In her famous essay "The Lost Tools of Learning," the magnificent Dorothy L. Sayers mourned the misunderstandings that arise because of conversationalists’ failures of understanding language. How can it be that people could hear something and misunderstand it so profoundly as to be unable to have a coherent conversation about the topic altogether? For Sayers, this problem came down to educational failures. This is often true in our time no less (and arguably more) than it was in 1947, when Sayers first gave her speech. Yet I have been noticing in our public discourse of late, even very highly educated people are struggling with the same issue Sayers noted—and not necessarily because of inadequate education. Rather, sometimes at fault are underlying assumptions that individuals bring to a topic—worldview baggage, if you will. I thought about this baggage and its ability to utterly distort perception when reading Maibritt Henkel's essay for The Argument last week about the September Fairer Disputations convention in Rochester, at which I had the privilege of speaking on a panel on care work, along with Ivana Greco and Stephanie Murray. (I also wrote my impressions of the convention for Mere Orthodoxy.)

The convention in Rochester in September gathered for the first time many of the regular writers from the online journal Fairer Disputations. In addition, though, the public and in-person nature of this event meant that it was the first opportunity for some who have never encountered the ideas of sex-realist feminism or read Fairer Disputations to be introduced to the general idea of what such an unusual feminism might mean in a world where, since the Second Wave at least, feminism has meant something rather different than what this community is after. 

Sex-realist feminism, at its most basic level, affirms the dignity of women qua women—and the dignity of men qua men. It seeks to erase competition between the two through encouraging flourishing for both—in the context of family relationships, in particular, but also in a modernity that is defined by all kinds of casual violence against women. Furthermore, in a world that increasingly attempts to erase all differences between men and women (and transgender ideology is the pinnacle of such erasure), sex-realist feminism affirms the importance of recognizing the biological differences between the two sexes, and the significant implications to women's lives that their physical bodies present. 

Maibritt Henkel was present at the conference, and her essay, "My weekend with the 'sex-realist feminists," is subtitled "The pro-life conference that wasn't." It is a report of her subjective impressions. But what I found most striking in reading her report is the profound misunderstandings of the basic premises of sex-realist feminism. In a nutshell, Henkel found that the conference was not really interested in the important questions she had hoped to find addressed—and that it was not even pro-life in her understanding of the term. She furthermore found herself bewildered by the questions the conference speakers were interested in, including the devaluing of mothers and children. "No one hates children. Please be serious," she writes in one of the subheadings in her article. 

As multiple mothers at the conference would be happy to tell Henkel, this, alas, is not true. In so many policies that she notes she would like to see revised, we see a profound devaluing of motherhood and of children's lives. Modern America is profoundly "family unfriendly", argues journalist Tim Carney in his best-selling book by this same title. Furthermore, multiple writers associated with Fairer Disputations have published not only essays but also books on a variety of topics related to this—meaning, there is significant research that these writers have put together following years or even decades of work. In other words, there is much more research and reading I would encourage Henkel to do first—before reporting back on whether she still thinks as she does.

For this recommended reading list I could name Erika Bachiochi's The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision; Mary Harrington's Feminism Against Progress, which addresses the ways modern feminism dehumanizes women; Louise Perry's striking research in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; Angela Franks's remarkable book Body and Identity: A History of the empty Self; Abigail Favale's excellent The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory; Leah Libresco Sargeant's The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto; and my own book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic. All of these authors, in addition to regularly writing for Fairer Disputations and elsewhere about issues pertaining to women and sex-realist feminism, were present at the conference—and Henkel spoke in person with at least some of them, as she notes. Other prominent speakers writing on these topics who were present at the conference include Freya India, whose recent book, Girls, is a NYT sex-realist feminist bestseller. Finally, Henkel attended the care work panel, on which, as I already mentioned, Ivana Greco, Stephanie Murray, and I spoke about the history of care work from antiquity to the present (the subject of my remarks) and on policy changes we would like to see today (the subject of Ivana's and Stephanie's remarks). 

Henkel seems deeply uncomfortable, though, with the idea of any "biologically fixed gender roles." She writes in concluding her piece, "By the logic of sex realism, it is always women who are at fault. You can't very well blame men for not taking on the burdens of childcare if they're just following their reproductive destinies. You can only blame the girlboss with frozen eggs for shirking hers." But this view does not express the view of any of the speakers at the conference! Indeed, as Henkel herself remarks, several women had expressed concern over some far-right men, whose anti-feminist stance includes support for repealing the 19^th Amendment. And the care work panel emphasized the contributions of fathers as well as mothers to the work of the home—indeed, one of the historical figures of care work that I talked about in my paper on the history of care work was Jesus as the Good Shepherd, a masculine model of compassionate care for children and adults alike. 

So how might someone who attended this conference misunderstand some fundamental premises of the sex-realist project so profoundly? Henkel's profile at the magazine states that she is "The Argument’s Gender, Families, & Culture fellow. Originally from Copenhagen, she graduated from Harvard in 2025 studying economics and social studies, with research focused on men’s role in feminism. She has previously worked at the Danish magazine Zetland, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and in political consulting." This background is important, because it highlights where she is coming from in her impressions of the conference and the ideas surrounding sex-realist feminism.

There are key things to note about Henkel's experiences in life so far, because they clearly color her coverage of the event. First, she has just recently graduated from college—so she has no personal familiarity with motherhood and the rearing of children. As one of the speakers at the conference—former British MP Miriam Cates—noted, studies in the UK show a significant difference in the political views and concerns of mothers and women who are not mothers. This is a grave concern for the evolution of British politics, Cates noted, because the absence of mothers in the voting booth makes for a less family friendly society. Second, "men's role in feminism" is a topic that FD has covered in various ways, but perhaps not in the way Henkel has learned about it so far. In my skepticism, indeed, I would like to know more about what Henkel means by “men’s role in feminism.” 

For instance, a former colleague of mine, who was a historian researching this very topic, has written a book arguing that Hugh Hefner and the Playboy empire were key players in advancing feminism. Indeed, Hefner and the Playboy project were feminist to the core, she argued. Their work is the model of men promoting feminism. Of course, sex-realist feminists would disagree. If this is the role of men in feminism Henkel has studied, a different kind of feminism would certainly be... confusing. And third, Henkel hails from Copenhagen, not America. While Scandinavian countries are well regarded for their exceptional support for maternal leave, they also have had exceptionally low birth rates of late. Last but not least, while Fairer Disputations is emphatically not a Christian project, a significant portion of speakers at the conference (and writers for the magazine) are Christians (whether Catholics or conservative evangelicals, like myself). This too makes a difference in worldview and in our interest in the larger questions of the purpose of men and women in God-created world. 

But perhaps it makes sense that a childless recent college graduate (and from a very secular college—and a very secular country of origin) would have a hard time wrapping her head around this project. About a year ago, I had a conversation with a Christian woman who had been a progressive feminist on gender roles much of her life. And then she had a baby. She was explaining to me, with utter surprise over her own life, just how completely her views on all matters of gender have changed. Overnight, she admitted, she had become a gender essentialist. 

Theory and ideas are all fine and dandy. But then real life crashes in, in the form of an eight-pound squish who will not sleep at night. So there you too will be, thinking about Aristotle (or, in my case, the Roman Empire), all while breastfeeding at 2:00am. 

And so, I want to thank Henkel for attending this conference that included a record number of babies and small children (my seven-year-old included) in attendance. And I want to encourage her and others who perhaps feel a similar sense of curiosity mingled with confusion about sex-realist feminism: Please keep coming to such events, join the conversations, and ask questions. In the Middle Ages, disputations were formal debates, where participants could ask difficult questions and debate over them, with the ultimate purpose of learning for all sides. Today, Fairer Disputations, deliberately echoing that tradition in its very name, continues to encourage this same spirit in support of the dignity of all women.

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus talks often about the heart. He warns against being clean on the outside, while harboring inward sin. It’s fitting for Christians to share this concern. However, at times our well-intentioned focus on “the heart” has heralded a kind of dualism, causing us to separate our spiritual and physical selves in a way God never intended.

We need a better theology of the body. And this need is especially urgent for teens.

We’re already seeing the reverberating effects of gaps in this area of discipleship. The fallout of “purity culture” gone awry, the normalization of artificial beauty enhancement, and the creeping influence of LGBT+ ideology—among other ethical issues—are symptomatic of a failure to teach a thoroughly Biblical and holistic view of the body. The things said and left unsaid have left a mark.

If we want to guard against the errors of the past—and equip our teens to navigate the cultural pressures of the present—it is essential to teach them why their bodies matter.

What We Risk Losing When We Lack a Robust Theology of the Body

Recently, I was asked to share about my book, Young Womanhood: Finding Joy and Purpose in the Body God Gave You, at a retreat. I was surprised when nearly every follow-up question centered on modesty, even though I hadn’t mentioned the topic. It’s not that I think modesty is unimportant (it’s indeed a Biblical issue, which I address in the book!), but if that’s the first or primary concern we have for teen girls when it comes to their embodiment, it shows that we’ve missed the bigger picture. Such inordinate focus is damaging. If a teen girl only ever hears what she should cover up—without a firm foundation about the goodness and purpose of her body—she will begin to view her body as a problem and an object of shame. But modesty isn’t about covering up something bad, it’s about honoring what God created good and displaying who we are in Christ.

That’s only one example. When we neglect teaching a robust theology of the body, it impacts everyday life. Teens may misinterpret the meaning of sex and the reason behind God’s boundaries for it, viewing him as a killjoy instead of a loving Father. They may eat and exercise to “fix” what they feel is deficient, instead of to strengthen and steward what is already valuable. Or, they may be tempted to neglect physical wellness, because why bother caring for bodily health if the heart is all that matters?

Without a robust theology of the body, we risk losing the most powerful and enduring motive for obedience: joy and trust in God. Instead of submitting our bodies to him because we trust his wise and generous design, our obedience will be motivated by legalism, fear, and shame. The best way to fight temptation isn’t just to point out what’s bent out of place, but to offer a better alternative.

What We Gain When We Teach a Robust Theology of the Body

God created us as embodied image bearers. So, our bodies are essential to how we were designed to know, enjoy, and honor him. Therefore, God doesn’t just care about our hearts. He cares about our bodies. He values them so much that he put on flesh, lived, died, and rose again so that we might enjoy the blessed reality of a bodily resurrection too.

Our bodies are also a part of God’s general revelation, which means they reveal truth about him (Rom. 1:20). This is especially poignant when we consider the meaning of our sexed bodies. Men and women reveal different truths about the nature of God through our bodily distinctions.

And the distinctions between us go beyond reproductive capacities and muscle mass. Differences in brain structure, hormones, and vascular systems all have God-ordained purposes—to help us know and image him more. Far from pigeonholing us into stringent stereotypes or caricatures of what it means to be a man or a woman, the wonder of these differences shows how expansive God’s design for us as men and women is. What clarity that brings to all this confusion over gender!

Ultimately, we must teach our teens how their embodied experiences and physical desires—though distorted by sin—are intended to point them to Jesus. Their senses are meant to stir their souls to worship. When they enjoy the pleasure of delicious food, beautiful music, or competitive sports, their hearts can be filled with gratitude to the Giver of every good gift. As they look in the mirror and cultivate their own beauty, they can be reminded to behold God as the ultimate expression of beauty.

When we give our teens a solid theology of the body, they gain better footing to fight temptation and seek satisfaction in Christ. Sexual immorality becomes less enticing the more their longing for intimacy leads them to joyfully anticipate when Christ comes for his Bride. Lip fillers, Botox, and other artificial body enhancements grow less appealing the more they gaze upon the beauty of Christ.

An Encouragement For Moving Forward

It’s no secret that the world has impoverished views of the body. And sadly, sometimes we do too. But the good news is this: God created our bodies with more meaning than we realize, and for more joy than we currently experience. When we mine what Scripture has to say on this topic, we gain—and can impart to our teens—a compelling and beautiful picture that embraces the value of our embodiment and moves us to worship God. With our hearts and our bodies.

In life or literature, tragedy is not so simple. My students may not live in a war zone, but they do know what it is to lose a home or family member to flood, fire, or tornado. They know that cancer or a car wreck can wreak havoc. They live with loss. For every educator, the hard realities of violence, death, and tragic circumstances often complicate what we teach, or more accurately, they complicate our thinking. 

When we think of how our modern culture uses the word tragic or tragedy, we might assume it does not relate to the genre of tragedy or the study of Greek, Shakespearean, or modern tragedies. The word is as overused as the word hero or epic. But the overuse of the word tragedy does not negate its relevance. I think the greater understanding comes when we ask ourselves, “In times of tragedy, what is my human response?”

A Modern Response

A decade ago I read that tragedy seeps into a classroom eventually but teachers have a choice about what to do with it. At that time, it was a response to the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. An article in the Atlantic Journal Constitution posed a question to two Georgia literature teachers—“How Do Teachers Respond When Tragedy Seeps into Classrooms?”

In this article, one teacher says her classroom is a haven. Yes, she explores “canonical literature” but she is content to leave the struggles and crises outside. She explains, “While this may seem callous, I remember my school days and how classroom time was a reprieve from chaos outside of school...I craved the day-to-day regularity.”

The second teacher teaches current events and politics in her Advanced Placement Language course. She writes, “We face these very relevant social and political issues head on in the daily experience of the classroom environment. This experience can get emotional...personal. But what we work hard to do as AP Language teachers is to create a safe environment...Sensational news is not the nature of the classroom.” She explains how issues are investigated from many angles and how students must use evidence to support their opinions. Above all, they avoid “divisive, tribal labelling.”

The article, however, poses only two camps. The first teacher wants the comfort of routine, her classroom a haven, while tragedy remains outside. The second teacher implores logic and analysis in a safe environment. “Let’s discuss, use evidence, cut away sensationalism.”

I was left wondering if these teachers truly dealt with the reality and heartbreak of tragic circumstances with their students. What was real life like? It can’t be ignored. How much of the responsibility becomes ours as teachers? The article brought some clarity, but as an educator, a more pressing question came to me—how do we understand and treat with tragedy while also teaching it? Where do the lines blur for life and literature? Or do they at all?

When I took a classroom management course in college, I learned that before a certain behavior occurred in the classroom, I had to know by heart what I would do if I had any hope of being a consistent disciplinarian. Would I really give a detention every time I caught a student chewing gum? If two students stole class time by heatedly arguing in class, what would I do? I had to know how I would respond. My first few years of teaching taught me the truth of this.

In the same way over the years, I realized I had to know how I look at tragic circumstances, to consciously think of it. In the world of psychology, this practice is known as prepared response, to anticipate how we hope to respond to a negative situation. It has been part of company and education training since 2001, but it was nonexistent in my second year of teaching when one of my high school students died in a car wreck. I could express sympathy to his friends and family, but my interaction was limited. After a one semester class, we had not been close, yet his classmates were. They were carrying the sorrow and heavy loss of a young life cut short. I offered what comfort I could and gave some time in class for students to share memories. It felt like so little because it was.

As teachers, we can read about psychological biases and the stages of emergency preparation. We can take the required training and acknowledge that yes, we will talk about hard subjects in the classroom. But it is never easy. As much as we care for our students, we are not trained counselors, especially as we encounter grief and pain. Here we are as literature, history, and humanities teachers. We teach tragedies and likely know them better than we do the hearts of the individuals in the seats in front of us. And that uniquely is where I think part of the answer lies.

A Medieval Response

In the 13th century, Dante Alighieri was compelled to delineate between comedy and tragedy since many misunderstood the comic nature of his divine trilogy. Gene Edward Veith, Jr., addresses this in his chapter “Tragedy and Comedy: The Literature of Damnation and Salvation.” From Latin and Italian, la commedia meant “amusing spectacle” or “happy ending.” In light of a spiritual worldview, Dante asserted that his trilogy was comic because a man’s portrayed life could contain suffering and trial, but he knew of a joy to come, the hope and reality of eternity. His end was happy.

However, a story was considered tragic when the man depicted had lived a life with some measure of pleasure and joy yet had no hope of an afterlife or eternity with God. Though this view was rooted in the Aristotelian principles written before the time of Christ, Dante defined the two terms in light of how they begin and end. It was a simple view, but it was undeniably about a greater perspective. 

