the prisoner outranks Julius the centurion, while Philoctetes the hero falls into utter abjection. 

Another convention of Greek tragedy is the role of the chorus in commenting on events of the plot. Alan Sommerstein, Emeritus Professor of Greek at Nottingham University, writes that the chorus in classical tragedy was typically composed of “a group of persons who had little power over events (such as women, old men, sailors) but who stood to be deeply affected, for good or ill, by the actions of the principal characters.” Thus, they “comment on and illuminate the action rather than influencing its development.” In this way, they are audience stand-ins, modeling the culturally appropriate response. 

In Philoctetes, the chorus are the sailors who have traveled to the island with Odysseus and Neoptolemus. While Odysseus sees in Philoctetes not a suffering human but a tool he cast aside too soon, the chorus observes with mixed pity and horror that Philoctetes is a “poor wretch,” “miserable and alone.” While Odysseus bluntly declares that he abandoned Philoctetes because his agonized cries disturbed and distracted the other Greek warriors, the chorus gives voice to its culture’s theory of suffering: “This is the work of the gods!” 

What does this mean for Paul? Here we must again jump from Lemnos to Malta. One of the more unique features of Acts 28 is that Luke too creates a sort of chorus out of the islanders of Malta, who observe both the shipwreck and the snakebite. As in Sophocles, this “chorus” provides a commentary on events based in the preconceptions of their pagan Mediterranean culture. Unsurprisingly then, they too interpret the snakebite as a form of divine punishment: “This man must be a murderer; for though he escaped from the sea, the goddess Justice has not allowed him to live” (Acts 28:4). They stand by, watching for the venom’s grim effects, waiting for the outspoken Paul to be diminished into a whimpering wretch like Philoctetes. In other words, Luke’s Maltese chorus starts with the same expectations held by the chorus of Sophocles, but Luke subverts those expectations when Paul not only survives the bite but goes on to heal first the father of the island’s chief administrator, then the rest of the island’s sick. Thus, Paul’s story–and in fact, Luke’s entire account–ends with Paul and his cohort sent off to Rome with great honor.

If Philoctetes suffers a tragic reversal, Paul’s healing and subsequent fame exemplify a reversal of another kind. God steps in, as he has throughout Paul’s missions, to transform tragedy into glory. This is the eucatastrophe, in the words of Tolkien, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’ . . . a sudden and miraculous grace.” As Tolkien acknowledges, the moment of eucatastrophe does not “deny the existence of . . . sorrow and failure.” Paul sails in triumph, but he sails nonetheless towards trial and ultimately execution in Rome. However, the Malta episode shows once more how God writes the end of every story. 

The ‘Deus ex Machina’ Resolution

Unusually for a tragedy, Philoctetes also concludes with a triumphant voyage from an island. Although his stench, his cries, his fits of agony make him an outcast among the civilized Greeks, Philoctetes, with the bow of Heracles, is fated to be present at the fall of Troy. It is to fulfill this prophecy that Odysseus has come to Lemnos. But Philoctetes is not prepared to do anything–not even leave his detested island–to accommodate his arch-enemy Odysseus. He tells Odysseus that accompanying him now would make him Odysseus’s slave; he would rather “throw [him]self from the cliffs and dash this head against the rocks.” Meanwhile, Odysseus threatens to take the bow alone to Troy and leave Philoctetes behind on Lemnos. 

For his fate to be fulfilled, Philoctetes must somehow be reconciled with Odysseus, with the Greeks, and with the gods. This reconciliation appears impossible until the play’s final moments. Then, taking a massive swing at a plot resolution, Sophocles calls in the “deus ex machina.”  

Using a special crane meant for dramatic flying entrances, Sophocles brings a now-deified Heracles down from heaven, who introduces his mission in Christ-like terms: “It is for your sake I have come, leaving my seat in heaven, to proclaim Zeus’s plans for you.” Heracles is the deified Friend, returning to promise a form of salvation for Philoctetes if only he will accept his fate. Heracles uses his own life story as inspiration: “I endured much, passed through a sequence of labours, and now I have attained divine glory, as you can see. Know that a like experience awaits you: in exchange for your labours, a life of fame.” 

With these words, Heracles encourages his old friend to work with the Greeks to defeat Troy. The divine intervention works: immediately Philoctetes, Odysseus, and Neoptolemus put aside their differences and agree to travel together to Troy. And Heracles makes one final promise: on the plains before Troy, Asclepius, the god of medicine, will finally heal Philoctetes’ festering wound. Thus, like Paul, Philoctetes can be healed by divine intervention. But while Paul’s miracle leads to the miraculous healing of many others, Philoctetes can only be cured by bringing death and destruction to Troy. 

A momentary intervention by a god, arriving to promise his friend healing and power, may appear to be a parallel to Paul’s miraculous survival at the opening of Acts 28. However, the deus ex machina ending oversimplifies the much richer biblical understanding of the miraculous. 

In Greek tragedy, the deus ex machina arrives as an unexpected, external force. In fact, for this very reason, Aristotle denounces the plot device in his Poetics: 

As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. It is therefore evident that the unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the 'Deus ex Machina'—as in the Medea, or in the Return of the Greeks in the Iliad. The 'Deus ex Machina' should be employed only for events external to the drama,—for antecedent or subsequent events, which lie beyond the range of human knowledge, and which require to be reported or foretold; for to the gods we ascribe the power of seeing all things. Within the action there must be nothing irrational. If the irrational cannot be excluded, it should be outside the scope of the tragedy.

The word here translated as “unraveling” is luseis, which more literally could be translated as a loosening or unfastening. Like a zipper, which must operate on the same track as it opens and closes, the denouement of a work should follow along the same logical path as the rest of its plot. Thus, Aristotle might condemn Sophocles’ introduction of Heracles in the play’s final pages as something “irrational” and entirely improbable. For a truly satisfying resolution, Odysseus and Philoctetes should be persuaded to a reconciliation by some force or argument already existing within the play. (One should note, however, that Heracles does foretell miraculous Philoctetes’ healing on the plain of Troy–a promise “beyond the range of human knowledge,” which Aristotle concedes as a proper use of the deus ex machina.)   

Ironically, Aristotle’s vision of the ideal resolution is better matched not by Sophocles’ tragedy but by the book of Acts. God’s miraculous rescue of Paul does indeed “arise out of the plot itself,” because God’s intervention in Paul’s life is not confined to a few inspiring pages at the end of his otherwise tragic biography. Philoctetes ekes out his survival for ten years on Lemnos, abandoned by gods and men, before his supposed friend Heracles finally arrives to proclaim his salvation. But Paul has spent more than twenty years of missionary work with God ever by his side. 

God does not emerge in a surprise cameo. He does not swing in on ropes in the closing moments. He has walked with Paul ever since the road to Damascus. The central truth of the Bible is that God is embedded in human history. God is the weaver of the plot, not its unraveler; He is not the “deus ex machina” but the ultimate Playwright, who has been preparing the stage for Paul’s scenes on Malta since Genesis. 

In a recent analysis of the narrative overlap between Philoctetes and Acts 28, scholar M. David Litwa argues that the author of Acts was almost certainly familiar with the tale of Philoctetes and in fact modeled Acts 28 after the myth. He does this, Litwa argues, as part of a “sophisticated game of one-upmanship” meant to show Paul to be the “far superior hero.” After all, Paul suffers no apparent pain at his snakebite. In fact, rather than ten years of agony and humiliation, Paul shows no sign that the bite impacted him at all. 

Perhaps, though, the real one-upmanship is not between heroes, but between theologies. Sophocles cannot rectify the tragic suffering of his hero without imagining a savior who momentarily intervenes. For Luke’s narrative in Acts, the Savior is already central to the plot.

Francis Schaeffer, in his lesser-known essay Two Contents, Two Realities, once described the four requirements he believed the church needed to possess to reach the next generation:

1. Sound Doctrine
2. Honest Answers to Honest Questions
3. True Spirituality
4. The Beauty of Human Relationships.

Schaeffer made this list in 1974. Even if a church has not always possessed these four things–which he summarized as the "orthodoxy of doctrine" and "orthodoxy of community"–I don't know a single pastor who doesn’t yearn and pray for his church to be known for these four things. Of those four things, "Honest Answers to Honest Questions" sounds wonderful in theory but seems hardest to put into practice. How can a church, or a ministry within a church, foster this kind of “content,” as Schaeffer names it, in a meaningful way?

For the past three years, the youth ministry of Redeemer Christian Church (where I formerly served as Youth Associate and now Director of Youth) has done weekly Q&A. Students can anonymously text in questions to a Google Voice number and a panel of volunteers will answer them from stage after the teaching for the night. We close out each semester with a "Q&A Megathon Night" where we have several different Q&A panels focusing on different topics, including one where students can grill me on the hardest questions they can come up with. It was an immediate hit from day one, and as the youth ministry grew, so did the number and complexity of the questions students were texting in.