Consider an inverse example. Twentieth century tragedies often reflect a lack of perspective, a lack of an eternal view. My students see this quite easily. Think of Willy Loman, even his son Happy, so ironically named in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Does either have any idea of why they are on this earth? Do they know why they are unhappy and discontent? That is what is clear to the audience. This context, this lack, reveals so much in contrast to the earliest tragedies.

A Greek Response

In 300 BC Aristotle fully analyzed the measure of tragedy and comedy and literary theory according to his live observations in Poetics. He shows that it is more about actions than characters, saying “Tragedy is an imitation of action...an image of people acting.” Today, most students learn of Aristotle’s definitions in a much too simplistic way. 

Several well-known student-help websites explain how Aristotle’s tragic hero should be virtuous, flawed, and suffer a reversal of fortune. Oh, and the audience should be sympathetic to the hero. That’s it. A bulleted list, nice graphics, and tragedy in a nutshell. No mention of fate or the role of the gods or any concept of a greater or eternal perspective.

It’s a good start, but I think the modern reader and student can appreciate the style and craft of the Greek tragedians. Aristotle saw the greater picture, the effect of the tragedy as a whole which he calls a “spectacle.” In her lecture notes Louise Cowan wrote about the spectacle as a work of art—

The work of art has its own world: that world is not cut off from the daily world in which we live, but it does not relate to it in any literal fashion. It is as works of art, then, that these tragedies must be seen; and that act, the act of seeing truly and clearly what is there is difficult enough.  

Seeing a great soul in pain or death should transform these concepts of pain and death for us because tragedy involves the dignity and significance of human life, man’s ability to endure suffering, and more so the depth of shared suffering. Aristotle spoke in great detail of his observations. And those distinctions should not be oversimplified.

Heroes and Hamartia

In the 21st century classroom, one of the most common elements discussed is the simplistic idea of a tragic hero, a character that has fallen from a great height, most often due to a tragic flaw. Aristotle does indeed refer to such a lead character, but he clarifies that “decent men ought not to be shown changing from good to bad fortune (since this is neither frightening nor pitiable but repellent).” It has to be more than just a bad-luck story or one fall from virtue. That is not complex enough or human enough or real enough for Aristotle. Unfortunately, many students are unaware that the Greek term “hamartia” does not mean flaw at all or even “missing the mark.”

According to Aristotle, the tragic figure does not have a flaw. Read his translators. Aristotle never uses the word. The tragic story progresses from “good fortune to bad, not through badness of character but on account of a great missing of the mark.”

In the introduction to his translation, Joe Sachs states that “there is no tragedy...unless a characteristically good central figure is aiming at something exceptionally high. For there to be a ‘hamartia,’ there must first be a mark to be missed.” Hamartia in Greek does not mean flaw, vice, sin, or “badness of character” according to Sachs. That is too simple. It is a good person attempting to do something admirable, and yet they miss. Few students however are aware of this context or the carefully crafted nature of the Greek tragic hero.

Death

Another notion many students believe is that all tragedies must end in death. Or, at the very least, a tragic ending means a negative one. Aristotle agrees with the negative end but includes this as a possibility without limiting his definition. He believes that tragedy speaks “more of things that are universal” and realistic. They include the use of sudden reversals, discoveries, and suffering. Part of the idea of a reversal is that a character can be surprised by new information, revelation, or a “discovery” that is “awe-striking,” such as discovering kinship after a terrible deed.

Macbeth suddenly chooses ambition over life-long loyalty to his king. Oedipus is ignorant that his action is a terrible deed until he discovers the kinship afterwards. Luke Skywalker acts in ignorance for some time, suddenly finding out who his father is. Aristotle would approve. He did not advocate having the protagonist battle a clear opponent either, but if the hero was pitted against friend or family the situation was more pitiable. Yes, the hero’s end and the play’s end could contain death, but the tragedy itself was shaped by many factors.

Emotion

Greek tragedy is also created with an intentional emotional effect. At a live play or with guidance in a classroom, students today do recognize such emotions and empathize with the characters. Our human response is hard to deny. Aristotle clearly states that we should feel pity and fear for our main character “undeserving of misfortune and fear for one like us [ourselves].” Again, human perspective raises its head. Sachs explains, 

It is by relation to the happiness or misery of that one character that the story comes to have a direction. If we are drawn toward that character rather than repulsed by him or her, our absorption in the story will dispose us to anticipate unfolding events with hope or fear, and to experience what comes to pass with gladness or regret.

Aristotle’s observations lend to a protagonist who is realistic, truly imitating humanity (“lifelike”), stirring our empathy. He can be both “responsible for and an undeserving victim of his own destruction...he is both guilty and innocent.” Our audience of modern students then can hopefully witness and appreciate the complexity of the tragic figure and experience the full effect Aristotle hoped for.

To me, this is the greatest benefit of reading and studying tragedy in story. Our humanness is clear, and perhaps our purpose in life is clarified, too. Tragedy can stir wonder because some assumption or opinion has been knocked away or held in abeyance for a moment. Seeing a great soul in pain or death should transform these concepts of pain and death for us because tragedy involves the dignity and significance of human life, and often, man’s ability to endure suffering. I could never claim to truly understand tragedy in our world today. It is not something I seek to understand either. But the glimpse into the realism Aristotle sought has given me a way of seeing I didn’t have before. It’s a seeing through and with tragic circumstances.

Trevin Wax has spent his career thinking about how to encourage believers to delight in both reading the Bible and in engaging in daily prayer. As it happens, both are areas in which many believers regularly say they do need more encouragement. Even some believers who read the Bible daily struggle with prayer—and some who love prayer find it difficult to really love some parts of the Bible. What if a liturgy could offer integrated support for both of these essential practices—and show how integrally connected they are? 

In the introduction to his new liturgy, The Lord Is My Light, Trevin explains his vision: “The Lord Is My Light is a structured plan for prayer and Bible reading that arranges biblical texts to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word and then surrounds them with confessions and prayers offered up from men and women throughout church history.”

***

Nadya Williams: You’ve mentioned that you first got the beginnings of the idea for this book during your time as a missionary in Romania. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Trevin Wax: More than twenty years ago now, I was a young evangelical studying at a Christian university in Romania, doing cross-cultural ministry in villages and cities with Romanians and the Roma people. I can’t say I got the idea for this book back then. But I did discover the ancient Christian tradition of praying with the church in a more formal way—making the words of forefathers and mothers in the faith my own—and leaning into the riches of The Book of Common Prayer. 

At first, praying the words of saints from years gone by made me feel like a child trying on his parents’ shoes. They felt too big and clunky. But over time, I could feel my heart expanding toward the intensity and clarity I found in those old words. That set me on a course of collecting prayers from church history and seeking spiritual benefit from prayers and practices from various traditions.

This project got going when readers of my In 30 Days series (a daily office for praying three times a day through the Psalms, the life of Jesus, and the letters of Paul) asked for a once-a-day rhythm that would take them through the whole sweep of Scripture, with a podcast version also. 

I see The Lord Is My Light as a gift for the Christian who loves the Bible but struggles to pray, and for believers from free-church traditions who are curious about liturgy but don’t know where to start.

Nadya Williams: Of course, there are many other daily liturgy resources—some Christian traditions have historically been very liturgical. How is your book different from these other liturgy collections? Why do evangelicals need this particular resource—and who do you think would especially benefit from it?

Trevin Wax: I’m grateful for the traditions that have provided helps for Christians in prayer, and this book draws deeply from them—often, in fact! I recently pointed to a few of my favorite resources and how I am indebted to them.

But anyone who has picked up a prayer book for the first time knows what it’s like to flip between sections and wonder which psalm goes with which day, or what the Bible reading is supposed to be, or what season of the church year it is. 

In The Lord Is My Light, everything you need is on the page, every word of the liturgy from start to finish. Even the elements that recur daily (the Lord’s Prayer, the Gloria) are printed in full—every time. 

The book is saturated with Scripture. Most of the words come straight from the Bible. (A sidenote: we dropped verse numbers from the biblical texts, so the readings feel like a Reader’s Bible.) The readings are arranged to highlight themes and connections in God’s Word, and so that participants can hear from every biblical author over a year. 

Many Christians are all about reading the Bible. Give us a reading plan, a study Bible, and a couple of commentaries, and we’re set. Prayer is harder. Consistent prayer that goes beyond a few minutes of repeating the same requests is a challenge. I know that feeling well. This book starts where many of us already are, with the Bible open, but then surrounds the day’s reading with confessions of faith and prayers from men and women throughout church history. It helps us set our personal requests within the larger story of redemption, unfolding daily through the structure of a liturgy.

Nadya Williams: Who were your sources and inspiration for this book? And what are your absolute favorites in this project?

Trevin Wax: Thomas Cranmer and the English prayer book tradition shaped a lot of it, of course, especially the confessions of sin and the collects. But I wanted to showcase a wide range of men and women from across time and from various parts of the world whose prayers have been recorded: the earliest Christians like Clement of Rome, African church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine, medieval voices like Anselm, Reformers like Martin Luther, preachers like Charles Spurgeon. You’ll come across prayers from the Anabaptist martyr Anna of Freiburg, the novelist Jane Austen, the social reformer William Wilberforce, the missionary Amy Carmichael, and the slave-turned-church-founder Richard Allen. The confessions of faith stretch from the Apostles’ Creed to selections from the Lausanne Covenant.

As for favorites, there are too many to count! Some of the collects are dear to my heart. Is there any prayer that better expresses what we want when we read the Scriptures than the one asking God to let us “hear them, read them, mark them, learn them, and inwardly digest them”? St. Patrick’s breastplate prayer is another favorite, for sure, as is the opening to Augustine’s Confessions. Those are well-known, deservedly so. 

A personal favorite that’s lesser known comes from Columbanus, an Irish monk and missionary who carried Celtic Christianity into the heart of Europe. I love how the prayer progresses. A single flame is first kindled in the soul, it makes the body a temple, then leaps outward to brothers and sisters and finally to the whole world. One small fire becomes, line by line, a lit landscape.

Lord, I pray that you may be a lamp for me in the darkness. Touch my soul and kindle a fire within it, that it may burn brightly and give light to my life. Thus my body may truly become your temple, lit by your perpetual flame burning on the altar of my heart. And may the light within me shine on my brothers and sisters that it may drive away the darkness of ignorance and sin from them also. Thus let us be lights to the world, manifesting the bright beauty of your gospel to all around us.

Nadya Williams: This is just such an ambitious liturgy, and there is a lot going on—but there is a method to it too. Could you tell a bit about the organization—what are the key themes, and what would someone get from persevering and going through this entire liturgy in a year?

Trevin Wax: Each day follows the same flow of ten elements: a Call to Prayer, a Confession of Faith, a Confession of Sin with a word of assurance, a Canticle (usually a psalm), the day’s Reading, the Gloria, the Lord’s Prayer, Intercessions and Personal Requests, the Prayer of the Church, and a Blessing from Scripture. Some elements (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed) repeat every week or two weeks to encourage memorization. But there’s a lot of variety, too. Trying to keep the experience both familiar and fresh requires a delicate balance, something of a dance.

The year follows the broad contours of the church calendar, so every year we walk again through the life of Jesus. We begin Advent with prophecies of the Day of the Lord and New Testament readings that point to Christ’s return. Christmas celebrates his first coming while looking ahead to his second. Epiphany showcases his glory in his earthly ministry. Lent leads us in repentance as Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. Holy Week takes us to the cross and the grave. Then comes Easter’s fifty days of celebration, the Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. In Ordinary Time, we follow the early church and then journey through the main storyline of the Old Testament.

By the end of the year, you’ll have heard from every biblical author and prayed at least a portion of all 150 psalms. You’ll have the creeds and some of the church’s most beautiful prayers in your heart and mind. And I hope you’ll have spent a year drawing near to God with these words and readings, so that he can shape your heart and desires according to his Word.

Nadya Williams: What would you tell someone who says they don’t like written prayers?

Trevin Wax: I understand the concern. It’s possible to treat a daily liturgy as a formula, a bargaining chip to secure God’s blessing. In our fallenness, we can turn prayer into a way of evading God, saying the right words while we keep him at a distance. Our practices can become a mask.

But spontaneous prayer isn’t immune to that danger. I like how the singer songwriter Andrew Osenga compares a lot of evangelical praying to a jam band. In youth group, he talks about knowing a few of the right phrases. He could sound deep and worshipful even when his heart wasn’t in it. His prayer was “spontaneous,” but that didn’t make it genuine. He just played the licks he knew. I suspect many of us pray that way.

Of course, Scripture itself gives us written prayers. The psalms were Jesus’s prayer book, and he’s the One who gave us the Lord’s Prayer: “Whenever you pray, say . . .” If prayer is only about voicing what we already feel, then of course we’d never borrow someone else’s words. But prayer also forms the feelings we want to have. Written prayers and spontaneous prayers can go together. The written ones can elevate our spontaneous prayers, and the spontaneous ones breathe life into structures that could grow stale. And in the end, whatever patterns we pick, we trust the Spirit to form us.

Nadya Williams: How do you envision people using this daily liturgy—did you have individuals in mind? Or families? Small groups? Churches? All of the above?

Trevin Wax: All of the above. Most people will pray it on their own, and they’ll finish in ten to twenty minutes. Those who want to spend more time in intercession may take half an hour. 

The podcast version features more than 100 voices from across the country and around the world: pastors and laypeople, young and old, men and women, singers and songwriters. Some are names you’d recognize, but no one is credited. I asked everyone not just to recite the words but to address God, so the recording captures real prayer. Each episode opens with a melodic line from a hymn suited to the season, then settles into an ambient soundscape. The Scripture reading has no music at all, so you hear only God’s Word. The result is a 10–12-minute audio sanctuary.

For families, I’ve included a responsive way to pray the liturgy in the introductory material. A small group could open its weekly meeting with the day’s liturgy, or decide together to do it day-by-day, whether or not they’re together physically. Pastors can use it to shape a prayer meeting or service, adding songs between the elements, a sermon after the reading, and the Lord’s Supper after the Lord’s Prayer. 

However it’s used, my prayer is the same: that people will receive this liturgy as a gift, placing themselves before God day after day with open hands.

Trevin Wax is vice president of resources and marketing at the North American Mission Board and a visiting professor at Cedarville University. A former missionary to Romania, Trevin is a regular columnist at The Gospel Coalition and has contributed to Mere Orthodoxy, World, and Christianity Today. He is the author of The Gospel Way Catechism, The Thrill of Orthodoxy, and Rethink Your Self.

~ E. A. Abbott

Away from our workplaces, and especially in churches, we scientists often find ourselves alone. 

Yet an ideology now commonly called “scientism” has “a popular hold on the imagination,” according to Alister McGrath. On the popular level, much of the trouble began with the New Atheists, who wielded science into an “ism” after wrenching it from the death throes of positivism. These authors convinced many to buy into their claim that science is the only rational way of understanding reality. Away from popular non-fiction, fictional characters tout seemingly wise lines, like from Dana Scully: “what I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.” 

The circularity of this view has been pointed out by many, even secular, philosophers and scientists. The only way to verify (and science is enamoured with verification) the claim that science is the only rational way of investigating reality is to somehow get ‘outside’ of science and obtain an overarching vantage point from where we can assess the relative rationality of science. But, as writes philosopher Edward Feser, “the very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.”  

Science, I learnt the hard way when it left me flailing in quantum uncertainty, is fundamentally empirical: it observes nature. It cannot, in the words of the great scientific essayist Stephen Jay Gould, “adjudicate” on what might lie beyond what we observe. Nor can it, writes McGrath, determine “what the world ought to be like.” That quantum uncertainty exists or that objects fall under gravity in a predictable fashion is something we have learnt from observation, not by knowing beforehand that it must or will always be so. Epistemology cannot determine ontology, as McGrath succinctly argues. 

Yet scientism, like most plain language terms, is a slippery beast. A. C. Grayling, who is philosophically trained and might be thought of as a second wave New Atheist, claims to distinguish his views from scientism in the first few pages of his book The Frontiers of Knowledge. But two pages later he asserts that the question of whether there might be limits to our knowledge is “meaningless” because it is unanswerable, thus aligning himself with the positivists and scientismists and distancing himself from historical atheists. 

Even Bertrand Russell acknowledged unanswerable questions were worth asking. Grayling’s contention that we are in a “primitive stage” of science whose “frontier—so different from a boundary” may be one day crossed with the knowledge borne of our “best and most rigorously supported belief” clearly privileges science as the pre-eminent way of knowing and fits atheist philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s definition of scientism as a “totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.”

When weighing the truth claims of science vs religion, especially Christianity, I find the perplexing question is not why there are philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge and reality. It’s not even why the rise of naturalistic science cut a line between itself and the natural philosophy and Christian theology it had co-existed with for centuries. Of course there was going to be conflict where its findings and that of long held theological beliefs overlapped. 

The real conundrum is why science was eventually recognized by many as the ultimate arbiter of rational knowledge and became entrenched as such in the popular imagination. This has persisted beyond first-wave New Atheism in the works of current best-selling authors like Grayling and Yuval Noah Harari. 

This can’t just be a reaction against a poorly lived out Christianity that I suspect fuels at least some New Atheist positions, nor can it be boiled down to purely ethical objections (like the problem of evil) or traditional philosophical arguments that old-school atheists relied on. There is also something drastic going on with the perception of science, even amongst many scientists.

Rationality Makes Knowledge and Explains

What we know is what we deem rational. “The production of knowledge across culture and history” has been “characterized” by “criteria of rationality,” writes McGrath. And, indeed, rationality is the fulcrum on which the modern debates (if we are kind), or dismissive rants (if we are not) between science and religion turn. 

But whose rationality? Rationality was once thought to be the “proper functioning of human cognitive processes.” The problem is that “proper functioning of human cognitive processes” is not a singular thing universally understood in the same way. Rather, we find both across cultures and across time wildly different accounts of what “proper functioning” actually means. Just consider the differing beliefs held as “rational” by physicists in 2022 France, theologians in 1680 Geneva, or a lone woman in 1162 Australia. This problem is not just a question of intellectual progress. 

Even modern science has retreated from the idea of there being such a thing as the scientific method. Instead, “scientific methods” write McGrath, “emerge though scientific practice.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Scientific Objectivity, Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger write that “good scientific reasoning cannot be captured by rational method.” Summarizing particularly the work of Paul Feyerabend, a philosopher of science, they go on to say, “no methodology whatsoever is able to capture the creative and often irrational ways by which science deepens our understanding of the world.” Indeed it was “just because he deliberately violated rules of scientific reasoning” that Galileo “managed to achieve groundbreaking scientific progress.” Science isn’t a plodding algorithmic approach to truth. Rather, McGrath writes, scientific theories often come in a “flash” of “insight.”

It’s hard to regard something as supremely rational when it resists being rationally categorized and employs irrational elements. 

Injecting a bit of philosophy of science into the science vs Christianity debates thus begins to subvert scientismic claims of science’s rational supremacy. In his project to map human rationality, especially that of science and theology, McGrath gives a thorough injection. Of particular import is his deep dive into the concept of “explanation.”

Explanation Comes in Many Forms

Quoting neuroscientist Steven Rose, McGrath outlines how when a frog jumps into a pond there are multiple explanations—or explanatory theories. All are “rational” in some sense. A physiologist may examine causality from the point of view of connection between the frog’s leg muscles and its brain. A biochemist will focus on organic chemistry, including that of the frog’s muscles that trigger the jump. An animal behaviourist explains the frog jumped to escape a snake. The latter is of particular interest as it is an example of top-down rational explanation. So often, science is viewed as only a bottom-up, reductionistic source of explanation: the parts explain the whole. 

But unification, McGrath reminds us, has also “played an important role in the development of the natural sciences” as a form of explanation. When Isaac Newton explained how planetary movement and the terrestrial tendency of objects to fall were due to the same phenomena of gravity that was explanation via unification. It was not a purely deductive process from first principles, like a mathematical theorem, that led to proving the existence of an entity called gravity. Such explanations are a “top-down” result of collecting observations of the world and looking for patterns and extending this collection of finite observations to a general theory. The observations are the evidence for the theory as are any correct predictions the theory makes. 

Recognition of the importance of unification then opens the door to similar explanations in other knowledge systems. Christianity, writes McGrath, also offers a unifying “explanatory framework.” Lewis’s famous argument from desire is an example, proposing God as the explanation for why we have desires which nothing finite can satisfy. Going back ten centuries, McGrath also argues that Aquinas’s ‘Five Ways’ and other ancient arguments commonly classified as proofs for God’s existence should more accurately be seen as affirmations of “the fundamental rationality of Christian belief” that, for Aquinas at least, unified his human experience and provided an “explanation of various aspects of our experience of the world,” such as goodness and beauty. The evidence for the explanation is our experience. Of course, Christianity or, indeed, any religion, is not reducible purely to its explanatory or rational elements. But these elements of faith are vital and also a lifeline for the scientifically minded. 

But Science is Better

The New Atheists stop the conversation here. Theology, or any sort of Christian apologism, is excluded from discussions of rationality because they are deemed irrational from the outset. Their influence is widespread. A 2017 survey of non-religious Australians found 47% “prefer a scientific and rational, ‘evidence-based’ approach to life,” implicitly ruling religion as incompatible with such an approach. In the United States, a 2015 Pew Research Centre Survey found 59% of Americans hold that science and religion are in conflict, with nearly a quarter giving reasons related to rationality and perceptions of “facts vs. beliefs.” Personal discussions across a broad spectrum of professions, faiths and educational backgrounds over many years reveals similar dichotomous views of science and faith.

In a way, I get it. I didn’t for a long time share McGrath’s view that “it is the Christian vision of reality as a whole—rather than any of its individual components—that proves rationally compelling.” That Christianity shares explanatory methods with science doesn’t automatically make Christianity rationally compelling. Combined with unfortunate early encounters with Christians unwilling to engage with Christianity’s rationality but who instead pushed me to just “feel” and “believe,” I dismissed the explanatory claims of Christianity as weak at best, cruel at worst. They lack science’s massive theoretical framework scaffolded around repeatable observational evidence and mathematical language that my certainty-seeking post-Enlightenment analytical mind desired. Science was just more rational. But I’ve since wondered: Did I just mean more controllable? Hold that thought. 

You will be hard pressed to find a thorough definition of what qualifies as rational in most New Atheist texts that usually tend toward the polemical. In a way, that’s understandable. Even McGrath acknowledges that “rationality has proved remarkably resistant to clarification.” Grayling makes an attempt. Rationality, he writes in The God Argument has the “primary mark” of “reliance on evidence, taking relevant experience seriously, and using associated knowledge and theory appropriately.” I’m reminded of the meme about how the word “reasonable”  holds up the western legal framework but will cut him some slack given that such fuzziness is inevitable in language. 

Grayling goes on to say, “to be rational about beliefs means ‘proportioning the evidence or grounds one has for holding that belief to the belief itself.’” Science is the shining example. He frequently links science with “common sense” that will be our “deliverance” from “irrational” religious claims. The rational and naturalistic worldview is one where “what exists is the realm of nature, describable by natural laws” which is accordingly “premised on observation, reason and science, and excludes any kind of faith-involving element. He goes on to argue that religious apologist arguments are not rational because they “only make sense to anyone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.”

Taking Grayling’s views as representative of the scientism movement, we see that the elevation of science and simultaneous denigration of religion rests on three related bases: derivation from evidence leading to warranted belief, the “common sense” and obvious existence of the natural world that we can observe and reason about, and the absence of a parochial and limiting system. 

Slippery Photons and the Failure of Complete Objectivity

To the first criteria—where does the evidence lead: This was a question physicists in the 1920s were angsting over. Fresh from the upending of seemingly common sense notions of Euclidean space independent of time by Einstein’s theories of relativity, they were now faced with perplexing results from experiments investigating the structure of atoms and light. “Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?” Werner Heisenberg, co-developer of Quantum Physics, asked himself one evening in near despair.

One of the experiments he was talking about was the famous double slit experiment. First performed in the 19th century, light is shone through two very narrow slits and then collected on a screen. 

According to the wave theory of light (that started with Christiaan Huygens in 1687 and explained experiments just like this one) the waves will diffract on passing through the slits then interfere at the screen, like ocean waves colliding, sometimes re-enforcing each other and sometimes cancelling out each other, producing a series of bright and dark bands. According to the particle theory of light (that started with Albert Einstein in 1905 and explained, for example, the photoelectric effect), each particle, or photon, of light would go through one slit or the other, like a car through a tunnel, and just two light bands would form on the screen, directly opposite the slits. 

On performing the experiment, the wave nature of light seems obvious with the appearance of the interference pattern. Yet scientists in the 1920s, noted that the light was also behaving like a particle as it was collected at the screen in a series of blips. Which was it? Was light a particle or a wave? A particle always has a path. So then, we must be able to determine which slit each photon passed through on its path to the screen. But if a detector was placed at either of the slits to determine which one the photon had passed through, the interference pattern would disappear, and the two bands of light opposite the slit consistent with the particle picture would instead appear. 

Whether light behaved as a particle or a wave thus depended on the measurement and, if a particle, its path could not be determined. We cannot, in Heisenberg’s words, “objectify” the light photon. (This is the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but other interpretations are just as upending.) Similar experiments have been done with electrons. The common sense idea of local realism, of bits of matter in certain places at certain times—the particle “must have been somewhere between two observations,” surely—was thus challenged. 

For Heisenberg, as he relates in his highly lucid 1959 book, Physics and Philosophy, the extreme difficulty he and other physicists had in accepting the these results arose because the science of classical physics had “started from the belief—or should one say from the illusion?—that we could describe the world or at least parts of the world without any reference to ourselves.”

Newton, that ubiquitous founder of modern science in the popular imagination had “left the impression that there were no assumptions in his physics which were not necessitated by the experimental data” wrote F. S. C. Northrop when introducing Heisenberg’s work. Instead, Newton claimed he had “deduced his basic concepts and laws from the experimental findings” in a way that would make the New Atheists proud. But there were assumptions. Newton had, most tellingly for Heisenberg, assumed objects exist in Euclidean space independent of observation, and set modern physics off on a path where it had “accepted the premises and parameters of the belief system already.” In other words, one of history’s greatest scientists went directly against our third Grayling criteria without even realising he had done so. The natural world is out there for us to discover and observe objectively. Obviously.

Objectivity, our second Grayling criteria, is a necessary assumption for science. We must believe that there are statements about and phenomena in the world whose content does not depend on whether and how they are being observed, and it is sensible, for example, to live each day assuming tables and chairs are there even if we aren’t looking. But just because some statements or parts of the world can be objectively identified in this way, it does not follow that they all can. The assumption that “the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range” is false, warned Heisenberg. The atomic range where quantum effects are most pronounced may seem far removed from everyday experience, but it is just these realms, of unusual and ineffable experience, of consciousness, of elusive meaning, that scientism wants to claim.

The Road from Evidence to Scientific Knowledge is not Straight

There is no arrogant suggestion from Heisenberg or most physicists today that Quantum Mechanics is a final theory. Here they agree with New Atheist claims that science will keep expanding with new theories and new insights. But Quantum Mechanics’s role in exposing and overturning seemingly self-evident assumptions about how we look at the world and how we do science is a warning of how we can’t always immediately recognize the limitations of our scientific concepts.

Quantum Mechanics has been a remarkably successful theory, making predictions and explaining phenomena to high accuracy. But so did Newtonian Mechanics for two centuries until Quantum Mechanics and relativity came along as more complete theories that reduced to Newtonian values in the realms of everyday experience of large objects and small speeds. This exposes at least in transitory form another concern in the philosophy of science: the underdetermination of theory by evidence. More than one theory can explain the same data. “In other words,” write Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger, “there is a gap between the evidence and the theory supported by it.”

In getting to new theories it is wise, as Grayling asserts, to have evidence for what we believe, for what we hold as knowledge. But how observations and evidence feed into theory and intertwine to make knowledge is not straightforward. Aside from flashes of irrational insight, imperfect objectivity, and underdetermination of theory by evidence, observations are entangled with the theories they confirm. When measuring temperature, for example, you use a thermometer, which operates by assuming temperature causes an expansion or contraction of material in the thermometer. The reading or observation is thus entangled with the theory that explains how temperature causes expansion and contraction. This entanglement, and indeed the gap between theory and evidence, doesn’t mean science is useless or wrong. But it does mean, as Thomas Kuhn postulated, that science is a “web of belief” rather than a logical train. 

Leading an evidence based life is not straightforward.

We Want Control, but Are Stuck in the Science System

What science does that, for example, theology does not is yield to our control. This is, I think, the real charm that has led to its elevation to the ultimate way of knowing in the minds of so many. 

Verifiable, repeatable experience, such as the results of a scientific experiment, feels safe. We don’t need to become entangled in questions of whether our spiritual experiences or those of others—experiences that cannot be summoned at will and tested in a scientific environment—are actually real. (Yet this is also where we need to be careful; we have not experienced or seen blackholes or quarks, but the repeatability of experiments that give evidence for their existence makes them seem more trustworthy than the uncontrollable “evidence/experience” of people who have, for example, had non-scientifically explainable experiences.)

Our control of scientific experimentation and the knowledge it offers, combined with the assumption that there are no assumptions in science, instils an undeniable authority into scientific practice and also into us, as its wielders. 

The historian of science, Steven Shapin, has written well on the turn in 20th century science from contemplation to pragmatism. As technology and broadscale publicly funded scientific institutions rose, scientific goals became focused not just on understanding nature, but on how we could use and control it. But the allure of authority goes deeper. We were not just using science to control nature but using our control of scientific experiment to define what nature was, subconsciously or not. Anything not scientifically understood or verifiable was not real, and thus we stayed in control. 

The problem, as Heisenberg realised, was that classical science, based on classical physics and its “fundamental concepts” of “space, time, matter and causality” was a framework “so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance.” For instance, how can someone operating within the confines of this classical science make sense of “mind, of the human soul or of life”? Religion now seemed “only imaginary.” Science may have been instigated as the new reality, yet how were we and how are we to marry this with the fact that “our existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality”?

Grayling, to his credit, also engages with our limited scientific concepts, referring to it as the “pinhole problem” whereby “we exist in a very narrow band” of slow speeds and large objects. This classical world seems so obvious and is therefore “very hard to escape.” We form our classical concepts from everyday experience, but these concepts don’t always apply in the far reaches of reality. 

Grayling writes:  

the cognitive architecture of our thought imposes conceptions of order, causality, linearity, consistency, monotonicity, uniformity, predictability, and so on, which are as useful to conceptualizing quantum phenomena as it would be to apply dog-grooming techniques to solving quadratic equations.

We are, writes Grayling, just not configured to “naturally” think in certain ways; for instance, quantum mechanically. But, we are, writes Grayling “able to think that way mathematically.” 

The way out of our conceptual cage for Grayling is thus mathematics. Mathematics becomes its own justifier, better than the natural language at explaining the world, and we should rely on it to probe into the remote parts of nature and experience. Mathematics, Grayling claims, will one day draw the noumenal out of the pinhole and make it phenomenal: it was just electricity, not a ghost.

Maybe. Scientific discovery will no doubt continue, aided by mathematics, but there’s no scientific reason to believe its remit will ever be complete nor that it is the only rational way to comprehend our world. We have no scientific basis to assume we will one day be Spheres, looking down smugly at a complete model of the reality of which we are embedded. 

Besides, I often find mathematics gives people a false sense of certainty. Not because it is axiomatic—to dismiss those axioms would be to dismiss the basis for human reasoning—but because the way mathematics encodes reality in science is not perfect. We must make approximations whenever constructing a mathematical model of the world. Mathematics, within its own system, proves results. But when used to construct a mathematical model of the world, we have, writes Heisenberg, “idealized” that world. At University, our physics class had a joke that began: “I can prove the existence of God. First, assume God is a sphere…” “Thinking mathematically,” as Grayling posits, only embeds us further in a system (that of mathematical science) that is somewhat detached from aspects of the “real world.” 

For Heisenberg, the way out of the cage is not mathematics but instead ordinary language. For even though its terms may be “not very well defined,” its concepts are “formed by the immediate connection with reality” in a way that hyper precise and “idealized” mathematical scientific language is not. And although ordinary language and its concepts are what led us into the limitations of classical physics in the first place, this occurred precisely when we started to try to exactly codify that language into mathematical and logical terms, thus rendering it smaller than the reality it was trying to represent. Ordinary language and the realms of art and religion in which it is used to represent and comprehend the “interplay between the world and ourselves” should not, says Heisenberg, be discarded.