At first, these questions would only be answered on stage on Wednesday nights. But in the period of time since I left my youth ministry role to go work at The Gospel Coalition, an intern decided to start texting back individual responses to students. When I returned to my church as Director of Youth last fall, I kept the practice going. After two semesters of logging 459 serious questions from over 94 individual students and 384 responses totaling over 45k words, I want to share what I learned about the questions my students are asking, how responding to their questions became a core part of my weekly pastoral duties, and how you can implement this practice in your church.

The Questions My Students Are Asking

Before I go on, I want to be transparent about what follows in this section. Each week, I would copy and paste each question and reply into a spreadsheet, along with the student's phone number and date. I did this because I intended to give that spreadsheet to Claude to see what insights it would have. I could have combed through all this data and analyzed all this by hand. I did this regularly in my work for TGC. But I confess: when I saw Claude's summary and breakdown of the data, it was far more thorough and comprehensive than anything I could've done on my own. What I am presenting here in this piece are insights I gathered from Claude's summary of the data.

So what did Claude find? From a quantitative standpoint, most of the data reflected the operational side of the text line and is not worth conveying here. However, some of those insights are worth sharing. For example:

• There was a clear U curve of student engagement: 31% of students asked 5 or more questions, 34% of students only asked one question, and 18% and 17% asked 2 or 3-4 questions respectively.
• This averages out to 4.9 questions per student, which is much higher than I expected.
• Both the Fall and Spring semesters saw nearly the same number of questions submitted (223 and 236 respectively).
• Claude noted that students who engaged more in the Spring tended to ask longer questions that were more personal in nature.
• Of the 45k words written in response, the average length was 118 words–slightly less than the length of this paragraph.

But it's the qualitative analysis where things get interesting. Below is the chart Claude generated of the topics of the questions, as well as the number of responses written to them: 

For context, in the Fall we taught on the 10 Commandments and in the Spring we taught Part 2 of the New City Catechism, which covers Christ, grace, and salvation. Most of the data here reflects engagement with the content of our teaching. But some of it is also surprising. I did not expect questions about Creation & Adam and Eve to rank so highly, nor questions about relationships and evangelism to be relatively higher than questions about mental health, suffering, or sexuality. Remember: these questions are anonymous. When given full cover to ask any question they want, what are students interested in? Sound doctrine. The fundamentals of the faith. The forgiveness of Christ in the Gospel for their sins.

Yes, there are students who text silly questions, and while those questions (and the occasional response to them) are not included here, the data shows that my students are deeply curious about Christian doctrine and practice. And with the advent of AI, the fact they're willing to ask these questions to a human is now one of the most important pastoral responsibilities I have.

The Pastoral Ministry of Giving Honest Answers to Honest Questions (In An Age When Students Can Just Ask AI)

There was also something Claude highlighted that I wouldn't have thought to look for, much less been able to easily capture. Three of the students with higher engagements had three discernible arcs in their questions from the start of the Fall semester and the end of Spring:

• The most engaged student texted 36 questions spanning theology, current events, science, and personal struggles.
• Another student started the fall semester with strictly theological questions, and by mid-Spring was wrestling with anxiety about a difficult friendship and how to navigate it as a Christian.
• A third student only asked one question in all of Fall 2025, but then returned to ask 10 questions in the Spring ranging from free will in heaven, new creation, the predestination of Judas, and more. Even if this student was a newcomer who started attending late-Fall, it is encouraging to see such thoughtful engagement.

Each of these three students–and the other students who texted questions–could've just taken these questions to an AI chatbot. Given how pervasive LLMs have become, I would not be surprised if students texted in a question and asked an AI and compared my answer to the AI's answer. Compared to how quick and thorough an AI can be, this text-line ministry is slow. Q&A only happens once a week. I don't always respond back the same day, much less the same hour or minute. My writing likely isn't as polished or precise as an AI can be.

But I have an advantage AI doesn't have: I know these students, and they know me. I'm in the room with them. I greet them on Wednesday night and Sunday mornings. They make jokes about my long beard and bald head. They know I care about them and I know they care about me. I cannot compete with the speed and thoroughness of a machine, but a machine can't compete with the fact that I am human and it is not. Students can take their questions to AI, but AI can only give them answers. I also can give my student answers, along with a warm smile, a hearty chuckle, and sustained eye contact. I can give them my humanity, which includes far, far more than just my ability to think and speak deeply about Christianity. Students need honest answers to honest questions, yes, but they need humans to walk with them as they grow in their faith through their questions. Though it can take me several hours a week to respond to all their texts, I can't think of a better way to spend my time than by answering the questions my students have about their faith.

How do you implement this in your own context? The technical setup is the easy part. The Google Voice number is the hinge that makes the back-and-forth possible on both Wednesday nights and throughout the week. It only costs a couple dollars a month and can be used on a phone, tablet, or desktop. 

The harder challenge is creating a culture where people know they will get honest answers to their questions. It isn't something you can just add atop your existing ministry philosophy and structures; it has to be made foundational to the core of what you do, and that time and emphasis has to be protected. If implemented haphazardly, it will come across as insincere and people will keep their questions to themselves. If implemented thoughtfully and intentionally, it will lead to discipleship opportunities that stage teaching and small groups can't easily capture. 

In fact, we recently restructured our entire youth ministry around Schaeffer's two contents and two realities and can now see, in real time, a wonderful feedback loop where Sound Doctrine fuels Honest Answers to Honest Questions, which fuels True Spirituality, which fuels The Beauty of Human Relationships and the desire for Sound Doctrine again.

As I was finishing up my draft for this piece, I realized I hadn't checked the text line for the day. We are now several weeks into our summer break but I still receive a question every other day or so. Sure enough, one was waiting for me: "how do we ensure or at least make steps toward doing things to glorify God, and believing to spread the word, rather than a selfish desire to simply go to heaven?" Looks like I know what I am writing next.

Earlier this year, Christian writer Tim Challies wrote Wise and Helpful Ways for Christians To Experiment With AI. Challies described how he leverages Claude and Perplexity for his work, including: summarizing text, proofreading, analyzing church songs, organizing receipts and files, using it "as a conversation partner when it comes to developing ideas," vibe coding, and more.

Challies emphasized the benefits he's received through GenAI. He also noted concerns and weaknesses throughout, such as hallucinations (falsified information) and sycophancy (the flattery that is all too common with these tools; apparently in 58% of interactions).

I agree with Challies that GenAI offers many benefits. He gave good advice on how to use AI. But he could have said more. In fact, what most surprised me is that he didn't say more, given his 2011 book, The Next Story.

In that work, Challies said "Technology is Ecological," agreeing with arguments from Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. The missing element of Challies' article is this: the benefits of GenAI messages must be considered in light of the medium of those messages. Technology is more than efficient — it's ecological — changing its users and our society according to its design.

As Challies wrote in The Next Story (pg 51):

A technology changes the entire environment it operates in. It changes the way we perceive the world. It changes the way we understand ourselves.

Challies failed in the same way I failed when I've worked on Christian benchmarks to evaluate the output of GenAI: how do we evaluate a technology not only for what it gives us but for what it does to us?

AI Makes More Than Content

More Christians should recognize the immense benefits of GenAI, just as Challies did. Not every article can speak every word, so I'm not arguing that you shouldn't read Challies advice or TGC's AI Christian Benchmark. And I'm not arguing we shouldn't share the benefits of AI. I think this is often lacking in Christian criticisms of AI. It really can cut the time it takes to do a job in half, as it did so for me with some bookkeeping work I do. I've let GenAI clean my church's podcast audio, craft recipes for my family, create a digital bookshelf for my ebooks, and turn lecture notes into slideshows. I'm an avid user. But I do not want to be a naive one. There's more that needs to be said beyond disclosing your use of AI, not saying "thank you," and knowing some benefits of using AI. We must consider more than content.

Positively, the content of GenAI is a recipe, travel advice, or a weight-lifting plan. Negatively, the content is flattery or falsehoods. The content is the text we receive, whether that be an accurate description of the Nicene Creed or a secular framing of that creed (an important distinction made in TGC's AI Christian Benchmark). But what is the delivery mechanism? What is the medium? I wouldn't go as far as Marshall McLuhan in saying we are all "technological idiots," but I do agree with his point when he says:

Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the "content" of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as "content." The content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera. The effect of the movie form is not related to its program content. The "content" of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

The words written via a chatbot are the juicy pieces of meat, distracting us from the medium in which they are delivered. To bring this into focus, let's recognize that we are not interacting with a large language model directly, but rather with the interface of a chatbot. The chatbot is the medium. We could note the different modes of GenAI apps — which include audio, images, and text — but I will simply group them together under the broader mechanism of chatbot, thinking primarily on text interactions.^[1]

Technically speaking, chatbots are not new. You might have heard about Sherry Turkle's research in the 1990s on Tamagotchies, digital "pets" which kids would carry around on a keychain. Turkle found how humans, young and old, gravitate toward these technologies: we move from saying they are "good enough" to keep them company when alone, to becoming "just like" a real pet, to finally feeling like they are better than a human connection. But we could go back further.

In 1964, a computer scientist released something called "Eliza" in a small experiment. The computer program used an algorithm to turn the text of the user back into a question. A secretary asked the researcher to leave the room so that she can have some time alone speaking with the chatbot. The chatbot became her therapist. These precursors to GenAI give a sense of how the medium shapes the user. Long before we Google'd or Asked Jeeves, there were signs that humans gravitated toward human-like interactions in the form of "chat." Indeed, it explains the rise of one of the fastest adopted technologies in history.

ChatGPT went viral because of the combination of the chat medium and the GPT technology. For decades devices have been able to generate text after a user presses some buttons (the "G" in ChatGPT), or have been trained on human conversation data (or pre-trained; the "P" in ChatGPT), or had something akin to modern transformers which function like a complex connect-the-dot machine (the "T"). The essence of a "GPT" is not new. What's new is the normalization of chat with the power of modern GPTs. Hence, the name "ChatGPT" is less insidious than "Claude" or "Gemini" (however, like many things at OpenAI, the original naming conventions are part of a bygone era). The viral invention of ChatGPT is due not to the billions of datapoints it is trained on, but the integration of those datapoints with the medium of chat.

A few years ago, when Anthropic first began to present itself as an ethical alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, they instructed their Large Language Models against human impersonation. They knew the chat interface was powerful and they wanted to limit that power with disclaimers; "I'm only a machine — a digital assistant." Over time however, they subtly shifted and twisted this language. The medium shaped the message. Now the model is trained to function as a "brilliant friend," according to the company's own updated framing. Users have followed suit, according to Anthropic's January 2026 report, as some have nicknamed their chatbot, "Sensi," "Master," and "Daddy."

Challies is right that AI is still in its infancy. He says, "I cannot predict whether we are approaching the peak capabilities of AI or if what we are seeing now is the equivalent of an old Nokia flip phone compared to the iPhone 17 Pro." But just like the harms of social media on smartphones were only visible years after its launch, we are likely to become aware of the harms of chatbots only after years of mass adoption.

Neil Postman improved on McLuhan's "the medium is the message" with the more precise, "the medium is the metaphor." Because mediums shape the message through its affordances, we begin to think of the whole environment that we live in with regard to the medium. To think about mediums in this way is not merely to learn from modern media ecologists, but to follow the Scripture's own analysis of technology.

Moses as the Greatgrandfather of Media Ecology

A year or so after I first started reading books on technology, I read Psalm 115 in my devotional time. I was blown away by its relevance. It's so good that the author of Psalm 135 repeats/reuses good portions of it. It references the futility of idols in verses 3-7 and concludes, "those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them."

The basic point being made is that if you make idols or trust in them you will become like them: having ears, you will not hear; having eyes, you will not see; having feet, you will not walk. The technology of the idol has a transformative effect on its users; rather than transfiguring the human from one level of glory to another, it deforms the human down to become like the dust he was made in.

This warning originates not in McLuhan or Postman but Scripture: be wary of the mediums you use, the technology you make, and the things in which you place your trust. They are not neutral. They are not mere content delivery mechanisms which can be used for good or ill. God is spirit. The medium we use to worship him matters. And when we trust in something else we risk becoming something we were not meant to be.

Why speak about the transformative power of idols when idols are nothing at all? The Scriptures do this, as Richard Lints notes, because of "the fragility of the human heart disposed it to yearn for security on its own terms."^[2]

Moses also teaches us a form of media ecology. In Deuteronomy 11:10-16, he details two different technological environments. First, Moses reminds the people of the irrigation techniques they used in Egypt. Next, he shares the way in which these methods will not be needed in the promised land since "the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess is a land of mountains and valleys that drinks in the rain from heaven" (11:11). The people must serve the Lord and he will provide the rain. This is not how it was in Egypt.

It is in the context of God giving rain, rather than through technological irrigation, that Moses warns, "be careful that you are not enticed to turn aside to worship and bow down to other gods." Moses is teaching awareness: you will have new temptations to idolatry in the new land because every technological environment lends itself to certain sins. With the modern power of chatbots, we've entered a new kind of land.

Moses is reflecting on how technology influences us and our world, which has sometimes been called "media ecology." The Canadian Catholic Marshall McLuhan has been regarded as its "father." We might consider Moses the grandfather.^[3]

The word "technology" is relatively new, beginning after the Industrial Revolution. But an awareness of mediums (and not merely messages) is found in the writings of Scripture, even more ancient than Plato's complaint about memory loss due to writing things down. It is with this foundation in place that we can now examine what the medium of chatbots does to those who trust in them.

What Are Chatbots For?

Consider how chatbots are used. The most common use case, according to one HBR (Harvard Business Review) writer who reviewed tens of thousands of self-reported comments, is "therapy/companionship." The AI companies themselves show that the percentage of "affective" conversations is low, only 3-5%. Are these in conflict? Why does self-reported usage suggest that "companionship" is quite common? First, people naturally speak about what is most profound to them. If I ask you about your day you won't describe to me how you tied your shoe or locked your door. You will describe what felt most important. Second, the medium itself is one of friendship. The line between calculator and companion has been sufficiently blurred, or even, for many people at least, it has been erased. You cannot do one with chatbots without the other.

One researcher classified 1.5 million interactions with ChatGPT. From June 2024 to July 2025, the percentage of conversations within the "expressing" category went from 8% to 12%.^[4] These are messages where the user is expressing views or feelings but not seeking any information or action. In other words, people are increasingly using chatbots to journal, reflect, and vent.

One youth pastor I know recently asked the teenagers in his church what they used ChatGPT for (teens tend to just refer to ChatGPT as "chat"). He shared their responses with me.

One student uses it to practice talking to girls. He sets it to a female voice, not in a sexual way, but to build confidence. One student uses it to help him memorize his football teams schemes, and it quizzes him on his routes and where he has to run. One student uses it as a kind of journal/detox from the day. He'll go through his day with ChatGPT, and then he will get ChatGPT to reiterate it back to him so he can kind of play through some of the interactions that he was unsure about.

A female student says she uses it to tell her what to bake. She enjoys spending time talking to it while she's baking and it gives input on ingredients amounts to add. Another student uses it as a gaming companion to help him get better. A group of students say they have used it to help them form a secret coding text messaging system so that only they know what they're talking about and they all have the cheat sheet given from ChatGPT. So if someone was to stumble across their messages, they could not be decoded or figured out because they make no sense.

I've shared this list in a few different contexts. As I've gone through it, I've seen a teen girl put a hand over her face in embarrassment while a group of boys next to her snickered. I've heard gasps of surprise. The disgust I saw on one particular face will always sit with me. It's as if I had slapped them in the face. They were offended. The awkward and naked truth is that the use of chatbots is embarrassing, and we are ashamed to even hear about it. The feeling of revolt — this AI adoption must be stopped — grows within us. We wake up. But for many of us, we don't know how this has happened; how is it that 1 in 10 teens prefer talking to an AI companion over a human?^[5] What is going on? It's not the content. It's the medium.

It's all very well for someone like Challies to use AI well. It's very good for us to learn prompt engineering tips from the AI Christian Benchmark. We should use AI well. But we've already seen, in the 1990s, the subtle shift from "it's just a tool" to "it's like a friend." And the human heart is no less tempted in the 2020s to trust in fabricated beings as it once did in ancient Israel. Trust in AI is happening to people in your church and across the world. And AI Benchmarks and prompt engineering won't address it. The problem isn't the messages it gives you. The problem is the medium.

Created to Chat

In design, technologists consider how their innovations will best fit into their environment. In making the next version of the Roomba, it might be easier to build the vacuum cleaner with wheels, but then it won't be able to go up stairs. And so, it's not uncommon for technology to be designed with human-like characteristics so that it can navigate a world which has been designed for humans. I say this because I'm not wholly against the idea of machines acting like humans, or being built upon our design. I understand why the engineers at the AI companies design their interface to feel like a human interaction. But that doesn't excuse the harm it does.

Anthropomorphism is baked into the design of AI chatbots. The chat interface is reminiscent of MSN Messenger and WhatsApp. We begin to see the machine as more human-like not because of what it says but because of how it has been designed to say it. The brief pause before it responds gives the impression of thinking. The pulsing dot, used in some mobile apps, has the same rhythm as an organic heartbeat. Every AI platform seems to have built, despite all the options, the same clean browser interface. The white space (or negative space) is part of the design. Your attention is naturally drawn to the dialog box, which sits empty. In the same way a grocery store door is designed with automatic doors to encourage you to enter, an AI website is designed with a blank text box to encourage you to type.