Christians Often Consolidate the Divide

Thus faced with the repressed metaphysical assumptions of inflated science, a recovering adherent of scientism might start to look outside the science system and examine Christianity more closely. When they do, I fear they may, like I was, be swiftly repelled by encountering that subset of Christians that espouse irrationality as a virtue. For them, “it is more spiritual,” writes Roger Olson “to believe against logic and evidence than to believe with them.” Thus we have found antiscientism. 

Here, non-Christian knowledge is not just unwelcome, but, in McGrath’s words, a “category violation,” a clearly implicit claim to the completeness and ultimacy of Christian knowledge. Yet, while God may be ultimate, our knowledge of him is not. Scientists are not Spheres and neither are Christians. 

For someone who loves science, who does not see explaining the geometry and cause of crepuscular rays as taking away from their beauty (as I have been told it does), antiscientism makes them have to “choose between being a Christian and being a scientist,” a false dichotomy not dictated by science or by the scriptures. The latter rather command us to “test everything; hold fast what is good,” ie: to use our God-given rational minds. 

Rationality Roulette

The problem we return to when using rationality as a lever into science-Christianity complementarianism is of ranking. Often, science and Christianity are not, as McGrath summarizes, “competing for the same explanatory territory.” Science is better at questions of function while religion and art speak more often to value and purpose. 

Yet science can seep into commenting on value and purpose. In constructing our theories, including scientific ones, we inherently inject values into what we examine and how we can examine it, as Heisenberg so eloquently reminded us with assumed objectivity. I think also of the medical model of the human as a biomedical machine. This assumption can overlook and implicitly render less important poorly understood mental and spiritual sickness. If you are mentally ill, do you take medicine, take psychiatric therapy or pray? With no agreement on such epistemological boundaries, it seems we have slipped into a sub-form of relativism where we must decide the boundary ourselves. McGrath acknowledges that ‘consilience’ is the hardest part of the discussion—that

[w]hat remains stubbornly elusive is their [rationalities] failure to provide means of calibrating their respective reliability or to offer a theoretical framework that allows the settling of boundary disputes.

This sub-relativism held me back from Christianity for years. It is hard to relinquish the control of an overarching view. Yet the voyage through a history of physics with Heisenberg and McGrath does still help navigate the “stormy story sea of reality claims.”

Any assertion that science is the only rational system is a metaphysical claim, not a scientific one and certainly not an obvious or inevitable endpoint of examination of evidence, or at least it isn’t unless you’re someone who has accepted the premises and parameters of the scientism belief system already.

The easiest group for most of us to belong to is a mob.

Mobs do not require one to think. They do not require sacrifice. They do not require vulnerability. They do not require patiently tolerating another person, or seeking to understand the person.

They simply require one to act—and to act in the same way that everyone else is acting.

Most of that has always been true, of course. Mobs have always been with us. And the best amongst us have always feared them. But the technological tools available to us now make us uniquely vulnerable to these problems. And if you, like me, think that mob behavior is both dangerous to our neighbors and demeaning to the individual members of the mob, that should concern you.

Mobs and Digital Technology

Why are we more prone to mob behavior today? There are several reasons.

First, digital technology makes it very easy to self-isolate. The public places we once gathered, which were weakened by the rise of television, have been further harmed by the rise of smartphones, video streaming, meal delivery apps, and much else besides. In many places it is harder, now, to find third places to gather with others—places neither residential nor commercial, but purely social. Additionally, as has been happening for decades now, voluntarily societies and group memberships of various sorts, including church attendance, are in decline. Our front porches are empty, our coffeeshops close early and the rotary clubs and bowling leagues are dwindling in numbers.

In short, the groups we once belonged to outside of our home and our employer are harder for many to access, for a variety of reasons.

At the same time that face-to-face community has become more complicated and challenging, online communities have arisen to fill that void. And so we now find many disembodied communities of a sort online–Facebook groups, group chats, communities gathered around podcasts or blogs, and so on. The profound limitation with these groups is that they are disembodied. What that means is these groups are not bound by the same rules and practices that embodied groups share. We cannot read each other's body language online, nor can we hear voice intonation or simply notice that a person looked especially stressed when they first walked in the room. All of that is invisible to us online.

In fact, it's worse than that: It's not just that those non-verbal signs are invisible to us online. It's also that the kinds of responses we offer to those signs are discouraged online: You don't stand out in an online community by being patient, generous, or kind. You stand out online by being extreme, the most devoted, the most radical, etc. When we opt out of our in-person communities and turn more and more to online communities, we are being formed to being less thoughtful and more angry, less patient and more reactive, less generous and more combative.

Most of us don't choose this for ourselves. What happens, rather, is that finding in-person community is difficult and so we turn to online versions as a last resort. But the formation that happens online happens regardless of what your original motivation was for turning to the internet to provide you with a community. And so over time all of us, if we aren't careful, find ourselves schooled in the habits and thoughts of the mob, rather than those proper to a human person committed to the love of neighbor.

If you desire something better for yourself, then there is an obvious problem here: If the devices we spend so much of our lives absorbed in are shaping us to be angry, reactive, and combative, and if the communities that would help shape us in better ways are scarce, what can be done?

Reading as a School of Friendship

We started by talking about mobs. Let's now turn to friendship.

Friendship as a form of community is almost entirely opposite to the mob. Mobs do not think or understand; they simply act. But in friendship we learn, through patient observation and conversation, to recognize another person, to understand them, even in some sense to think their thoughts after them. We learn to enjoy shared goods together, and to see the things that delight us in new ways precisely because our friend has taught us how. We sometimes say, "Oh, I wish so-and-so were here to see this," precisely because we know they would love whatever it is we're seeing. In friendship, we learn what it means to be human in a deeper way, what it means to share our life and our mind with another.

I want to suggest that the reading of books gives us a way to practice a version of friendship, one that doesn't perfectly mimic in-person friendship, but that offers the best version of friendship one can find, apart from the possibility of a face-to-face conversation. There are many reasons for this. I'll briefly list three.

First, a great deal of friendship is about attention. It's about attending to the thing you share with your friend that brought you together, delighting in whatever that thing is, be it a game, music, cooking, or something else. But it's also about attending to your friend directly—being aware of what other things they enjoy, what might be happening in their life, and so on. If you don't pay attention to anything, you will find it very hard to form and maintain friendships. Taking the time to closely read a book or even an essay, short story, or poem is a school for learning to pay attention. It is also a good school for learning to handle complexity without feeling anxious or threatened and to sit patiently as a story or argument builds. These are all qualities we need in order to grow and mature in our capacity for friendship.

Second, the reading of books opens up the possibility of a form of friendship stretched over space or even time. When you read, you are encountering the ideas, thoughts, and stories of a person who almost certainly lives far from you. If you read enough of the person, they almost become a kind of mental companion to you—and you carry them about with you, even if they live far away. Not only that, but in some cases that person you first encounter in writing might one day become a friend. My own career began with a chance email sent to Mere Orthodoxy founder Matt Anderson in 2009 while I was still in college. I had read an essay of his and wanted to understand his argument better. On a whim, I sent him an email. He replied. 17 years later... here I am.

But reading doesn't just open up friendships across space; it opens up friendships across time. It is not friendship in the truest sense, but certainly I feel as if some of the writers I know best have become friends of a sort to me, friends separated by time. Indeed, some of these friends are people I once knew in the flesh, but who have since gone to their rest. The friendship we once had face-to-face is now a friendship that exists across time, experienced by me through reading, not conversation. It will not always be so. But until that day when faith is sight and the dead rise incorruptible, I am grateful that reading allows me to reach across the years and meet new friends and renew old friendships.

Lastly, friendships often develop around some third thing that the two friends enjoy together. We've hopefully all had the experience that C. S. Lewis wrote of so well when he spoke of how a friendship begins when we say, "you too? But I thought I was the only one..." It follows, then, that as we cultivate a love for more things, we develop a capacity to form new friendships, for there are more things that we love and which we might share with another.

One of the easiest, cheapest, and best ways to cultivate new interests, loves, and affections is reading. Even earlier today, I took my boys to the public library and while they browsed the kids section, I scanned some of the other shelves and came across a book on the friendship between the US president Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that I'm looking forward to reading. And, who can say, perhaps in deepening my understanding of that friendship, I might find new friends of my own in the years to come.

How might churches develop a culture of reading?

The simplest way to develop culture is to simply begin doing the things you want to see normalized and practiced more broadly. So, begin by reading for yourself. But it needn't stop there.

Churches can build their own libraries to be used by members and to help introduce their congregants to the devotional, biblical, and theological riches of the Christian tradition. They can also encourage starting reading groups, either to go through great devotional or theological classics of the faith or simply to read great novels, short stories, or poetry together.

The key thing is that healthy reading cultures begin not with anxiety or antagonism, but with a sense of joy and delight over the world. Our world is cursed and, therefore, quite imperfect and frequently painful. And yet even so it is worth loving. And we can learn how and what to love in it better through the reading of books.

On the face of it, it is strange that Christians who confess their God as the Maker of all things both seen and unseen should balk at the possibility of paranormal occurrences in the world he has made. This is not true across the board, thankfully. But significant numbers of Christians reduce to “delusion” or “fraud” any report of hauntings, strange creatures, or eerie phenomena.

But more than strange, it is not fitting that Christians should deny the reality of the paranormal. Why should we who affirm the reality of angels, of prophecies, Jesus’s virgin birth and resurrection, and the efficacy of the sacraments, dismiss the possibility of ghosts, cryptids, remote viewing, or precognition? If these things are so closely adjacent to religious phenomena then Christians have every reason to interrogate them and ask where they fit within a Christian account of the world.

Religion and the Paranormal

Sociologists of religion have theorized a “bounded affinity” between religion and the paranormal, rooted in how both “share inherent physiological, psychological, and ontological similarities.” It’s an affinity that is so intuitive as to be impenetrably opaque to those who have not seen and felt their common spirit.

Jeffrey Kripal is a prominent scholar whose work focuses on this overlap. His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly, documents strange encounters myriads of experiencers have undergone and invites readers to consider the possibility of things they have been assured are impossible. Though these things are not supposed to take place, they do and always have throughout humankind’s history. What implications might phenomena as pervasive as this hold for us? And what resources might help us to understand these implications?  

“Much of the modern paranormal material,” he writes, “and especially the ufological material, looks a good deal… like what a traditional theologian might call angelology or demonology.” Such encounters are a liminal category bringing obstinately separate discourses and paradigms uncomfortably together. Indeed, as Kripal has posited in an earlier work, the paranormal is “the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers into a parascientific or ‘science mysticism’ register.” The paranormal resists easy categorization by either discourse and shows how the numinous exceeds the ideological limits with which we attempt to constrain it.

Kripal advocates for the experience-source hypothesis, the idea that global religious convictions are rooted in and sourced from events directly experienced by individual subjects and mediated to others. If they are derived from real events then they are more than merely social constructions and channels of power originating in superstition or deception. This hypothesis funds a renewed comparative task, allowing us to “move away from a strict social production thesis and toward a global phenomenology of religious experience.”

Kripal notes how Husserl’s phenomenological method once deeply informed the comparative study of religion. This was fitting, as the study of religion can and should draw upon religious insight and practice, and Kripal finds significant similarities between Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and the method of medieval apophatic theology. The reduction brackets “the ‘naturalist standpoint’ of the sciences and their naive sense-based positivisms about the fact-world.” This approach allows for phenomena to disclose themselves and to be studied in their givenness with all their existential import.

However, contemporary religious studies tend toward historicist approaches that preemptively flatten the possibilities of the phenomenon it studies. It settled instead for cataloguing the features of different belief systems, safely within the bounds of a detached naturalism. This approach protects the subjectivity of the researcher by keeping at bay any of the claims made by the object of their study.

Why do many Christians dismiss the paranormal?

What is peculiar, then, is that many Christians functionally honor those same boundaries, boundaries they otherwise oppose on principle. They do so, it seems, for three main reasons. 

First, some Christians treat accounts of the uncanny and the paranormal as irrelevant, citing Christ’s victory over the powers (Colossians 2:15) as warrant for ignoring them. This approach treats these forces and entities as powerless and therefore as distractions from the tasks of the Christian life. But it risks triumphalism when it celebrates Christ’s victory in such a way that it assumes the existence and activity of these entities are unworthy of acknowledgment. 

Second, it is sometimes asserted that the spread of the gospel in the ancient world unmasked the hoaxes and lies that deceived our predecessors. But this approach is wrong for how it uses some instances in which this was true to comprehensively conclude it was true in each and every case. We bear false witness if we claim the ancient or the medieval world was wracked with superstition and fraud and nothing else. In fact, to make such an assertion is to align oneself with the historical narrative of scientific naturalism. Like the alliance of Pharisees and Sadducees against Jesus, this cooperation between opponents reveals a motive they share that is deeper than the disagreements that distinguish them. 

Piety may motivate these denials from Christians but with that and beneath it is also, likely, a fear. It is likely a fear that such entities are real and maliciously opposed to them. But perhaps there is more lurking beneath that simple surface explanation. What does the strange threaten? This is the question we often do not allow ourselves to ask. 

The deeper fear, undoubtedly, is that such entities destabilize the order they and we take for granted: the assurance that we wield a control over the world and our destinies. Some part of us always knows we do not wield such control, but fallen human beings habitually suppress such knowledge. The denial of the paranormal and the miraculous protects the disbelieving subject from the disruptive implications of the thing denied.

One of the most dangerous positions one can be in is that of presuming they are invulnerable. Devotion to Jesus Christ can be genuine and yet coexist with a presumption of imperviousness. Consider the psalmist who in his prosperity said, “I shall never be moved” (Psalm 30:6). One need not speak those words to live from such a sentiment. Confidence in God is good, but even it must be examined; all things must, as every thing is a fallen thing. What one confesses with their lips as confidence in Christ can be haughtiness cloaked in pious garb. This warning is not only for our others, but for us: “The one who thinks they are standing firm should take heed so as not to fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12).

More than presumption, though, is this not arrogance? An arrogance not unlike that of the scientific naturalist whose stultifying certainty contends the world is nothing more than what is visible, measurable, and manipulatable. This is neither humble nor a just orientation towards the world and its creatures.

For some Christians there is also a fear that to acknowledge these phenomena is to afford them an attention they do not deserve, that endangers our allegiance and worship. But acknowledgment and study is not preoccupation, much less worship. Of course interest can become unhealthy but it isn’t inherently so. One should be cautious but this is necessary for all objects of study as mastery should not be our goal. And in the specific case of the paranormal, faith should seek understanding so as to reckon with the world God has made and to unmask the enemy’s schemes.

Is accepting the paranormal dangerous?

There is, to be sure, a danger in accepting that strange things do occur. Pioneering paranormal researcher John Keel warns that belief is a double-edged sword as some nonhuman entities disastrously manipulate people through it. “The phenomenon is dependent on belief,” Keel observes, “and as more and more people believe in [for example] flying saucers from other planets, [these things] can manipulate more people through false illumination.” 

Keel names the process by which contactees undergo shifts in self-understanding and their orientation to the world “false illumination.” It is a process like conversion, refashioning the contactee in a new subjectivity. However, the entities responsible seem to enjoy disgracing and shattering the subjects of their illumination. Keel documents how false illumination ruins lives as contactees are supplied with esoteric information or with predictions that come to pass for a season, but are eventually abandoned to ridicule and ignominy when obsession or bogus predictions isolates them or destroys their credibility.

Conventional wisdom imagines three options available with regard to the paranormal. 

• Deny the reality of these phenomena
• Acknowledge their reality and live in perpetual fear of them
• Acknowledge them and order our lives around their veneration. 

The easier option to take with regard to these phenomena is ignoring them. But convenience is rarely an indicator of the best course to take. If we are Christians worship is categorically ruled out, but so is servile fear. The irony is that if we treat acknowledgment as tantamount to serving and revering these entities then we are already living in such a way that we are dominated by fear.

We should not live in constant terror but we are unwise to pretend they are powerless against us. We have not arrived at eschatological fullness and so we are still liable to harm. That harm, however, is limited, as entities that are hostile to God can only tyrannize us to the extent we permit them to do so.