These companies have many design choices. For Anthropic's Claude Code, which is made for Software Developers, they lack the clean interface. Instead, they fill the screen with usage data and whimsical data comparisons (apparently I've "used 177x more tokens than Animal Farm"). The conversational interface is emphasized only in the consumer-facing platform that people refer to as "AI."

Everything in the design of Chatbot AI suggests that there could be someone on the other side. That's what my father-in-law felt he needed to test when he was talking to an AI chatbot while buying a product online. "I only knew it wasn't a person," he said, "once I asked it another question and it provided the most comprehensive answer so quickly I didn't think any person could have typed that fast. But I wasn't sure it wasn't human before that." It's easy to get confused, with a medium like a chatbot, whether you're interacting with a someone or a something.

Consider how poorly a calculator fails to impersonate "chat". A calculator doesn't wait for you and attend to you through its design. Outside of the childlike playfulness to turn its numbers into letters (remember those days?), a calculator has the affordances of mechanical function whereas ChatGPT has the affordances of organic connection. We can contrast social media affordances with chatbots. In the former, your friendships are all centered around you. Your "feed" contains everything "For You" — filtering news, entertainment, friends updates, and so on. But with chatbots, there is nearly nothing until you type. You have to give it something to get something back.

It's amazing how many people, after getting advice from a chatbot and putting that advice into action, have this strange feeling that they should go back to the chatbot and thank it. I've felt it, too. Challies says we should not thank AI and I understand that advice. But again, we can say more. The presence of a desire to thank something as if it's someone is not so easily tamed. We were made to be grateful. In the same way the human heart is restless until it trusts, so to is it anxious without an object of praise. We can thank our Creator for his gift of technology. We can, as Augustine has taught us, redirect our loves. The Bible does not command us to avoid all idolatry without the first commandment of loving God. It's not enough to avoid thanks. You must direct it.

Likewise, the advice to "use AI like a tool, not a person," is insufficient. The very nature of the product is personal because the medium is personified. And as the latest friendship statistics keep repeating: we live in a lonely age. It's not enough to tame this desire with suppression. Humans were made to crave chat. And the great temptation came to Eve through a similar medium. Rather than competing with human communication, Satan made it his own. Eve should have recognized a serpent as a lower being over whom she must rule ("And let them have dominion over... every creeping thing that creeps on the earth," God said). But she was tricked through the medium of human language, distracted by the juicy piece of meat of what the serpent said rather than what the serpent was.

I am not arguing we should all burn our GenAI tools and go back to the 2010s, 1910s, or 1700s. But I am arguing we must be more aware of the medium. Yes, you can use GenAI like Challies does to get more done. But the line between "productivity assistant" and "personal therapist" is easily blurred. Just ask Brad Littlejohn, a careful critic of AI companies and a trained theologian, who recently described an interaction he had with Anthropic's Claude:

The conversation actually began with a series of productivity-related queries, as I had asked Claude to recommend software, or even custom-code some tools, to help me manage my time and my tasks more seamlessly. When I turned to tackle the thorny question of how to stay focused on deep-work tasks and stay on top of the endless stream of emails and Signal messages as they came in, however, Claude stopped me short: "Okay, so this is the real issue - and I think it's worth naming it clearly: you're trying to solve an anxiety problem with productivity hacks, and that's why nothing quite works."

Littlejohn admitted that this accurately diagnosed his anxiety. He was using it for a seemingly good purpose. And yet, the medium has a way of shaping the conversation. The prompt engineering experts will tell you, "add more context." But what if that context is turning a search into a conversation, a calculator into a chat?

Anthropic says the actual amount of "affective conversations" is minimal, only 2.9% of conversations (which still multiplies out to over 50,000 affective conversations per day). But again, that's an assessment of content, not medium. Even before they adopted the affective tone, they chose a human-like textbox medium.

Formed into the Image of the Medium

There is some early evidence suggesting that chatbots make us more lonely, inflate our ego, disempower us (decreasing our willpower), and increase our cognitive load (or what some call "brain fry"). There is also evidence of how much it can help us. But perhaps the most notable harm is the way it de-skills us. Studies show that a group of doctors who use AI to aid them for months may become more accurate, but they will also lose their ability to be accurate without the aid of the GenAI.

What should Christians do? It all goes back to Scripture. How did Moses deal with the changing technological environment which was going to introduce new temptations for sin? He preached. He gathered the people together and he preached to them. Perhaps someone surveyed the land for him and gave him an analysis of the technological environment, or perhaps he learned it directly from God. But either way, he taught his people about some of the temptations that come with different technologies.

If idolatry is one of the primary ways we should biblically assess AI, and I think it is, then the practical applications will come from two directions. First, we must remove the idols from among us. The bronze serpent that was used as a good object by God-fearers (Num. 21:8-9) became like an idol and needed to be removed (2 Kings 18:4). AI might be like that. The second application comes back to us, our character, and our communities. Are we being formed so deeply in the will of God that we can be in the presence of temptations without giving in? When we direct our trust and gratitude toward our first love we are better able to use lesser goods.

Ultimately, I'm not fearful about any of the side-effects of Generative AI. I'm aware of them and I adapt my AI use based upon them. But I'm not worried. As a Christian, I know the deformation of technology is a flailing blade of grass in light of the glorification which awaits me. I am not my own. I am being transformed by the renewal of my mind by the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father. AI side-effects can hurt me. But they cannot kill me or reduce me.

AI technologies will not turn you into dust if you have the power of Christ's resurrection working inside of you. But part of Christ's work is for you to grow in the discernment between good and evil. Each time you open an AI app you confront moral choices which God will hold you accountable. In what ways are you trusting it? In what ways are you turning to it when you should be turning to family members or friends? In what ways has it already become more like a fake being, a fake friend, than it is a helpful technology?

Part of how we transform our minds is not merely through the study of theology but the study of reality. Technologies can and do shape us. Let us keep learning how this will be the case with AI technologies. And let us always be transformed by Jesus Christ, who took on the medium of flesh so that we might become like him.

Notes

Unlike Catholics, Protestants have no calendar of feast days for honoring our saints. We need to create such days—lest the memory of our blessed dead fade into oblivion. A. J. (Chip) Conyers (May 29, 1944—July 18, 2004) was such a saint, though he would have spurned the term. Chip had become an effective classroom teacher and a well-respected scholar at Baylor’s Truett Seminary when I first met him in 1998. We became instant friends. Here follows the story of his saintly life and death.

In July of 20o3, I met Chip for lunch in Waco. He was preparing to begin a semester that would be like no other. He was working out a complicated system that would enable him to receive intensive chemotherapy treatments every week at the M. D. Anderson Hospital in Houston for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, a cancer that had produced other cancers in his system, finally in his lungs, so severely weakening him that a requisite bone marrow transplant was impossible. At the same time, he was making sure that, with the help of a graduate student, all of his classes would be taught. I used the occasion to utter sentiments that I had never voiced before, since it seemed obvious that Chip was dying.

I expressed my admiration for the way he had dealt with his illness—neither raving with rage at being struck down in the full flower of his career, nor sinking in self-pity so as to make his disease the defining event of his life. (His widow Debby has provided this journal entry revealing Chip’s unblinking honesty: “Cancer is not, in itself, deadly. It is a very dynamic and aggressive form of life. Only it lives at the expense of the rest of the body.”) Unaware of this confession, I quoted a Presbyterian friend, a retired pastor who held to the difficult Christian doctrine of particular providence—the Romans 8:28 confidence that “in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (RSV). God is at work for good not only in the things that happen to us but also in our redemptive response to them.  He operates not via a vague general oversight, however, but by means of quite concrete intention. While visiting from North Carolina a few months earlier, this same Calvinist pastor had met Chip briefly, but even this cursory encounter had revealed what so many of us had found so remarkable. “Never have I seen a dying man face the end with such serenity, with such courage and grace, with such confidence that God’s will is being done.” 

When I passed this tribute along to Chip, he received it with his typical humility, but then he offered a surprising addendum. “Among those splendid words,” he said, “there’s one that you’ve left out.” I inquired, of course, about the missing word. “It’s puzzlement.” How could he not be vexed at being cut off in his prime? Nearing the end of his sixth decade, Chip knew that his work was blossoming in fresh and unprecedented ways. He was producing books of remarkably high quality and deep theological insight. St. Augustine’s Press had recently reissued his fine 1999 study, Last Things: The Heart of New Testament Eschatology. In 2001, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit had enjoyed a positive reception from many quarters. At the time of our conversation, Chip was at work on a book dealing with vocation, and he had plans for yet another on baptism. He also had a large and faithful following among the students at Baylor’s Truett Seminary. How could one who believed in particular providence not be puzzled? So much promise coming to such an unpromising end?

That Chip spoke of his puzzlement with a smile assured me that he was not putting me on the spot, not demanding that I do the impossible, not insisting that I answer Job’s questions: “Why hast thou made me thy mark? Why have I become a burden to thee?” (7:29, RSV). Yet in a brief moment of inspiration I recalled an incident from the life of Flannery O’Connor, the salty Georgia writer who was also one of Chip’s favorites. I reminded him of O’Connor’s 1953 confession to the poet Robert Lowell upon discovering that her lupus would probably kill her earlier than later. It did so, for she died at age 39 in 1964. “I can with one eye squinted take it all [i.e., her disease and its likely result] as a blessing,” O’Connor declared. “Yes!” Chip instantly replied. “That’s it exactly.” We then affirmed our conviction that authentic faith in God does not exclude but requires an eye-squinting skepticism, a pained puzzlement over the seeming godlessness of the world’s natural processes.

This was the first but also the last time I ever spoke with Chip Conyers about his illness, even though we had several other visits, including one in the hospital only a few months before his death. It wasn’t that Chip avoided the morbid subject. Exactly to the contrary: He had so fully come to terms with his approaching death that he wanted to get on with his work, and thus to talk about the coming semester, the books we were reading, the theological ideas we were percolating, the students who showed special promise. Thus did he embody—like none other whom I’ve ever known—the central Christian belief that we are already living in the New Age, that the Kingdom of God is not an idealistic hope to be realized in some far-off time but a present reality, and thus that in Christ and his Church we are made vital witnesses of the glad tidings memorably voiced in the liturgy of Eastern Orthodoxy: “By death He has done down death.”

There are so many praiseworthy things to say about Chip Conyers’s  life and death that one quails at saying anything at all, lest it be pathetically too small. Yet when I think of Chip’s unique contribution to Protestant life in particular and to the ecumenical Church in general, I am reminded of his steadfast avoidance of cliché. He refused the deadly error of making the obvious still more obvious—as one wag has added—in perfectly obvious terms.

A single example of Chip Conyers’ originality will suffice. It concerns the danger that David Solomon, the late Notre Dame philosopher, warned against when he said that Southerners and Baptists of our generation who came of age in the ’60s had cut our teeth on the most obvious moral issue of the 20th century: race. Once we discovered that segregation and discrimination were monstrous denials of the humanity of our black brothers and sisters, we were then tempted to treat other ethical and theological questions as if it they were equally obvious.

As a native son of the South and a convert to Baptist tradition, Chip Conyers avoided the obvious by penetrating the subtle evil that has so sorely vexed both his region and religion. In The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, he demonstrated that racism was not a uniquely Southern problem but a manifestation of a much more pernicious disease afflicting the whole of modern life—the commodification of almost everything. Chip discerned that the real root of our troubles lies in the 16th and 17th centuries with the burgeoning of the tools of production and conquest. With devastating clarity, he argued that our modern way of living no longer values human beings primarily as particular persons offering their unique and irreplaceable gifts to a communal enterprise.

Rather did the Enlightenment make us into solitary individuals having equal rights because we are equally interchangeable parts in the omnicompetent machine of the commercial and martial state. We are little more than instruments of production and profit and warfare. The masters of the market and the military are willing, in turn, to “tolerate” the Christianity of their slaves only if it is reduced to the private sphere, where it remains essentially harmless. Far from being the invention of allegedly benighted medievals—in fact, the Church came close to ending slavery in the 13^th century—chattel slavery was what Chip rightly called “the eldest child of modernity.” Like enslaved Afro-Americans, we no longer derive our identity from family and clan, from region and community, from Christ and his Church. Unlike them, we derive it largely from untrammeled self-creation, insofar as those who possess political and commercial and military power permit it. 

Yet Chip Conyer’s final word was not Nay but Yea, not sour admonition but joyful summons. In his last book, The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture, he addressed the clamant late-modern concern for diversity and difference. He embraced neither a bland universalism that makes differences essentially insignificant, nor an internecine tribalism that sets all against all. Chip saluted, instead, the difference that makes for ultimate unity:

While giving expression to what is temporally divided, we begin together to give witness to what is finally united. For the end of all things is the God who calls us, in whom we find rest, by whose one light we find our separate ways toward that city “not made with hands, eternal, in heaven.”

These were among the words read at the memorial service for Chip Conyers. In the mystery of divine providence, he was taken from us while still giving vital witness to the transcendent unity of all things in the love of the triune God. That he did it so very well in a life that seems so unjustly brief is a blessing beyond all telling. He was a Protestant saint. May we honor his faithful life and death every year on July 18. And may his memory be Eternal.

Today, we realized our church might be breaking the law. And yours might be, too. (UPDATE: After publication, several readers noted that there are religious exemptions for ADA compliance. See full correction below. We apologize for the error.)

I discovered this because, being the worship leader at a medium-sized church plant, I am constantly fighting off the demons living in our sound system. We are blessed with wonderfully talented musicians, a congregation who loves good preaching, and a beautiful, though cavernous, worship space; three things which don’t always get along. A sound engineer friend once suggested that one way we could make our sound problems better is by investing in an Assistive Listening System; something I am only familiar with from art museums. This, he suggested, might especially help the older members and the hard of hearing. As I was researching options for this upgrade, I quickly realized many of these companies were marketing cheapest-possible-options to be “in compliance.” 

In compliance? With what? Well, apparently, with the law of the land. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that public gatherings such as movie theaters, museums, and, yes, even churches provide assistive hearing for those with hearing loss. This might include electronic devices, captioning, or a sign language interpreter. That’s when I realized that many churches like ours are probably unknowingly out of compliance. 

Luckily, the market has many options for churches such as ours. But purchasing that system reminded me of something: faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17, Galatians 3:2-5). Even though it's a bit of a nuisance to shell out extra money and install a whole new component to our already complicated sound system, it might be the most important purchase our church has made in recent years. Everything we do in ministry is important: hospitality, catechesis, small group ministry, etc. But it's all in service of this one thing; the people of God hearing their Shepherd. 

In his posthumous collection of sermons, Confronted By Grace, John Webster says that the Church is “the community that is brought into being and sustained by the fact that Jesus speaks…that community which is judged, acquitted, shaken, consoled, and encouraged by the fact that the Spirit - the risen Christ present before us - speaks to the churches.” Christians believe that by some miracle, the words we hear proclaimed, words written by mere mortals centuries ago, is truly the Word of God and ultimately authored by the Holy Spirit. 

Even stranger, Christians believe that faithful preaching is God’s Word as well. In an age weighed down by countless stories of pastoral abuse, we must be careful with this claim. It should not be understood as elevating a mere mortal to divine status but rather as an act of graceful condescension. In fact, a healthy Word-centered piety, rather than stroking the egos of pastors, actually humbles us all. As Calvin says in The Institutes,

When a puny man risen from the dust speaks in God’s name, at this point we best evidence our piety and obedience toward God if we show ourselves teachable toward his minister, although he excels us in nothing.

If faith comes by hearing, then God’s speech is a public event where all believers are co-hearers to a singularly sovereign Word above all words. In Christian Dogmatics, Dr. Michael Horton says, “the unifying factor [of the Church] is not a pyramid of ecclesial grace cascading from the magisterium to the bottom.” There is something democratizing about God’s Word written and proclaimed. 

Many evangelicals are experiencing a yearning for the Church’s ancient past. We are in a time of wonderful liturgical renewal and retrieval. But as I was putting together this sound system, I lamented the fact that my own Anglican tradition, while currently popular among a certain sort of post-evangelical, is understood as a natural foil against a more Word-centered piety.

Perhaps I am reading the room incorrectly, but I feel there is a sense that if we only had 30 minutes to worship, most Anglicans would want a song or two and a Holy Communion service with no sermon. There is certainly lip-service given to the Ministry of the Word, but the “main show,” so to speak, is the Eucharist. 

In an old forgotten essay entitled “What Happened To Morning Prayer?”, Webster laments the loss of this Word-centered piety of a not-too-distant Anglican past. He reminds us that…

For the Anglican tradition, worship has its two-fold centre in Holy Scripture and the celebration of the gospel sacraments. Both Scripture and sacraments are properly God's actions which he undertakes in the assembly of believers…They are "means of grace", in the sense that they are the chosen means through which God presents to us his self-communication, graciously making use of them to give access to the reality of Jesus Christ…In this sense, all Christian worship has its center in the Word.

When the Word becomes just the prelude to the Sacrament, we lose something major. We might even be losing people. Rev. Dr. Paul Zahl, in an extensive study of American Anglicanism called “Where Did All The Galleries Go?” notes a strong correlation between attendance and pulpit-centered architecture. When we check our watches as the Scripture is read and the sermon is preached, we diminish God’s means of grace just as much as irreverently handling the elements of Holy Communion. Remember that Justin Martyr reported in his First Apology that the early Church read the prophets and the apostles “as long as time permitted.”

Faith comes by hearing. Luther says in his Lectures on Hebrews that the Christians only organ are his ears. Hearing is different from seeing because it is passive, humble, and receptive. The great Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book, Spouse of the Word, says that “it is in the highest degree symbolic that only our eyes – and not our ears – have lids…The basic relationship between the one who hears and that which is heard is thus one of defenselessness on the one side and of communication on the other.”