Acknowledging the Paranormal in an Apocalyptic Key

Another alternative, however, is possible: acknowledgement in an apocalyptic key, acknowledgment that is disciplined by the gospel. This opens onto an activity of critical sifting by which Christians commit themselves to a phenomenology of encounter but not to an ontology of the things encountered. 

Scripture enjoins exactly this: ”Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). We are not to deny the reality of non-human entities but are to critically examine them. Christians can adopt a dialectical response patterned after God’s posture towards fallen humanity. God affirms humanity as his creature, as his image bearer, and as his covenant partner. But he denies humanity’s bid for divinity, for self-definition, and for autonomy. God says both “No” and “Yes” to Adam’s race and never less than both.

Analogously, Christians can affirm the reality of strange and uncanny phenomena without divinizing them or according them a status similar to God. Acknowledgment is part of our task, not belief. Acknowledgment is not belief in the sense of faith in or fidelity to something: it simply attests that a thing is. In fact, a Christian response to the paranormal should caution against giving such entities our belief. To grant them belief is to grant them power over us. “Theological exorcism,” Karl Barth wrote in Church Dogmatics, “must be an act of unbelief which is grounded in faith.” Faith in Jesus Christ, the apocalyptic emancipator of Adam’s race, grounds the only substantive freedom that can be had.

An entity that positions itself as an interpreter of reality but denies the Son of God assumed flesh or that he was raised from the dead does not speak as a commissioned messenger of God’s grace. It may speak true things, as when the demon-oppressed man in the synagogue at Capernaum identified Jesus as “the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:21-28; Luke 4:31-37), but it doesn’t speak on God’s behalf. It cannot but disclose some aspect of reality but it does not in itself mediate God’s character or salvation.

Even so, God may use even such an entity as this to demonstrate his power or to dissuade someone from a path they were considering. Or he may permit an individual to take up a life of obsession with or servitude to these things to lead them to repentance and deliver them from their bondage to these counterfeit gods (Galatians 4:8).

But not all that is strange or uncanny is a minion of the Enemy. Though there is validity to this concern it is a foregone conclusion to assume this is so in all cases. Consider how nearly every angelic encounter recorded in Scripture inspires such terror that the visitant must assure the witness, “Be not afraid.” The bizarre creatures witnessed by Ezekiel may seem grotesque or monstrous but they accompanied God’s speech to the prophet. Who can guarantee God would not dispatch a Sasquatch or a sylph to do his bidding, either?

We do not have to preemptively interpret and force phenomena into preconceived categories such as “angelic” or “demonic.” Instead we can weigh and judge eyewitness accounts on the basis of what actually transpired and how it accords with the witness of Scripture. The Pauline concept of powers and principalities usefully broadens Christian vocabulary and imagination in just such a way. It forces recognition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in conventional Christian theologies: some for good, some for evil, and some, like us, that fall between the two. 

Keel and other researchers such as Jacques Vallee have drawn attention to the similarities between the bizarre behaviors of UFOs and other strange phenomena in the modern era and fairies, goblins, and other preternatural creatures of the past. As a result they decided upon something like the experience-source hypothesis. Rather than fitting the data into a Procrustean bed of extraterrestrial or uncatalogued animal theories they attended to the details of the encounters themselves. They asserted the accounts of thousands of eyewitnesses testified to the reality of something much stranger and much older. Their conclusion was that the same strange things that have always haunted our world are still here, still carrying out their inscrutable purposes. 

Keel notes that these beings have always been accompanied by “explanatory manifestations” and that “these manifestations have always been adjusted to the psychology and beliefs of each particular period in time.” This is important to bear in mind because the paranormal encompasses an immense field of phenomena, much of it so strange, in fact, that researchers in some of its subdomains (such as Bigfoot and UFOs) routinely downplay the ghostly or magical aspects of their subjects. There is an outlandishness to such accounts that threatens the potential respectability of their study as scientific endeavors. This is why so many eyewitness accounts are ignored or suppressed as researchers construct “plausible” narratives and paradigms from miniscule data sets that fit their preconceived notions. 

This shows how ideologically captured by scientific naturalism even investigators of strange phenomena commonly are. Their notions of what is impossible have not been sufficiently strained to accept the strangest instances. The average person would probably never guess that UFOs habitually behave more like specters than spacecraft, or that some Sasquatches and gray aliens can be repelled at the invocation of Jesus’s name. On the other hand, some apparitions of the dead have helped to convict murderers and others have persuaded surviving unbelieving friends or family to believe the gospel. This means that no single predetermined judgment is adequate for understanding the anomalous or knowing how to respond to it when it occurs.

Reenchantment Is Not Intrinsically Christian

It is important that we reckon with these phenomena because whether they are increasing or not, they are becoming more mainstream. The question that many residents of the modern period want to ask is, “What is really possible?” The human heart desires the world to be more mysterious and more profound than the reductive stories they have had inculcated to them their entire lives. People are weary of a world and of plausibility structures that diminish wonder and meaning. They are starved in their souls and will inevitably seek sustenance for them. 

Re-enchantment will be enticing for the dissatisfied but enchantment doesn’t carry an intrinsically Christian valence. Mystery and wonder are good but they can be misleading if they do not direct the individual to Jesus Christ. Some people seeking mystery and wonder will be curiously trying doors that open onto horrific things. Others will receive entities that perceive and take advantage of their half-formed invitation. False illumination will follow naive dabbling in the paranormal precisely because these individuals have little to no formation and, lacking this, will become subject to the entities they encounter. 

Many are coming to see that what they had presumed to be impossible does in fact occur in our world. And there are many evangelists ready to shape their reception of the impossible: new stories and new gospels will interpret these experiences to the detriment of those that are persuaded by them. 

And they will need guidance as they undergo what is known as ontological shock. This phraseology, fascinatingly, was first used by Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology to describe the effects of encountering the ground of all being. In recent years the term has been appropriated from its theological origins to name the radical dislocation one experiences following a paranormal encounter. This dislocation is rooted in the discovery that the world is not what the experiencing subject was assured it was. The encounter shatters the constraints and the presuppositions of the subject’s worldview. It is often traumatic because the subject undergoes deep suffering as they are forced to reckon with something that is “simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.”

This shock closely corresponds to another kind of upheaval, one that, fittingly, returns to the domain of Christian theology. This upheaval is not only depicted in Scripture but informs its witness in both form and substance. For New Testament apocalyptic also drastically reconfigures the experiencer’s presuppositions of what is and what is possible. But it is sourced in the eschatological activity of the Son’s and the Holy Spirit’s missions, in the life of the age to come that arrives and invades the present evil age (Galatians 1:4). 

Life and new creation interrupt the “normal” operations of the world in its occupation by and thralldom under powers hostile to God and to his creatures. Apocalyptic, at its root, is the consistent application of eschatology to the present conditions of the world. The resurrection of Jesus Christ contests those conditions and irrevocably changes them for those who encounter Christ in the power of the Spirit. The upheaval it unleashes shatters and reconstitutes the subject for whom an entirely new world has just dawned.

A realist objector may say that there is only one world and in an important sense this is true. But its objectivity doesn’t guarantee its reception by any knowing subject. Human beings habitually resist and deny reality though they are only ever in its midst. Scripture itself testifies that a thing can be so but for the hard-hearted it is impossible to see and more importantly, impossible to align oneself with (John 9:39-41, Romans 1:18-23). Jesus could perform miraculous signs before his opponents’ very eyes and those signs could go unrecognized as good works of God. Hardheartedness will not submit its preconceptions to God’s activity and sees only the work of demons (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15; John 7:20, 10:20).  

The idea of the apocalyptic names the truth that the world can be what it is and nevertheless not be recognized as what it is. Revelation—unveiling—is necessary because the truth of the world and of themselves is not translucent to fallen human beings. Revelation, properly understood, is disclosure: not simply of propositions and prophecies but the unforeseeable and uncontrollable unveiling of the reality of God, his character and his purpose, manifested in the flesh of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. 

With its emphasis upon disruption and upheaval, the apocalyptic threatens the presumption of stability and mastery we in our fallenness so prize. The mood of New Testament apocalyptic literature is urgent and distrustful of appearances because it sees through the illusions we, in our fallenness, have become habituated to. It sets in motion a fervent drive to announce the astonishing news that conventional reality has been unmasked and overturned in the wake of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension. 

The theological importance of continuity across salvation history is no simple defeater of the profound disruption that is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Even with regard to the paranormal, sometimes what is particularly frightening to eyewitnesses is how the creature they encountered and the strange behavior it exhibited showed itself in a world in which the everyday laws we take for granted held true in every other regard. 

The continuity of important features of the world’s operation or of redemptive history does not negate the unique and unusual things that determine the world or history in their actuality. The guarantor of continuity is God, not any ability or feature of human beings in general or of the covenant community in particular, but the gracious superintendence of a God whose character always remains the same. Upheaval is not so much the secret heart of reality as it is a consequence of an upside down world being turned right once more.

Ontological shock, whether in a paranormal or a theological key, means that the world we had presumed and the security we had relied upon are delusions. And because it is intrinsic to the Christian tradition and the encounter in which fallen human beings become subjects of discipleship, we can sympathetically receive those who have encountered things that burst the limits of our culture’s plausibility structures and pastorally guide them into the truth beyond the rupture they have experienced.

In an important sense this is no new undertaking. Christian witness has always been tasked with framing the world’s possibilities within a larger account than the world has believed about itself in any of its local variations. Now it must recognize stranger possibilities, as it has before, and situate them within an unlikely but beautiful story of homecoming, a story that confirms the reality of the strange things more and more people are encountering but further confirms their place in the economy of God’s works.

If an austere worldview, in screening out the possibility of the weird and the eerie, discourages those that have experienced such phenomena from embracing Christ and joining themselves to his body then that worldview fails to love. It clings, instead, to a safe comfortability it prizes more than its witness to the truth or compassion for the confused and afflicted.

This means the problem is more than just an intellectual one. For worldviews and paradigms and ideologies are always more than ways of seeing the world. They are modes of belonging, postures by which we position ourselves relative to ourselves, to others, to creatures, to place, and to God. Worldviews and ideologies admit certain features of reality and screens out others.and they do so because they are orientations towards the world and its Maker. It is always the heart that determines what we will see and what loves and fears we will justify.

What does your theology allow you to see? What does it allow you to expect? And how does it aid you in understanding events in your world as belonging to the economy of God’s purposes or striving against it? Does it allow you to recognize the mundane as pregnant with significance? Does it allow you to acknowledge the unusual and see it as governed by God all the same? Is there not a wonder that we allow ourselves to be robbed of when we dismiss these phenomena?

If not, then does your theology truly comport with the world? Or does it quarantine you from its unsettling fullness? If in our ontology and our moral imaginations there is no room for the eerie and the otherworldly; if we appropriate the promise of Romans 8 that nothing can separate us from the love of God and assure ourselves nothing can undo us or upset the lives we have built, then we live presumptuously. And if we shrink from our dimly understood fears we will not have the awareness or the fortitude to confront the darkness.

There is evangelistic opportunity in the recognition that these phenomena genuinely take place as Christians can guide contactees and the curious to the Maker of all things. Importantly, however, we can do so in a way that reckons seriously with the disruptions these individuals have undergone and accord them the dignity of acknowledging the reality of what they have encountered.

Again, acknowledging the phenomenology of the encounter doesn’t thereby commit us to the interpretation suggested by the encounter or offered by these entities or the subcultures that form around them. With this approach Christians can combat the false illumination some of these beings aim to engender in those to whom they reveal themselves. 

And we ought to do this. We are sent into the world by Jesus Christ as he was sent by his Father (John 20:21). Christ always remains distinct from us but if we love him and are united to him, then we share in his mission. By this means we can simultaneously witness to the depth and mystery of the world and witness against the inhuman actants that would degrade and destroy our fellow image-bearers. 

The question is, will we do so? Will we forgo the illusion of mastery to serve our seeking and ontologically shocked neighbors? Or will we cling to an image of our world that will, sooner or later, apocalyptically unravel?

“What will happen to the body?” I asked. 

“Oh, it will go out with the medical waste, it won’t be recognizable as a body,” said the doctor. “Do you have any other questions?”

“Oh. Uh.” I looked down at my note pad and studied a short list of questions. I felt silly for asking this one, maybe I had a more serious question on there, one he wouldn’t dismiss so easily. 

I muddled my way through the rest of the appointment and then stopped at the desk to schedule my D&C for two days later. 

It was only Wednesday, but that week already had felt like eternity since the appointment on Monday when we learned our baby’s heartbeat had stopped. No matter what I did that week to process the grief, I felt like a walking tomb. It wasn’t until the D&C was over that I rested—the morning sickness stopped, the waiting stopped, the finality brought peace. 

But the weight of death lingered. 

Now, twelve years, two more miscarriages, and two live births later it is not the D&C I regret; it is my own shame at that single question that haunts me. This was the most important question I asked all week, or maybe ever: what will happen to my baby’s body?

What will happen to my baby’s body?

We never had the opportunity to dignify our miscarried babies through a Christian burial. We did what we could through private memorials, intentional prayers, and symbolic remembrances to mark their lives with solemn honor. We celebrated their entry into eternity with the Father, and we rested in their union with the Son. But we never got to lay them to rest. This will remain a grief for as long as I live—not a guilt, not a shame—but a grief. 

I hope strongly and securely for eternity and the promises of the world to come. There will be no death in heaven and therefore no need for burial. Additionally, one’s entry into heaven is not dependent on proper burial. All who mourn must remember that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor power, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, Romans 8:38-39. 

Yet my inability to bury my babies and to honor their bodies properly is a loss and one that I still grieve, even with my hope of heaven. 

As the Feast of All Souls (November 2) approaches I am grateful for the time to think of my dead and this year my ponderings have led to a new question: 

What remains of the remains?

We must not look away from the dead. Nor should we simply look back to their lives, forgetting their death. It is good and right to remember with joy the moments of happiness or love. But our dead are not simply “missing” or away—they have died and how we treat their bodies in death reflects much on how we value bodies as image bearers in this life. 

So what remains of our remains? 

Even as death rituals shift culturally we are all familiar with a common progression. Following death bodily remains are mourned communally and then placed in the ground peacefully and intentionally. My family and I did not have the opportunity to process our grief through the communal funeral ritual. The carefully articulated rite guides loved ones through grief, points our gaze toward heaven, and reminds us that there is quite literally life after death - both in the eternity - but also at the potluck following the committal of the body. There has been death, yet life continues. Funerals serve the living in many ways. 

This rite is intended to surround the actual remains of the deceased. We accompany our dead to the grave in love, care, intention, and seriousness. We do not simply throw them out with the medical waste. This process cannot be replicated without the body of the dead present. While it might be necessary in certain circumstances, the lack of body at a memorial service or the lack of a memorial service at a burial is something to be grieved. 

The funeral rituals and the presence of the dead must go together. Divorced from each other, it serves neither the dead or the living. 

Without this ritual I found my body stuck, my thoughts a little confused, and ultimately I was quite lonely. Instead of receiving hugs amidst tears and funeral potatoes, people tiptoed around me—not sure if they should offer condolences—no place to put the sadness. A great cloud of grief simply hung above me, and I wasn’t sure if anyone cared. 

Twelve years later, I still mourn that my babies have no earthly resting place. I know their souls no longer live in their bodies. I know that one day their bodies will be resurrected, and my ensouled children will sing into eternity. I know they are cherished beings that carry the image of God. But it is precisely because I know this, I grieve. 

Most simply there is no ground for me to return to or for others to find. It would be too easy for my life to move on in the business of motherhood and midlife matters. To find myself distracted. There is no physical ground that holds their bodies that might stop me or pull me back. While they are deeply written into my body and my heart, I too am fickle. Their names are not etched in stone—risking that I might start to see something ephemeral about their being. Too often for us to ignore, scripture includes the rolls of the dead called among the people. These recitations are not long and boring - they are evidence that God’s people are not ephemeral, and that we must not forget. And not only must we remember, there is something crucial about laying the body to rest as we see Abraham buy a field from the Hittites so that he might bury Sarah. 

So how is it we remember one another? One of my rather macabre hobbies, I’ll admit, is walking historic cemeteries. Shortly after the miscarriage of our second baby, my husband and I spent a long weekend in Salem, Massachusetts. Amidst the visits to wonderful restaurants, churches, museums, and historic buildings we also stopped to walk the cemeteries. There, over 300 years later, I stopped at the graveside of many children and babies and had the opportunity to honor them and their grieving mothers, even if briefly.

And now years later I am blessed with a happy thought that I can’t help but imagine. Perhaps one day, in heaven, those prayers I said then will bear an effect I had not even imagined until now: there will be a moment when we all meet. Not just the whole host of heaven, but me and the women over whose bones I prayed. I will join the young puritan mother with all of her children in her lap and me, carrying my many children in my arms and we will weep no more. Instead we will sing together to the Glory of our risen Lord, knit together by the prayers of my heart on that cool October day standing at their graveside. 

So what remains of our remains? 

As I think of the young puritan mothers burying many of their children in the new world, I am struck by how different our lives might be; even if we might embrace each other with knowing hearts one day in heaven. For most of human history parents have not had the opportunity to bury their miscarried babies. It is only recent science that lets us see inside the womb, to watch the flicker of life on the screen, to see the baby grow carefully, and to identify the body at its earliest stages of development. 

This science gives us evidence that our miscarried babies existed, and therefore they must be counted among the dead. They are ensouled creatures and counted by God. Their life is a gift and through scientific advancements we have the opportunity to look at the earliest moments of that divine spark. 

Our remains might only be a vessel that once held that spark—now empty as we all wait for the return of Christ. But that vessel, knit carefully by the creator, was the vessel through which he chose to place his image for all. And for the redeemed, it is where Christ comes to dwell - the vessel serves as a temple of flesh.

It is obvious that this story isn’t over yet. Despite the holy presence of our Lord, we must still suffer death. But that does not undo our place in the redemption story. While our bodies turn to dust, they are not trash to be forgotten. Our bodies serve as artifacts that tell the story of a living God, an animate spirit, and a present Christ. And as artifacts they point to the new body promised in the new heavens and new earth. 

What remains of our remains might be the whole story of the universe from Genesis to Revelation. We do not bury our remains out of humanist pride, no, our death itself is evidence of our curse, our limitations, and our very distinction from God. Our remains tell of failure - like the ruins of an ancient city. What remains of our remains is not human centric, but God honoring. It is in this vessel he put his image and it is for that purpose we should bury our dead. 

God will redeem my grief when I hold my babies in my arms. But today I honor their bodies with the grief I carry inside of me that they have no resting place on this side of heaven. This is not done in shame nor is it an attempt to heap on myself unnecessary guilt. Instead it is held as an honest testament and act of love for myself as a young mother grieving my first pregnancy that day in the doctor’s office. I must see my tender heart and honor those needs when I simply asked: “what will happen to my baby’s body?” This grief I carry today gives myself and my baby the dignity that the doctor did not. 

Perhaps I have asked the wrong question. It is not what remains of our remains that demands we treat our dead with dignity, but precisely what has departed and what is to come.

It has become commonplace for conservatives and libertarians to characterize the New Deal as socialist. Indeed, it was one of the core contentions of the post-WWII conservative movement that the New Deal represented part of a fundamental shift in the American political and economic order, away from the free enterprise system. This skewed and often alarmist interpretation of the New Deal actually originated in criticisms of FDR that surfaced as early as his first presidential term. 

For example, the American Liberty League was created in 1934 by wealthy industrialists (including several members of the DuPont family) and a few disgruntled Democrats (indeed, former President Herbert Hoover declined to join the League because of the prominent role of certain Democrats). The League spent an enormous amount of money (at least one million dollars) on an extensive anti-New Deal campaign. It published dozens of pamphlets that characterized the New Deal as part of a nefarious plot to introduce a kind of anti-capitalist collectivism in America—though sometimes the League’s authors seemed uncertain as to whether FDR was a communist or a fascist.  

For instance, the Liberty League denounced the Agricultural Adjustment Act for reflecting a “trend toward Fascist control of agriculture.” Disgruntled Democrat and League supporter John W. Davis predicted that the role of Congress under Roosevelt would become “little more than that of the present Congress of Soviets, the Reichstag of Germany or the Italian Parliament.”

Most academic historians today, however, don’t concur with this alarmist and partisan interpretation of the New Deal. As one recent anthology puts it, “Few historians accept the view that the New Deal was socialistic either in its goals or its results.” Don’t misunderstand me here –many historians are indeed critical of the New Deal, but they don’t view it as truly radical, or as an attempt to implement socialist ideas in a systematic way.

This essay seeks to answer five basic questions: 1) How should one define socialism?  2) What were FDR’s political and economic views?  3) Were FDR’s advisers (the famed Brain Trust) socialists?  4) Were the chief policies of the New Deal socialist in any meaningful sense?   5) How did some on the bona fide ideological Left evaluate the New Deal?  

***

1) The socialist label can be an effective weapon in partisan polemics, but scholars usually endeavor to employ the term with more precision and care. The Oxford Learner's Dictionary, for instance, defines socialism as "a set of political and economic theories based on the belief that everyone has an equal right to a share of a country’s wealth and that the government should own and control the main industries." Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster explains it as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” Only by embracing an ahistorical and simplistic approach that sees anything that isn’t thoroughly laissez-faire capitalism as “socialistic” can one press FDR’s policies into a socialist pigeon hole.  Nevertheless, for reasons mostly ideological and partisan, many conservatives since the 1930s have unfortunately embraced this sort of either/or binary thinking.

2) As for FDR’s personal ideological orientation, his economic views were notoriously unsystematic and ill-defined. The economic principles he expressed publicly actually sounded pretty conservative. Both as governor of New York and as president, Roosevelt was usually a fiscal conservative and often expressed concerns about big deficits. Roosevelt scholar Frank Friedel describes FDR as always “a staunch believer in a balanced budget.” During the 1932 presidential campaign, Roosevelt often attacked Hoover for reckless spending. Moreover, prior to the late 1930s, President Roosevelt sought to cut federal spending. Several historians have noted his failure to grasp Keynesian theory that the federal government should spend money to prime the pump to promote economic growth and employment. Overall, FDR seemed more committed to saving the existing political and economic order (with some tinkering) rather than adopting a radical alternative. On more than one occasion, FDR spoke of his efforts "to save our system, the capitalist system," while dismissing the "crackpot ideas" of "radicals" on the Left.  

3) Moreover, Roosevelt’s celebrated Brain Trust included Raymond Moley who actually favored a flat tax and who later became a strong critic of the New Deal. Another FDR associate, Hugh Johnson, attacked what he saw as Hoover’s reckless spending and long advocated a conservative fiscal policy. Columbia University professor Adolph A. Berle, Jr. rejected the concept of a planned economy, though he did favor a greater role for the federal government. Some Roosevelt advisers (such as Rexford Tugwell) were indeed fond of national economic planning, but they were far from the majority and exercised limited influence, mostly after 1936.  

4) The actual policies that comprised the New Deal proved mostly unsuccessful in ending the Great Depression (they were especially ineffective in lowering the unemployment rate), and most of them didn’t reflect socialist ideas or models. The Emergency Banking Act of 1933 closed many banks temporarily to calm panicked depositors but, notably, the President resisted nationalizing the banking system, despite calls from many quarters to do so. Strikingly, these banking measures had actually been drafted by Treasury officials in the Hoover administration!  The Securities Act of 1933 was a moderate reform that enjoyed substantial support from big business. Through the ill-fated National Recovery Administration (NRA), the federal government attempted to act as a kind of honest broker between business owners and labor but it mostly benefited large corporations. The heads of several large corporations actually defended the NRA publicly before the Supreme Court ruled one of its key provisions unconstitutional in 1935. 

The Social Security Act of 1935 was a very modest old-age pension scheme that contrasted dramatically with ambitious government pension systems in Western Europe. SSA was, after all, financed by a regressive payroll tax on employees. This sort of tax normally hits the poor especially hard.  As Ronald Radosh wrote in 1972: “Social Security may have been a symbolic measure of the new Welfare State. But, to the corporate liberals in the governing class, it served as the type of legislation that eased tension, created stability, and prevented or broke any movements for radical structural change. Hence, it served an essentially conservative purpose because it helped maintain the existing system of production and distribution.” Nor were New Deal programs successful at lowering unemployment—which remained unusually high as late as 1940 and was finally reduced only by America’s participation in World War II.

Presumably, a socialist or socialist-leaning government would have been very interested in redistributing incomes to correct a maldistribution that had long favored the top earners.  As Norman Thomas (the Socialist Party’s perennial presidential candidate) declared in 1934:  redistribution represented “the essential feature of any immediate program for Socialism.” The New Deal, however, does not appear to have achieved any significant redistribution.  Distinguished economic historian Douglas C. North studied this question and concluded that FDR’s programs did not significantly alter income distribution; indeed, it does not appear to have even been a clearly targeted administrative goal. 

FDR and most of his advisors seemed uninterested in tax policies of any kind. Neither did the New Deal’s pro-organized labor policies improve incomes in the lowest brackets. The share of income earned by the very top bracket did decrease slightly between 1933 and 1939 but that was mostly the product of the Depression itself; North concludes, “the significant decline in inequality” came instead during “the war years.” The welfare payments that some conservatives love to hate were never during the 1930s, in fact, large enough to produce a significant shift of income from high to low brackets. As North explains: “It is not at all clear that the New Deal measures provided any significant redistribution of income. The really significant fall [in income inequality] is clearly related to the high progressive tax rates imposed during World War II.”

5) Moreover, one might have thought that committed socialists would have supported the New Deal. Many did not. Instead, bona fide socialists such as Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas were often very sharp critics of the New Deal. Thomas was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers and was ordained in the northern Presbyterian Church shortly after graduating from Princeton in 1905. His pastoral ministry in New York convinced Thomas of the need for social reform. Although sympathetic to FDR’s concerns, Thomas wrote a book eviscerating New Deal policies and once famously quipped that FDR was "trying to treat tuberculosis with a cough drop.” Thomas’s assessment of the New Deal was consistently pointed and dismissive.  A few humorous examples may suffice here: 

“Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher.”

“…there is nothing Socialist about trying to regulate or reform Wall Street. Socialism wants to abolish the system of which Wall Street is an appropriate expression.” 

“There is no socialism at all about taking over all the banks which fell in Uncle Sam's lap, putting them on their feet again, and turning them back to the bankers to see if they can bring them once more to ruin.” 

***

To conclude, a dispassionate assessment of the New Deal does not support the extreme characterizations of conservative editorialists and talk radio polemics. Indeed, many of Roosevelt’s goals can actually be described as conservative—in that he sought to conserve key features of the American economic order through some regulatory tinkering and the introduction of several modest reforms. As Stanford University’s Barton Bernstein argued back in the 1960s: 

Though vigorous in rhetoric and experimental in tone, the New Deal was narrow in its goals and wary of bold economic reform. Roosevelt's sense of what was politically desirable was frequently more restricted than others' views of what was possible and necessary… Operating within very safe channels, Roosevelt not only avoided Marxism and the socialization of property, but he also stopped far short of other possibilities… The President and many of his associates were doctrinaires of the center, and their maneuvers in social reform were limited to cautious excursions.

In short, a thoughtful historical assessment of the New Deal confirms that it wasn’t socialist by design or intent. While its failures were significant, it would be more honest and constructive for conservatives to evaluate those problematic policies (such as the National Recovery Administration, ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), rather than simply continuing the sort of polemical and inaccurate name calling that first began back in 1933.

Nathan Fielder and and Lance Oppenheim’s recent documentary/performance art film You Can See Everything is a movie that critics and movie fans will be talking about for years to come. It has already generated Oscar-buzz and plenty of money at the box office. More importantly, it has opened up a cultural conversation around the nature of truth and the feasibility of truly knowing another person.

Without spoiling the brilliant, three-hour, jaw-dropping rollercoaster of a movie, Fielder and Oppenheim expertly muddy the waters on whether or not two human beings can ever really get down to the essence of each other. Even further, the film raises the question of whether we can really ever truly know ourselves. The now infamous trailer of Fielder staring skeptically into the bugged-eyes of fraudster Elizabeth Holmes as she insists on her obviously false innocence has already become a cultural icon. “Of course, I’m not deceiving you.”

I am still wrestling with what a Christian ought to do with such a message. I have watched Fielder since I was in high school and would consider him a uniquely potent commentator who knows our cultural moment with an unrivaled clarity. You Can See Everything feels like his magnum opus where all of the strands of his career come together into one beautiful and maximal statement. In many ways, I applaud his efforts and I recommend you see it. Still, despite Fielder’s clear diagnosis of our particular moment, I am anxious about what this means. 

Through the divine revelation of the Triune God of the Scriptures, self-knowledge is not a muddy stream, but an ever clearer mirror. In the Gospel, God reveals Himself to sinners reliably and clearly, and through this knowledge we also have knowledge of ourselves, both our belovedness and our sinfulness. In God’s light, we can see our wounds and we can see the Spirit slowly and certainly heal them. This certain self-knowledge is something that the post-Christian West seems more and more determined to deny is even possible. Truth is harder and harder to come by. Anthropological norms are ever-shifting. Even something as given as personhood is negotiable. 

Take for instance, as a random example, a recent episode of Amy Poehler’s podcast where she interviews a similarly brilliant comedian/cultural commentator, Kate Berlant (warning: this episode is not suitable for young audiences). Berlant and her frequent collaborator John Early, for those unfamiliar with their work, are the millennial heirs to the Christopher Guest-style of satirical comedy. Like Fielder (and Elizabeth Holmes), you watch them and have no idea when the sincerity begins and they stop being “their character.” Are they always in character? Are they just like this?

In the podcast, Berlant discusses this with Amy in the episode, pointing out that all human existence is a “performance.” According to her, gender is something we perform, sexuality, relationships, even regular awkward interactions on airplanes, it’s all just performance. You can feel Poehler, the podcast crew, and the progressive-leaning audience nodding along to this as they discuss it. Of course, there is something true to this observation. We are all enmeshed in a web of scripts, expectations, and narratives which dictate how we ought to act in any given situation. It can be difficult to make a clear distinction between where our “programming” and our “real self” begins. I think of Neil Peart riffing on William Shakespeare in the song “Limelight”

All the world’s indeed a stage

And we are merely players

Performers and portrayers

Each another’s audience

Outside the gilded cage

However, as I listen to all of this, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of dread. Is this really all we can say about our relationships to one another? That it might be impossible to really know someone? To even know ourselves? Are our lives just a string of performances? I can’t help but think about how a social media centered age might further contribute to this feeling of constantly performing, as Bo Burnham, another comedian/prophet has observed. 

As a Christian, I want to insist that this is not true. Your life is not a series of performances. It is not fake. It is real. Your identity is not just a series of false narratives that other people have imposed upon you and that have now randomly collided together and created your confusing life. Your personhood, your gender, your essence is not fluid. You are created in the image of God. You were made to glorify Him and be holy. You were not made to figure this out one day. You were made to do it today. All the things you have done wrong have been paid for and God offers you a real way to transform now, in this very moment. 

Maybe performance isn’t the worst metaphor, however. Michael Horton and Kevin Vanhoozer have taken up the metaphor with great fruitfulness. Maybe what the world gets wrong is not the imperative to perform, but what the performance ultimately is. As a Christian, I want to say we do indeed have roles and duties, a narrative which comes from outside ourselves that we must follow. But it’s the script of holiness, self-denial, and Christ-like conformity. It is not a fleeting and ultimately unknowable script. It comes to you in the inspired Word of God. 

Biblical theologians have long pointed out the pattern in both the Old and New Testaments of indicative-imperative. God never commands us to do things before He transforms us. Liberation comes before the Decalogue on Sinai. Paul’s letters always begin with a rehearsal of what God has done before he gives the ethical implications. This is the imperative of holiness, the biblical drama. First, your identity is established securely and from outside yourself. Then and only then is your destiny prescribed. In The Christian Faith, Dr. Horton says, “Where most people think that the goal of religion is to get people to become something that they are not, the Scriptures call believers to become more and more what they already are in Christ.” 

The Gospel enables us to remove our cynicism as we stare into the eyes of another or even ourselves, because it reveals that there is a God who searches hearts. The Christian faith offers modern people something we all seem to be crying out for: a final and unchanging performance that we don’t need to search for or be skeptical of. The script is given to you, freely, as a pure gift. In the Gospel, both God and man are named as definitive players with a definitive future. God searches and knows hearts. There is no hiding from Him. He knows you. And you can know Him. And if Someone can truly know you, if Someone can truly see everything, then there is hope for you. You can embrace honesty and integrity. You can embrace stability in your identity. You can stop searching for yourself.