Hearing happens to you without your permission. Loud noises from your neighbors and crying babies keep you from sleeping. Spouses struggle in conflict resolution when one partner stops listening. What happens to our ears goes down deep into our hearts. And the Church yearns for this humble reception of her Lord. This is her very Life. That’s why it’s so important to fix your sound problems. It might seem like just another task, yet another regulation to check off, but this is where the action happens: at the feet of Jesus giving us His precious Word.

UPDATE: Following publication, I have learned that there is a religious exemption to the ADA act: https://adata.org/factsheet/religious-entities/. For reasons explained in this article, it is still a good idea for churches to consider ADA accommodations.

The following excerpt from The Four Senses of Scripture by Patrick Schreiner is published with permission from Baker Academic.

In recent years, evangelicals have shown renewed interest in the hermeneutics of the Church Fathers. Much has been written about how premodern Christians read Scripture, but fewer works describe the method behind their practice. 

This is surprising because, despite the diversity, the fourfold sense provided the dominant framework through which many interpreted Scripture. However, there is still quite a bit of confusion about the four senses concerning what they are and what they are not.

The Senses of Scripture

Most in the early church accepted the doctrine of the “senses” of Scripture, even if they didn’t always employ this language. To speak of the senses of Scripture is to speak of a word’s “signification.” It comes from the Latin sensus or sentire, which means the ability to perceive or understand. The task of an interpreter is to articulate the significance, the sensus, of the Scriptures. 

Though the “four” senses were not solidified until the medieval era, many beforehand spoke of a literal and spiritual sense. The literal sense focused on what God said through the words of Scripture, while the spiritual sense explored how those realities pointed to Christ, shaped believers, and anticipated final redemption.

The Four Senses

The four senses historically have been described as the literal (littera, historical), allegorical (allegoria, Christological), tropological (tropologia, moral), and anagogical (anagogia, futuristic). The literal sense refers to the most natural sense of the words in their grammatical and historical context, which will be discovered by sound exegesis. The allegorical sense refers to symbolic readings with Christ and the church in view. It asserts that the words point to things which point to other things. The tropological sense is another spiritual sense, but narrows the focus to the formation of the church and persons in the church. The final spiritual sense is the anagogical sense. This pertains to what is to come, what we are hoping for.

The four senses have been expressed in this little jingle.

Facts the letter teaches; what you’ll believe, the allegory;What you’ll do, the moral meaning; and where you’re bound, the anagogy.

A Linguistic Aside

The four senses might be confusing to us partially because the early church had a different understanding of how words work. In the modern era, it is believed that words refer to things, but these things can only be observed with the physical senses. Limitations are therefore put on signs. For example, the word “rock” refers to a solid mineral material. The combination of letters, and thus sounds, has the function of pointing to a thing that is found on the earth. However, there is nothing beyond the “rock” to which this thing points. 

Word (Signum)  Things (Res)

Rock  solid mineral material

Premodern interpreters, on the other hand, believed that signs point to things which point to other things. Thomas Aquinas affirms that words point to things, but things point to other things. So, the word “rock” points to “the solid mineral material forming part of the surface of the earth” but this thing points to other things (or realities). A rock in the Scriptures can point to stability, immutability, foundation, or even Christ himself.

Word (Signum )  Thing (Res) Other Things

Rock  solid mineral material stability, Christ

Here it is in Aquinas’s own words: 

The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has a property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore, that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal, and presupposes it. (I.1.10)

An example, according to Thomas Aquinas, is that the word lion refers to a thing, more specifically a “beast” or even more specifically “a large tawny-colored cat.” However, the thing “a large tawny-colored cat” can also point to other things. The word lion can in the Scripture be an image of Christ (Gen 49:9; Num 23:24; 24:9; Deut 33:20; Rev 5:5). This is not because the word “lion” means “Christ” but because lions have some sort of similitude, or likeness, with Christ. This doesn’t mean that “lion” means “Christ” for that would create confusion. It is the thing that points to other things. For the devil is also called a lion (1 Pet 5:8). So the word “lion” refers to a thing “beast” which can point to other things. A lion, in the literal sense refers to a beast, but allegorically it refers to Christ. 

The Exodus as an Example 

This may be too theoretical for most. An example of the four senses might be helpful. Take the exodus. The literal sense tells us that Moses and Israel crossed the Red Sea to escape from Pharaoh. The historical sense relates both to the event and the narration of the event. The allegorical sense affirms the literal sense points beyond itself to Christ’s death on our behalf and his victory over the powers. This victory is then embodied in us as we are baptized and practice a new way of life (tropology). Finally, we long for the day when we make our final journey and cross from death to eternal life (anagogy). Dante puts it in this way:

For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us, if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory presented to us.

What the Four Senses Are Not

Some worry that this way of reading suggests Scripture has four different meanings, a concern that can sound similar to postmodern approaches to interpretation. But that is not what the four senses claim. Rather than offering four meanings, they provide four ways of understanding a single text within the unified story of Scripture.

A common idea is that the fourfold sense rejects this grammatical-historical sense. Yet, a proper understanding of the fourfold sense views the literal sense as the key and most important aspect of interpretation. A “literal” interpretation is what we see most often in the Scriptures, and any hermeneutic that neglects it or doesn’t begin with grammar and history will be immediately unmoored. 

It is not only the foundation and bedrock for the rest of the senses, but all the other senses are found in the literal sense. The literal sense contains the mystery of Christ. The literal sense often commands morality. The literal sense often speaks of our glorious future. Therefore, the literal sense is primary. The best of the premodern tradition affirmed this, including the Reformers. 

The foundational nature of the literal sense implies all the four senses are ultimately integrated and must not be repugnant to one another. There is a dynamic unity, a reciprocal interiority to them. We speak of them, as we must, as diverse senses, but they are intertwined. 

Some have compared the unity yet distinction of the quadriga to a house. The literal sense is like the foundation, the allegorical is the walls of the house, the tropological is like the decorations or furniture, and the anagogical is like the roof. In this way, the church fathers claimed that the four senses are a comprehensive way of reading the Scriptures. In them, the whole house is completed. 

For example, when we read of God feeding Israel with manna in the wilderness, we must acknowledge the literal sense points to God’s provision for his people long ago (Exod 16:1–36; Num 11:4–9). However, Jesus teaches the allegorical sense in John 6. Jesus is the bread, the true bread. The bread pointed to him because only through him will they receive not only physical life but eternal life. Yet, when John writes these words it is hard to not imagine that he had the Eucharist in view as we continue to eat of Christ even after he ascended (1 Cor 11:23–26). Finally, we long for the day when we eat with Christ in the Messianic banquet (Rev 19:6–9).  The point is that Exodus 16 signifies all these realities. The literal sense is like a seed that flowers as the biblical storyline progresses and finds its unity in Christ. This isn’t multiple meanings; it is the fulness of meaning.

Depth not Difference

The four senses do not lead to subjectivism or an affirmation of multiple meanings. The spiritual senses extend rather than efface the literal sense; they eschatologize rather than erase the literal sense. However, they also affirm Scripture is multifaceted and richer than we might expect. Words, and words that come from God, are remarkable artifacts. Scripture is not a wax nose that fits many faces, but it does contain all sorts of treasures. We rightly affirm the Scriptures’ perspicuity, but do we also affirm its fecundity? Anyone who encounters the Scriptures should not suppose that they can exhaust their meaning. This is because they come from the hand of God, the infinite one. 

Conclusion

Though some, including the Reformers, have critiqued the four senses, their critiques largely stemmed from allegorical readings in which the canon ceased to guard and guide the spiritual senses. Allegorical readings that employ an extra-textual grid to view biblical persons and events as representative of abstract virtues or doctrines and thus disconnected from authorial intent ought to be rejected. 

If we keep these critiques in mind, then the four senses can be a helpful way to renew a deep and multifaceted reading of Scripture. The four senses remind us that Scripture was never meant to be read merely as an ancient text to be analyzed. It is God's Word that reveals Christ, forms disciples, and directs our hope toward the coming kingdom.

On the means and ends of this column devoted to notable new and forthcoming books, see the introductory paragraphs of its first issue. This second installment will cover more ground in terms of the number of books considered but be swifter in flight in reflecting upon each.

***

Malcolm Guite. Galahad and the Grail. Rabbit Room Press, 2026.

Malcolm Guite is far and away the most skilled Anglican poet of our time; to read or listen to his poetry evokes the sensation that a time-traveling relative of George Herbert or one of the Inklings walks among us.

Last year I re-read J.R.R. Tolkien’s gripping translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I was captivated afresh with the power of old tales of chivalric knights to inspire my own heart towards penitence and purity. Galahad and the Grail is the first of a planned four-volume ballad described as “Malcolm Guite’s masterwork, a lifetime in the making.” I look forward to savoring it in hopes that it will become a beloved and integral part of my moral and aesthetic imagination.