Among the many harrowing admonitions of the Lord Jesus, one statement makes me weak in the knees each time I read it: “I tell you that on the day of judgment people will have to account for every careless word they speak. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Mt 12:36–37, CSB) 

In addition to nearly making me want to cut out my own tongue, those words have challenged me as a young pastor. A few moments of reflection, and careless words I’ve said to, in front of, and about church members and attendees are replaying on the voice memo in my mind. A few more moments of reflection, and I’m recalling careful words I should have spoken, but didn’t—which may be just as harmful.

This summer, during the earliest days of my first pastoral sabbatical, I spent hours thinking and praying about these spoken and unspoken words and what lies behind them. Upon reflection, I’ve become convinced that all our speech, every word uttered, every conversation basically belongs in one of four categories. Of those four, two will particularly shape the trajectory of our lives, for better or worse. And the fear of man—a matter not of mouth but of heart—will trap us in fruitless speech and block us from life-giving speech.

Four Kinds of Speech

Every word we speak can basically be plotted onto at least two axes:

1. Unhelpful—Helpful
2. Easy—Difficult

I take this claim as fairly self-evident. A joke, for example, is helpful insofar as it encourages lightheartedness and good humor; it’s unhelpful insofar as it directs the mind to that which is crass or encourages and normalizes vulgarity. A word to one’s spouse can be helpful (“Thanks for all your hard work today!”) or unhelpful (“Why do you always do that?”). A word to a neighbor may be easy (“Good morning!”) or difficult (“Would you mind turning off the loud music a little earlier next time?”). A word to a church member may be easy (“It’s good to see you this morning!”) or difficult (“I’d like to have a conversation about some of the things you’re posting on social media,”).

From these two plot points flow four kinds of speech:

1. Speech that is difficult and helpful (what I’m calling “life-giving speech”)
2. Speech that is easy and helpful (“kind speech”)
3. Speech that is easy and unhelpful (“fruitless speech”)
4. Speech that is difficult and unhelpful (“unwise speech”)

Let’s consider Quadrant 4 first. This is probably the least common category of conversation: challenging but ultimately unhelpful. I have given and received this kind of speech. Though it is rare, it’s likely to leave a mark. For example, my wife and I were once approached by friends who wanted to have a hard conversation with us. They went about it technically in all the right ways—it took a great deal of courage! But the substance of their concerns were selfish and inconsiderate, and the timing was horribly unwise, resulting in one of the most painful conversations (and series thereof) of our lives, and the eventual loss of a friendship.

Quadrant 2 is the exact opposite: low cost, high reward. Easy but helpful. We should all strive to be people who take every opportunity for this kind of speech. It costs you nothing but a few moments and adequate attention to encourage your child in her piano playing, to call a friend on his birthday, to tell your husband he looks handsome, to thank your pastor for his sermon preparation, to stop and pray with a grieving friend, or to celebrate your wife’s promotion in front of friends. A lifetime of this kind of speech only benefits you and everyone around you.

But as helpful as kind speech is, it’s not the most consequential. Similarly, as painful as unwise speech can be, it’s so rare that it’s unlikely to play a large role in that Judgment Day word recall. Rather, it’s the Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 conversations that set the trajectory and inform the climate of our lives and relationships.

Up and to the Right

The first realization I had through prayerful self-examination early in my sabbatical was that most of the words I regret saying are in the bottom left—easy but unhelpful—while most of the words I regret not saying are in the top right—difficult but helpful. 

Consider the kinds of speech that fall into the “unhelpful” category:

• “Unwholesome talk” (Eph 4:29) and “crude joking” (Eph 5:4) are easy ways to get a laugh, but ultimately neither helpful nor edifying.
• Gossip—prohibited at many points throughout Scripture—can ingratiate you to your listener by scratching the itching ear, giving them the “tea,” or subtly inviting them into the “inner ring,” but it ultimately destroys relationships and reputations.
• Sarcasm, though there is a helpful use for it on occasion, usually tears down people, poisons relational and organizational cultures, and is often just a defense mechanism that allows you for little cost to avoid vulnerable or substantive conversations.

These are the sins of the tongue I regularly fall into. They’re the careless words that I fear to one day give an account for.

Consider, on the other hand, “life-giving” speech:

• Loving correction may temporarily “wound” the hearers, but it is nonetheless “faithful,” because it ultimately helps them grow or heal. (Pr 27:6)
• Discipline of a child or an employee is enjoyable neither for the one receiving it, nor (under healthy circumstances) the one giving it, but it nonetheless is the action of a loving authority figure. (Pr 3:12; Heb 12:6)
• Private confrontation over sin is one of the most nerve-jostling things we can do, but Jesus commands it, and it is a way to “win your brother” and protect integrity of the church. (Mt 5:18; 1 Cor 5:6)

These conversations can be incredibly difficult, and there have been many times as a pastor, friend, husband, father, son, brother, and so on that I have neglected to have them, with the result that issues go unresolved, I grow bitter or jaded, and the other party misses an opportunity to grow.

Out of the Mouth the Heart Speaks

The monumental realization I had during those first days of my sabbatical was that Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 3 are intrinsically connected. The reason I get stuck in unfruitful speech is the same reason I naturally draw back from life-giving speech. Why is it, after all, that I sometimes say things I shouldn’t, and sometimes don’t say things I should? These aren’t two different problems, but two sides of the same problem: fear of man.

Jesus said “the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart.” (Mt 12:34) This is why our words will acquit or condemn us—not because we are saved by works, but because our works are evidence of the state of our hearts, and there is no stronger evidence than our words. This is probably why James says controlling the tongue is a mark of spiritual maturity—not because it is the last rung on the ladder of virtue, but because it is the clearest evidence of our hearts. If we have a habit life-giving speech, as opposed to fruitless speech, it must be because we are “good trees” (Mt 12:33) or “sweet water springs” (Js 3:11).

And what did the fruit of my words reveal about my heart? That it is still in the grip of the fear of man. Indeed, it is my desire for the approval of others—my desire to be “liked,” that thin and fleeting feeling that isn’t worth much at all in the end—that leads me into fruitless talk, and it is my fear of offending others and falling out of their favor which often keeps me from saying to them things I should say, or saying them as clearly, directly, and thoroughly as I know I ought.

To summarize, the habitual presence or absence of fruitless (Quadrant 3) and life-giving (Quadrant 1) speech will in no small way set the trajectory of your life and the climate of your relationships. The fear of man traps you in Quadrant 3, and it blocks you from Quadrant 1. Ironically, then, the idol of man’s approval will in the long run be a cancer to your relationship with others. The desire to be “liked” at all costs will make you the kind of conversationalist who in the end will be loved, appreciated, and respected by almost no one.

Here, then, is the solution. Solomon told us that “the tongue that heals is a tree of life, but a devious tongue breaks the spirit.” (Pr 15:14) If we want to be life-givers rather than spirit-breakers, people who help others and glorify God with our words, and who will not be condemned by our words on the last day, we must let the Lord transform not primarily our tongues, but our hearts. Specifically, we must fear God and not man. We must let his approval and affirmation of us in Christ wash over our hearts, increasing in us affections for him and genuine love for others, rather than the need for their approval.

How will this happen? Through prayer and practice. In prayer, we rehearse, meditate on, and delight in the gospel. God’s Spirit brings home to our hearts God’s real, objective love for us, and our heart gradually detaches from weaker affections and attached to the God who “so loved us that he gave his only Son” for us. (Jn 3:16) Increasingly, we stop needing the approval of others, because we already have God’s approval, which is infinitely sweeter to us, and we start rather desiring their good—and using our words to work for it.

That’s where practice comes in. Armed with prayer and the Spirit, we watch our tongues. We grow slower to speak, and we examine our hearts before we do. We prayerfully rehearse hard conversations beforehand, and we trust the Spirit will give us the words to say in those sweaty-palmed, heart-racing moments. We mess up, then we pray for forgiveness and ask for help again, and try to do better next time. Through a life of prayer and practice, the Lord releases us from the vice grip of the fear of man and releases us into freedom of fruitful, life-giving, God-honoring speech.

The Power of Life and Death

As I write this, I’m looking toward the end of this sabbatical. Among other things, the Lord has worked into my heart a greater awareness of that small instrument which holds “the power of life and death”: the tongue. (Pr 18:21) My prayer upon re-entry is that he would grant me a renewed commitment to words that give life—that through prayer and practice, my words will build up and not tear down. I pray the same will be true for you. 

I first read The Lord of the Rings because the movie was coming out, and if I wanted to see it with my dad, I had to read the book first. Despite the roadblock that is “The Council of Elrond” (if you know, you know), I finished the book in time for opening day, and a lifelong fan was made. 

At face value, the book seems to be the story of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. And in many ways, it is. But at its core, The Lord of the Rings is the story of how ordinary people respond courageously to perilous circumstances in order to preserve all that is good and beautiful in their ordinary, everyday lives. And it’s about the friendships that sustain them through the grimmest moments of their quest. 

While I deeply admire the world building genius of Tolkien, what has kept me coming back to The Lord of the Rings time and again for 25 years is the beauty of the friendships I find in its pages. And maybe that’s because the older I get, the less I’m interested in going on grand adventures, and the more I care about the people who will be by my side when the adventure stops feeling so adventurous. 

We all want to believe that a Samwise Gamgee will stand by our side until the bitter end. But how hopeful do we feel about that being a reality? I would venture to guess, not very hopeful. 

Convenience over Connection

A Pew Research study found that 24% of responders aged 19-29 feel lonely all or most of the time. For those in my age bracket (30-49) the percentage stands at 20%. I don’t have to tell you that we are living through a loneliness epidemic. People are lonely and longing for friendship, yet it has never been easier to retreat from embodied, human connection. We can work from home, order our groceries through an app, and watch church online. Instead of meeting up with a friend, we share reels as we doom scroll in our beds at night. We’ve gained convenience, but lost connection. 

I think of a new mom who doesn’t know why her three-month old has started protesting his morning nap. Instead of calling her mom who successfully raised three kids or her friend who is on baby number four, she asks ChatGPT. She may feel like she is getting a better answer (and sometimes, maybe she is), but what she has missed is a chance for meaningful connection with another human being, the connection that only happens when we are vulnerable enough to ask someone for help. 

When we look through the microscope of our day-to-day lives, these decisions of convenience often make sense. But trust is built over time as we vulnerably offer our presence to others, and receive their presence in return. And if we always make decisions that favor convenience, we will not build the trust that leads to the kind of lasting friendship that will be a grace to us in our darkest hour. 

Self-preservation over Self-sacrifice

A few years ago, The New York Times ran an article about the growing trend of going “no-contact” with family members deemed toxic or abusive, citing the influence of TikTok therapists like Patrick Teahan. While mainstream therapy supports reconciliation except in the most extreme situations of abuse, going no contact has become a hallmark of therapy culture (as noted recently by Kwame Anthony Appiah). 

I think of the young women I mentor who are flooded with reels, encouraging them that the best way to deal with the strained relationship with their mom is to put up higher boundaries that limit contact, or to cut off contact altogether. Even if they don’t take these drastic measures, they cannot help being influenced by the ideas, and neither can we. We are steeped in a therapy culture that talks a lot more about self-care than self-sacrifice, and we would be naive if we didn’t acknowledge the formative influence it has on us. And so, when relationships (whether with a parent, sibling, or friend) get hard, as they inevitably will, our first impulse is often toward self-preservation (putting up higher boundaries) and not self-sacrificial presence and faithfulness. 

In a world that values convenience over connection and talks more about self-care than self-sacrifice, how are Christians called to engage?

I believe we can find a model in Ruth. 

A Model for Faithful Presence

In the opening chapter of the book bearing her name, Ruth’s husband of ten years dies. Now, childless and widowed, her best hope is to return to her father’s house where she will be provided for, and maybe even marry again. She has proven to be a faithful and loving daughter-in-law to Naomi, but now that her husband is dead, she is free to return home. And Naomi, knowing Ruth has no future with her, urges her to make this choice. But Ruth, choosing to stay with Naomi when it would be much easier to go, gives her famous response:

Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you. (Ruth 1:16-17 ESV) 

In staying with Naomi, Ruth compromises any chance she has of a secure future. Will Naomi’s people and God accept her? And if they do, would a man marry a widow who is attached to another widow? Ruth has no idea. 

So, why should we follow Ruth’s example to stay when it’s easier to go? 

First, humans were made to live in relationships with one another, and we lose something fundamental about what it is to be human when we forgo meaningful connection for convenience. And we see evidence of this in the lonely people all around us.

Secondly, disciples of Jesus are called to follow Jesus in his death and resurrection–to die to self and live for him. As Jesus hung on the cross, those who passed by taunted him to “come down from the cross” (Matthew 27:40). But despite their taunts, Jesus stayed. And because he stayed, we can choose self-sacrificial faithfulness over self-preservation. 

But there is one more reason that I want to highlight, one that can be drawn directly from the model of faithfulness found in Ruth. When Ruth makes the decision to stay with Naomi, she has no idea how things will turn out for her. But we do. Ruth will marry Boaz, Naomi’s redeemer, and the story will end with Naomi bouncing a baby on her knee. God uses Ruth and her faithful love to be the providential means of Naomi’s redemption. Because Ruth stays, because she chooses connection and self-sacrifice over convenience and self-preservation, Naomi’s empty and bitter life becomes full once more. 

So, why should we stay when it would be easier to go? Because like Ruth and Naomi, God often uses the relationships in our lives as the providential means of his redemptive purposes.

And so, as Christians, our first impulse should not be to put up higher boundaries or to look for the exit. While there are times when limiting contact with someone may be necessary, especially in situations of abuse, those decisions should be informed by much prayer and the wise counsel of those who know us (and our proclivities) well. Rather, like Ruth, our first impulse should be to stay, believing that as we stay, God will do his redemptive work in and through us. 

It took Tolkien 17 years to write The Lord of the Rings, and in many ways, it was his close friendship with C. S. Lewis that strengthened him to keep going. But sadly, by the time Tolkien published the first installment of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, he and Lewis had drifted apart. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, there is a draft of a letter to his son, Michael, written in 1963. He says:

I am sorry that I have not answered your letters sooner; but Jack Lewis’s death on the 22nd has preoccupied me. It is also involving me in some correspondence, as many people still regard me as one of his intimates. Alas! that ceased to be so some ten years ago.

For the man who wrote one of the greatest epics about faithful and loyal friendship, his lived experience fell far short.

What hope can there be for us? 

I’d love to end by saying, be like Ruth. Stay in relationships when they are inconvenient and require incredible self-sacrifice, because if you do, you will experience the kind of redemption that she did. 

But sometimes, you stay faithful in a marriage and your spouse never changes. 

Or you keep showing up for a friend who is nowhere to be found on the day of your crisis.

Or you stick it out at a church only to wonder ten years later if you should have left sooner. 

Other times, you experience magic. 

Our experience in relationships will always be imperfect. We will get hurt. We will experience betrayal, and we will betray. Even as I write, my ghosts haunt me: friends I’ve lost touch with; pastors I don’t see anymore; loved ones I haven’t spoken to in months. And the temptation is often to move on and put up boundaries, to choose convenience and self-preservation. But when we choose to stay, we give ourselves the opportunity to experience glimpses and foretastes of heaven that we would otherwise only get in fairytales and myths like The Lord of the Rings. 

So stay when it would be easier to go. Choose connection and self-sacrifice over convenience and self-preservation. And as you do, the Holy Spirit will do his work of forming you into a person who hopes against hope that God is at work, both visibly and invisibly, bringing about his redemption, the restoration of his entire creation–even your relationships.

In 2005 David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement speech at Kenyon College called This Is Water. He opened with a parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” 

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Wallace was attacking an uncritical egoism, moving through life with naive certainty; something that happens when we’re unaware of our default assumptions. This self-foregrounding limits our ability to understand others. Since we’re not the only fish in the sea, and we have agency in how we encounter life, Wallace was pleading with his audience to practice epistemic humility.

Wallace was not presuming to be the older fish. Neither am I. But, like the late writer, I’m urging us to notice the water, especially as it relates to evangelicalism and the Great Commission.