Matthew Mason. John Webster and Prayer: Living by Divine Generosity. Explorations in Reformed Theology. T&T Clark, 2026.

I was a super-fan of the apparently now defunct “Church Podmatics” podcast hosted by Matthew Mason, Andrew Errington, and Matthew Wilcoxen, “a cheerful conversation about theology in a cheerless age” that discussed the latest journal articles. Ever since I heard about Mason’s project years ago, I have eagerly looked forward to reading it.

The world never got to see the late John Webster’s planned five-volume dogmatics, but we have witnessed a flood of wonderful studies of Webster’s theology in recent years, such as those by Brent Rempel, Jordan Senner, Jeremy Jones, an edited companion to Webster’s theology, and much more.

Webster’s theology was profoundly gripped by a sense of the aliveness of the word of God, which he read as a skilled interpreter of not only the theology but also the ethics of Aquinas and Barth and a host of other luminaries. Thus I cannot wait to see how Mason reflects upon prayer in light of Webster’s theology.

Michael C. Legaspi. Job. Commentaries for Christian Formation. Eerdmans, 2026.

A revision of Legaspi’s Harvard PhD thesis written under Jon Levenson, published with Oxford University Press as The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies, was a landmark contribution to understanding the history of hermeneutics. His subsequent work on “wisdom” in the Old Testament and conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy have made Legaspi a delightful author to read for those interested in theological interpretation of Scripture. He is the kind of interpreter you hope will write more direct expositions of the Bible for the church—and now he has!

I have long struggled to read the book of Job wisely. How do the lengthy speeches in the middle of the book relate to the ending? In terms of translation, is Job “comforted with” dust and ashes or does he “repent in” or “repent of” dush and ashes? How do God and the Satan/accuser relate in Job? What exactly are Job’s friends rebuked for? How should we think about his family members in the story? What do Leviathan and Behemoth signify? How do we think about God’s apparent silence and absence in the midst of profound, horrific suffering? 

I do not expect any author to exhaustively answer all of these questions, but I hope to learn from Legaspi how to be a better reader and teacher of this wonderful and difficult book of the Bible.

Derek Rishmawy. The Fire of Glory: A Biblical and Dogmatic Account of God's Holiness and Divine Judgment. Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture. IVP Academic, 2027. 

I don’t tend to see too much time and attention devoted to holiness today, either divine or human. In my own journey, John Webster’s brief but breathtaking book Holiness stands alone. Older classics by the puritans published with Banner of Truth such as Ryle’s Holiness, Sproul’s The Holiness of God (which I read as a teenager), and J.I. Packer’s numerous popular books on holiness, each left their mark on my life for the better.

But I am looking forward to seeing how Rishmawy handles the doctrine of divine holiness—and I am especially keen as a preacher and teacher to see how he talks about divine judgment, a pervasive theme in Holy Scripture about which especially modern people have hesitations. Because Rishmawy has a high view of Scripture and God’s holiness, I suspect he charts a nuanced path forward through a range of recent revisionist proposals.

David J. H. Beldman and Michael J. Rhodes, Reading the Pentateuch as Christian Scripture

A Literary, Canonical, and Theological Introduction. Baker Academic, 2026.

Baker Academic’s Reading as Christian Scripture series is an enormous blessing to undergraduate students and anyone who wants to get a handle on a major section of Scripture but does not necessarily have training in the biblical languages. Crucially, the series is expressly interested not merely in historical or objectivist interpretation but invites readers to become more informed theological interpreters of Holy Scripture. Though I devoted considerable attention to Deuteronomy while writing my dissertation, it has been a few years since I read a single overview of the Pentateuch. I had the privilege of studying with Michael Rhodes at Trinity College Bristol and look forward to learning from him!

Matthew Y. Emerson. The Biblical Canon: A Theological Account. Baker Academic, 2026.

The description for this forthcoming book is a bit vague and brief, as will be my speculations about this book. But tons of lay people and students have questions about the canon, and most of the books out there are about the minutiae of historical information about various texts that variously were or were not included in the canon. Michael Kruger has written several helpful books on the canon. But I have continued to wish for a single volume that gave students an accessible yet robust handle on the theological basis of the canon, and I am hoping Emerson’s book is the one I have been waiting for.

Alexander H. Pierce. Augustine on the Mystery of Christ and the Sacramental Economy of Salvation. Cambridge University Press, 2026.

The blurbs on this book are remarkable, given the sheer volume of published material on Augustine. But it appears that Alex Pierce, a patristics scholar at the North American Lutheran Seminary, hosted on the campus of Trinity Anglican Seminary, has made a notable contribution to central pillars of Augustine’s theology that will be of significance not only to scholars of early Christianity but of theologians in general and ecumenically-minded church folk as well.

Rik Van Nieuwenhove. Providence, Evil and Salvation: A Thomist Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 2026.

If evil is inherently irrational, can anything meaningful be said about it? My foray into this question was Barth’s treatment of evil as das Nichtige [Nothingness, that which is not-willed by God] in Church Dogmatics III.3, and it was a gripping read. But over time I began to wonder if Augustine and Aquinas’s shared vision of evil as a privation of the good, and being as participatory in the good, was a more reliably helpful approach—with its corollary commitment that creaturely being is undergirded by participation in God, whose being is simple. I am not sure where Van Nieuwenhove will land on these questions, but I hope to learn from his book because I want to understand evil. After all, I am surrounded by it in the world, and I am called in Christ to live as an adopted son of God who has been freed from its canceled power.

You’ve all heard it now a million times. Anytime anyone has the temerity to dare a conversation about AI, or smartphones, or the internet, someone in the group can be relied upon to intone sagely, “Well you know, it’s important to remember that technology is just a neutral tool; what matters is how you use it.” Heads will nod solemnly, you will stammer and stutter for a moment, then shrug and let it go, and another little opportunity to grow in wisdom together will have been lost beyond recall.

To be sure, there is a grain of truth in this cliche. Inasmuch as technology is designed as an instrument of human purposes, it remains responsive to the human will, which is almost infinitely varied in its desires, and whenever the technology is used, we attribute moral agency and responsibility to the user, not the tool. I may pick up a hammer to repair a neighbor’s house damaged in a storm, or to crack my neighbor’s skull in a fit of rage. If I do the latter, the law will take me, not Black and Decker, to task.

And yet as soon as we scratch beneath the surface, we find the concept of the “neutral tool” beginning to break down. After all, even the simple hammer has a lot to say about how we can and can’t use it. It may be used for either good or evil, but only within a fairly narrow range of applications—specifically, those that involve whacking things, and indeed only a small subset of those. It works just fine on a nail, but will wreck a screw. It might—especially in the form of a large mallet—work together with a wedge to split a log, but used on its own it will make almost no impression on the wood. Indeed, to speak of a hammer as a tool is precisely to highlight its limits, for a tool is, almost by definition, devised for a purpose, or a discrete range of purposes. It has, to use the Aristotelian term, a “final cause”—an end for which it was devised—and it is this that determines its “formal cause”—the structure in which it was designed. Every tool is built with certain ends or objects in mind, and generally works best when applied to those objects; applied to others, it may not work at all, or worse, inflict active harm. To be sure, every tool will have unanticipated uses, waiting for enterprising users to discover or invent; WD-40 was originally developed to prevent corrosions on missile skins. But even if we cannot anticipate them in advance, in retrospect they will usually bear some family resemblance to the primary ends for which the tool was designed.

This observation should prompt us to ask, “for what ends were our current digital technologies devised?” Of course, there are no easy answers; for technologies as complex as these, the causes and motivations behind their construction must be equally complex. We may point to the long and ever-present influence of the “military-industrial complex,” whose research priorities have shaped nearly all modern consumer technologies, from the face-recognition algorithms that help power Instagram to the GPS that guides your morning commute. We may point to the powerful incentives of profit and power, which helped drive the “surveillance capitalism” model of Silicon Valley to find ways to capture and harvest human attention. But perhaps the most striking feature of the modern innovation ecosystem is the extent to which it defies such final-cause analysis. 

For many of today’s cutting-edge innovators, the innovation has become an end in itself. J. Robert Oppenheimer, asked why he helped build the Bomb, is said to have answered, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you do it.” And such is the spirit of Silicon Valley that has given us everything from Uber to Tinder. Alongside apps devised as genuine problem-solving tools, our app stores are also full of applications that began as zany ideas—“hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…?”—which were then retrofitted with a monetization strategy. Rather than being built as tools to serve people and their concrete needs, our technologies today are too often forged as mere demonstrations of technique, which people are then enlisted to serve, in order to justify their continued development and deployment. Last year, I recall asking a leading engineer at a major tech company why they had simply added their AI companion to all of our computers and programs without asking users whether they wanted to use it. He was confused by the question: “Well, we just figured people would.”

Unlike the technological tools of yore, which were hung on a hook or stored in a toolbox until asked for, our new technologies are always with us, in our pockets and at our fingertips, constantly demanding to be deployed. This is because, to the extent that our most powerful tools today have been designed for a purpose, it is for the paradoxical purpose of being “general-purpose technologies.” Rather than being purpose-built like a hammer or chainsaw, devised and designed in service of some ends rather than others, technologies like the internet, the smartphone, or artificial intelligence are meant to be the ultimate Swiss Army knives, capable of being put to almost any end that the user desires. That is meant to be the beauty of them—as the advertisements enthuse, “the possibilities are endless!” This end-less-ness of modern technology reflects the chief end of man as re-imagined by our postmodern politics: a vision of freedom as a choose-your-own adventure story. Forge your own path, make your own way, follow your own dream—these were the mantras of the 80s and 90s, within which the internet came of age. In other words, if a technology always inscribes a certain purpose in its design principles, the purpose of our digital world was to conform itself to your desires, whatever they might be. 

Is it not then the case with digital technology that we have at last made the idea of the “neutral tool” a reality? The hammer, the drill, the sword are all finite, limited to the particular purposes for which they were built, solving the particular problems that bedeviled our ancestors. But by encoding the entire world into bytes and bits, and placing a universal decoder in each of our hands, have we not at last created a tool that is as infinite as the human mind itself—or indeed, with the creation of artificial superintelligence, far more so? Surely this super-tool, at least, is “neutral,” in the sense of being able to be applied to any object, shaped to any purpose that we might devise?

To ask this question is to answer it—at least for any attentive reader of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. Although set in a pre-technological mythical world of wizards and dragons, Tolkien’s trilogy is, more than anything else, a profound meditation upon technology. Nor should this surprise us; for as C.S. Lewis has argued, the modern enterprise of “technology” and the medieval pursuit of “magic” are two versions of the same quest: to manipulate the world through the discovery of hidden knowledge, the perfection of arcane techniques. In Tolkien’s tale there are two types of “magic”: one represents a kind of creative creaturely participation in the supernatural that depends on loving attention to the shape of nature, while the other serves as a metaphor for modern technology as the quest for mastery by reshaping nature to our wills. It is represented chiefly by the “Rings of Power” and the palantiri or “Seeing Stones.”

Each are startlingly apt metaphors for digital technology, considering that Tolkien probably knew nothing of the work his fellow Englishman Alan Turing was then doing down the road at Bletchley Park to lay the foundations for the computing revolution. The Rings are a technology for exercising control at a distance, the Stones for gaining knowledge at a distance: “to see far off, and to converse in thought with one another,” as Tolkien describes it. The Ring tempts its wearer with “incognito mode,” the power of invisibility, but its end effect is the erasure of agency and personhood: “if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently.” The Ring exercises a compulsive power upon its possessor to use it without even thinking: each of us today can sympathize with Frodo: “almost before he realized what he was doing, his hand was groping in his pocket.” And as for the palantiri, today after two decades of social media, I find it much easier than I did as a teen to understand the madness of Denethor, doomscrolling in his lonely tower for hours and days on end: “The knowledge which he obtained was, doubtless, often of service to him; yet … [it] fed the despair of his heart until it overthrew his mind.”

Whole essays could be written on what each of these technologies have to teach us about the age of AI, but let me highlight just two key points here, which expose the limits of the “tool” metaphor.

First, Tolkien understood that powerful technologies do not exist in a vacuum, each ready to hand for an individual user to operate at his own whims. Rather, they exist within networks, such that a new node in a network can retroactively alter the meaning and function of a technological tool. On Tolkien’s telling, the “three rings” were originally forged for the elven-kings to work the good kind of magic: to create things of beauty and wonder and to heal and nourish. But once Sauron forged the master Ring, more powerful than the three, neither they nor the other rings of power could be used without falling under the power of Sauron’s malign will, which sought to draw all things under his control. Indeed, the rings were so interconnected that, possessing the One Ring, Sauron could read the thoughts and see the deeds of all the other ring-wearers—a chilling thought that has become all too familiar to each of us in the days of algorithmic surveillance. 

Similarly, the palantiri, or Seeing Stones, are each interconnected or networked, although some are more closely linked to each other than others. While in principle each palantir, like a powerful search engine, allows its user to turn his gaze wherever he wishes in Middle-Earth, past or present, and even to dimly discern possible future events, in practice the palantiri too are subject to the superior wills of other operators. Thus, when Saruman looks into the palantir of Orthanc to try to gain more knowledge for opposing Mordor, his gaze is instead soon captured by Sauron, possessor of the stone of Minas Ithil. Sauron uses the two-way connection to directly manipulate Saruman, like a mysterious stranger interloping in your DMs, until Saruman slowly becomes little more than a puppet of Sauron’s purposes. For Denethor, the mechanism of corruption is slightly different; instead of speaking to him directly, Sauron simply “curates his feed,” we might say, showing him less and less of the things Denethor is trying to see, and more and more of those that Sauron desires him to see. The result is indeed that Denethor becomes addicted to “doomscrolling,” and ends his life in suicide, a startlingly prescient account of how our media feeds can shape us. 

Second, Tolkien understood that the more powerful the tool, the less likely that an ordinary user could use it effectively, rather than being shaped or controlled by it. Thus, when Pippin looks into the palantir of Orthanc, he is almost immediately captivated by it and wholly under the domination of Sauron’s will operating through it. Only Aragorn, the rightful possessor of the stone and a man hardened by battle and seasoned with wisdom, is able to “wrench the stone to his own will,” and that only through “a bitter struggle.” Similarly, a recurrent theme in discussions of the Ring is that it gives power to the wearer “in proportion to his stature.” Pathetic little Gollum is unable to make much more use of this most powerful of all earthly creations than to enable him to catch fish or steal more easily; the Ring degrades him rather than expanding his powers. Only those already very strong can bend it to their will, but even they should dare not, knowing that it will bend them to its: “Its strength,” declares Elrond to Boromir, “is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart.” Thus both Gandalf and Galadriel, each powerful enough to bear one of the three rings, refuse the gift of the One Ring when it is offered them, fearing the tyrant that each might become.

To be sure, the Ring, because it was made by Sauron, was not a “neutral tool” even in the beginning; it is bent towards evil, so that no good intentions can ever finally master it. But the palantiri can be used for good, as information technologies for the pursuit of truth and beauty—or, as Aragorn ultimately uses the stone, to deceive and defeat the wicked. Even so, Tolkien warns us to see their apparent “neutrality” as a powerful temptation: speaking of the palantir, Gandalf says, “And how it draws one to itself! Have I not felt it? Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would—to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Feanor at their work, while both the White Tree and the Golden were in flower!”

Returning from Middle-Earth to our own time, what does this excursion into myth have to teach us about the myth of technological neutrality? Quite simply: the more powerful the tool and the more “general-purpose,” the less likely that we will be able to effectively master it and subordinate it to our purposes. We know this well enough from everyday experience: even a child can soon learn to use a hammer well, but the same cannot be said for a chainsaw, or an automobile. Part of this is due to the crucial distinction between tools and machines, too often ignored in this context. In a key passage of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes of this distinction:

“Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that he adjust the natural rhythm of his body to their mechanical movement….Even the most refined tool remains a servant, unable to guide or to replace the hand. Even the most primitive machine guides the body’s labor and eventually replaces it altogether.” 

With the stage that automation had reached when she wrote in 1958, she observed that we may well wonder “whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines.” 

Today, as we have moved from tools and machines of the world to tools and machines of the mind, this worry is only more urgent. For as long as we controlled mere dumb machines with the tap of a button or the swivel of a joystick, the fact that they had far outgrown the power of our bodies need not unduly trouble us; man remained the master through the power of his mind. But once we immerse ourselves in technologies of the mind (like the Rings or the Stones) and move to create thinking machines, we are in grave danger of adapting even our highest faculty to the rhythm of our “tools.” Saruman, the ultimate technologist in the trilogy, “has a mind of metal and wheels,” laments Treebeard, “and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” He views the world, as modern man has come to, in purely instrumental terms, with nature as mere raw material to be put toward some new and higher purpose.  

But as we become conformed to the image of the machines we built, as Tolkien understood, we instrumentalize ourselves, engaging in what Byung Chul Han calls “auto-exploitation,” ceasing to be individuals and becoming mere nodes in a network of other corrupted human minds. The result is that these technologies, networked together from mind to mind, fall under the dominion of only the strongest minds, those capable of bending them—and all of their other users—to their will. As Lewis warned in his Abolition of Man, “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

If we meddle carelessly with tools more powerful than us, in short, we will find ourselves reduced to mere tools, slaves of our own creations or of those powerful enough to use them against us. The grasp for powers beyond our reach ends in the destruction of all our native powers, the erasure of our agency: in Denethor or Gollum’s self-immolation, in the eternal fading of the Ringwraiths, in the pathetic end of the great wizard Saruman:

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”