The Aquariums We Don’t Realize We’re Swimming In

In Finding Dory, we’re offered a window into what culture is and how to engage it. It’s the tale of Dory, an endearing fish with memory loss. Her mission is locating lost family. She teams up with Hank the octopus, memorably voiced by Ed O’Neill. As a child of the 90s, I can’t help but refer to him as Al Bundy. They end up at a massive SeaWorld-like complex called the Marine Life Institute.

The Institute isn’t one giant tank, it’s made up of a number of crudely interconnected aquariums. In their search, Dory and Hank move from the whale exhibit to a tide pool, and so on. Each setting is its own little world, replete with different ecosystems, from rocky caves to varying temperatures and distinct pH levels. These settings aren’t just for display. They provide the very conditions of life; oxygenated water, food, shelter, and community. The waters are the mediums through which the creatures encounter the world. Which brings out the point of the illustration: basically everything is culture. Often unquestioned, it is the container of our existence, the arena of our mission.

This is not an argument for relativism but a sober acknowledgment that everyone is cultured in one way or another. If my aquarium were ancient paganism and a hurricane tore through the coast, I might think, “Poseidon’s at it again!” But my modern setting, disenchanted and steeped in meteorology, reads the storm differently. Even as we face universal realities like birth and death, we have default modes of thinking and feeling that are tied to unique conceptions of the good life. Without awareness or consent, we’re shaped by our environment. If the tank is polluted, it is usually absorbed. When the water is muddy, it becomes harder to see, especially beyond ourselves.

In a vacuum, we grimace when Christians syncretize the faith. I’ve done it too, even when I should have known better. It’s tricky because we evangelicals typically find ourselves in what James K.A. Smith calls, “homogeneous zones of shared belief.” As such, our ‘normal’–predominantly white churches, conservatism, individualism, being middle class, and nuclear families–can be jarring for outsiders. In fact, many of my non-evangelical and non-white friends don’t see us in theological terms (i.e. Bebbington’s quadrilateral) but sociologically, as a subculture outfitted for a certain type of person. 

This isn’t to say that all aspects of evangelicalism are problematic; statistically we shine in generosity and volunteerism. Theologically, we aspire to submit to Scripture and to be guided by historic Christian teaching. Rather, it’s acknowledging that we are necessarily formed by what we hold in common socially. Since homogeneity naturally creates blind spots and cultural ignorance is a form of self-centeredness, it’s not surprising that those who don’t fit the mold are repelled for non-theological reasons.

What Makes Culture, Culture?

Though culture has been studied with great care by academics, missionaries, policymakers, and marketers, it’s one of those words we still use imprecisely. Imagine an alien lands on Earth, tilts its curious green head, and asks you: “Earthling, what is culture?” What would you say? Is it a place on a map? A collection of vibes? Accents? The (not so) subtle difference between people? The word feminist has the same three syllables everywhere, but it’s usually celebrated on campus and vilified in the manosphere. What about symbols (e.g., stars and bars), or the meanings we assign to colors (e.g., red versus blue?) Or, should colors be spelled ‘colours’?

At a basic level, a dictionary will tell you culture involves the customs, institutions, and achievements of a social group. As for criteria, there are at least five salient elements. 

First, cultures are both material and ideological. Food, clothing, and architecture coexist with non-material realities like values and beliefs. These items sum up to form what Mark Sayers refers to as a “street philosophy”: intuitive assumptions about how the world works and how to live in it. An invisible guide that governs how we think and behave. To advance my argument here, I’ve been socialized to offer logic and allegory. Were I a medieval samurai, I might attack with a sword.

Second, cultures are shared. They are held in common and tacitly agreed upon through collective experiences, customs, practices, and assumptions. Modifiers like “youth” or “Amish” culture are meaningful because they describe a common paradigm. Even as I write this, and you read, we do so from culture. Font and grammar won’t gain traction without a shared reality.

Third, cultures are learned. Even though they feel natural, we acquire them directly through parenting and storytelling, indirectly through observation and inherited norms. We learn how to dress, take turns, whisper in libraries, and what counts as polite or strange. Watching Tom Green order a sandwich illustrates how cringe comedy depends on violating the non-moral expectations we’ve been trained to obey. Sociologists describe this process as socialization: internalizing life scripts that render patterns and values invisible precisely because they seem intuitive and normal.

Fourth, cultures are religious. This doesn’t mean every culture maps neatly onto a formal set of creeds, but that even secular cultures produce architecture for ultimate reality. Cultures assign meaning, draw lines between what’s clean and unclean, and functionally tell us what the world is and what it’s for. It’s no accident that the Latin root of culture is cultus, a term tied to cult worship. In the ancient world, the epicenter of social life was formed around temples and the gods they served. Culture is therefore a liturgical environment that trains our desires and loyalties. Today, such worship might show up in flags, slogans, sports arenas, dream homes, or curated bodies. Though specific expressions vary, the essence of worship remains.

Finally, cultures are taken for granted. People rarely question the culture they belong to, especially those of us who inhabit dominant or mainstream cultures. Assumptions easily go unnoticed because they’re so entrenched. That’s why tourists stick out like a sore thumb and why an odd sandwich order makes us cringe.

Culture in Scripture

English translations of the Bible virtually never use the noun “culture,” but it is saturated with concepts essential to the term: customs, traditions, symbolism, marriage rites, styles of dress, kinship, and practices that relate to honor and shame. Scripture speaks of distinct peoples, clans, languages, and nations. For instance, the ‘table of nations’ in Genesis 10 describes how the descendants of Noah’s sons spread:

“From these descendants, the peoples of the coasts and islands spread out into their lands according to their clans in their nations, each with its own language.” (Gen. 10:5, CSB).

Scripture does not depict humanity as a bland monolith—or worse, as somehow without culture. Rather, we are richly differentiated. That theme carries forward into the Great Commission. When Jesus sent His followers out, He commanded them to make disciples of all nations [ethnē] (Matt. 28:19). Note well: the Greek term ethnē does not refer to political nation-states but complex groupings that exist within and across political borders. 

Jesus’ command to make disciples of all stripes means we aren’t ultimately called to spread a preferred (and fallen) paradigm, but to minister to acculturated peoples wherever and however they’re found. Regardless of the container that houses them, sinful humans need the reconciliation and life that only our Savior provides. That’s why throughout the Bible, even in Israel’s call to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 46:9), God’s plan has always been multi-ethnic. Positively, cultures can be understood as communal expressions of God’s wisdom, glory, and creativity—sites where God intends to be present and worshiped. In God’s program cultures are features, not bugs.

Four Approaches to Culture

In his book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter charted the four main ways Christians have been oriented toward culture:

(1) Defensive against fights to protect Christianity from secularism and recover or institute a perceived lost Christian society; think dominionism, theonomy, or the culture warriors who police the internet and public square. 

(2) Relevance to essentially audits Christianity according to the prevailing moral order. Becoming Chameleon-like, the faith can serve immanent purposes that champion things expressive individualism or therapeutic support. 

(3) Purity from emphasizes separation from corrupt ideas and sinful lifestyles to preserve piety and devotion. This is overprotection through withdrawal; sequestered institutions and parallel media, tailored for holy-huddles.

Finally, Hunter’s preferred alternative is (4) faithful presence within. This happens when, through mundane work, regular relationships, and everyday life, believers embody Christ’s posture of ‘being in but not of the world.’ In the thick of public-facing lives, we pursue flourishing and advance the Gospel without dominance, acquiescence, or escapism. 

Discerning the Water  

In Finding Dory, Dory’s parents taught her a rhyme to help her stay safe from dangerous currents. They used a simple rhyme:“We see the undertow and we say: ‘Heck no!’” But instead, and forgetful as ever, Dory’s response was, “Let’s go!”Aren’t we just like that? Going with the flow even when our Father has advised caution? 

Unseen currents can distract us with entertainment. Pull us toward searching for identity in social media. Hustle culture tempts us to measure ourselves by productivity, spinning our tires in perpetual overcommitment. We may also drift toward what insiders want to hear (2 Tim. 4:1-5). For instance, white evangelicals generally accept challenging sex ethics and abortion, but voicing concern about ICE raids, preemptive war, or a pugilistic leader’s character (who 82% of us voted for) can feel off-brand, even scandalous. 

It’s also easy for churches to be swept up by market impulses that fetishize low-cost and easily-consumed Christianity; the gods of growth and market-share then short-circuit our prophetic voice. Even if it is just at a gut-level, we know upholding the status quo translates into giving and butts in seats. Yet, what works for the majority can be a barrier that prevents homogeneous congregations from attracting and retaining our young, non-white, and ideologically-diverse neighbors (e.g., see Pew’s findings on Politics).

Conclusion

This is the question that grips my heart: in an age that is spiritually open (at least theoretically), what if there is something in the water we’re not noticing that causes people to see Christianity as implausible? Put propositionally, conflating historic Christianity with cultural idiosyncrasies might just be a non-starter for folks who might otherwise be open. 

Navigating a pluralistic society is difficult for everyone. As for me, I have more questions than answers. But what I do know is that culture is the only place mission exists and forgetful fish need constant reminders about what their mission is (Luke 19:10; Matthew 4:19). Which is why even a thick definition of culture won’t suffice. We need a theology of culture—one that takes seriously the waters we’re swimming in. 

This is water. May we notice how and to whom we swim. 

I have lived in and around Austin, Texas, for almost 15 years. I’m not sure there is a city in the United States that has changed more in that time. As a former full-time musician and pastor, I’ve watched as the city skyline has tripled, as tech giants have moved into the neighborhood, and fields that used to surround the city have turned into strip centers and master-planned communities.

One of the major changes that has happened is watching as the “Live Music Capital of the World” has become one of the country’s emerging AI capitals. Over the past 15 years, it has become more desirable to work in tech and more difficult to be a musician. Austin is a great case study of what happens when technology reshapes the economics of a creative community. As the cost of living has grown more expensive, the musicians who built its desirable culture have increasingly struggled to afford to live in the city. The irony is palpable—a city can become more valuable because of its artists while simultaneously pricing them out.

But what happens when technology doesn’t just change the economics of making art, but changes the process of making art? There has been much digital ink spilled over the dynamics of generative AI, particularly its ability to create products like music. What I want to examine is a bit different: what happens to the soul and character of an artist when they outsource the creative process to generative AI?

I recently talked with my friend Kyle Lent, a music producer in Austin, about what generative AI means for musicians. Kyle used to produce Christian music for a church in town, but he now produces for a variety of genres. While I was expecting him to share thoughts about why Christians shouldn’t use generative AI or articulate frustrations about the effects that generative AI would have on an audience, he did not. He wasn’t most concerned about what generative AI does to the listener—he was concerned about what it would do to the artist.

He said, “The one who suffers from AI-generated art isn’t the congregant. It’s the creator.”

He talked about how the process of forming art forms the artist. When an artist writes songs, for example, sometimes they take hours, days, even years. Leonard Cohen said it took him around five years to finish his hit song, “Hallelujah.” Whenever an artist labors over art, the process of creating builds their character. It creates resilience and confidence. On the other hand, sometimes a song takes fifteen minutes to finish. When an artist experiences this, especially with other artists, it’s simply fun. The process of writing that song brings joy, camaraderie, and a sense of “striking gold.”

While the character that the process of creating art builds is important, we also discussed what happens when an artist can receive the reward of a creation without doing the hard work that creates it. AI can produce something that sounds good without the blood, sweat, and tears of the songwriting and producing process. A good example is the viral hit “The Puerto Rico Song” by Saxboy Billy. While the artist wrote the lyrics, he used the generative AI platform Suno to create the music. While it was incredibly efficient to use Suno, and it worked (my family loved it), the artist gained a large amount of attention and money while abdicating the process.

We were not asking where the song came from, or if musicians had been compensated, nor did we know that the music was completely AI-generated—we simply liked the output. I can assure you that I was not thinking about Saxboy Billy’s soul or character as I listened along.

Despite our critical conversation, Kyle is not anti-AI. He shared with me how, recently, he recorded drums and vocals for an upcoming song in the same room at the same time, on the same stem. In the past, he would have had to set up for vocals, then set up for drums, or spend hours trying to separate the bleed between the stems. Instead, he found an AI tool that automatically separates the vocals from the drum mic, saving him time and his client money.

The difference for Kyle is not that AI is involved in the creative process, but is AI serving the artist or replacing the artist?

Making generative music via AI can absorb the entire process of creating music. Suno allows a person with no musical training to enter a description of the song they want it to make, and within minutes, it is able to create a finished recording. A process that typically requires multiple trained musicians, producers, and other specialists can now be completed with a text prompt.

In some ways, this is genuinely incredible. But what does this do to the artist? 

Why would the same artists struggling to pay rent turn around and may another musician when they could have AI lay down a bass track? 

This is where the economic, personal, and spiritual questions begin to collide. The same technology that is contributing to raising housing prices also makes music cheaper and more accessible for artists. Yet, it can also remove the opportunities through which musicians make their living, as well as develop and hone their skills. If less experienced musicians never get hired to play the gig or record the track because Suno can generate this for cheap in seconds, how do musicians develop? How do they build relationships? How do they grow their skills? How do they build their character?

It’s complicated. 

One question that requires an answer is, where did Suno gain its ability to generate songs? 

An article entitled, “The Millions of Songs Mashed Into AI-Generated Music” helps provide the answer. Suno was trained on massive quantities of music made by human musicians. 

But what music and how did Suno access it? According to a court filing by Suno in 2024, that included “essentially all music files of reasonable quality” that could be downloaded from the internet. In other words, Suno was trained on songs created by humans. 

The lawsuit that I referenced is trying to determine whether companies like Suno had the right to use copyrighted music to train their AI models without the explicit permission or compensation of the artists who created it. 

If the plaintiffs are correct, anytime someone uses Suno for generative AI to create a song, they are plagiarizing other artist’s work. 

But there is a deeper problem than plagiarism here. What if the value of creating something is not ultimately found in the thing that is created?

The Christian faith provides a powerful worldview for why it matters that humans create. The Imago Dei is a theological perspective that, in simplest form, says that humans are made in the image of God. This is foundational to our creative ethics because it argues that God, in part, made humans to be makers. So, if creating is an aspect of what it means to bear the image of God, then creating is not simply about making something that profits, but creating in itself has value because it reflects the character of God. 

If we as humans are to reflect our Creator, our creative process cannot primarily value efficiency as the highest good. Whether God created all things in seven days or longer, He certainly could have chosen to be more efficient. His example of creation proves that the labor of the creative process must be meaningful and good. Efficiency is not inherently evil, but it is an economic virtue, not a spiritual one.

In our cultural moment, we have become so used to measuring progress by efficiency, but we have neglected to consider what efficiency may be costing. If something can be accomplished quicker, cheaper, and with less time, we tend to assume that path should be taken. But Christians, of all people, should be suspicious of the assumption to be true. Our spiritual formation and our character take a lifetime of slow, painful, worthwhile processes.

Generative AI removes all of the friction of the creative process. While some friction should be moved, if we eliminate friction altogether we lose all of the fire of the formational furnace. If artists outsource the entire creation of their art to AI, they will not be liberated. They will be malformed and malnourished. They will starve because of the loss of character, skill and emotion that can only be gained from the struggle.

The point here is not that any and every use of generative AI is wrong. Returning to Kyle as an example, there is a difference in using AI in art to assist the creative process versus completely outsourcing the creative process. It is not wrong for technology to make aspects of the process easier, but when the process is completely replaced, this is what is dangerous to the artist.

Christians should continue to create; we should also support the artists who are creating, even when AI could produce something similar for less money. Not because AI is inherently evil, but because human creation is important to our flourishing as individuals and as a society.

We should continue to use AI with wisdom—there are certainly great benefits to it. But a guiding principle, particularly in the arts, is that we can allow it to remove tedious aspects of work that keep us from doing the work that only humans can accomplish.

The question that Christians should be asking as generative AI continues to infiltrate the arts is, “What happens to us when we stop making art?”

The art matters, but so does the person who spent years learning how to make the art. 

The art is not the only thing being made—the creator is being made, too.

Ever the precocious child, a young C.S. Lewis was reading a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem (Tegner’s Drapa), when he came across these lines:

I heard a voice that cried,
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead——

Lewis recounts how these words affected him:

I knew nothing about Balder; but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then, as in the other examples, found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it.

Immediately after recounting this story, only a few pages into his autobiography, Lewis warns the reader:

The reader who finds [this episode] of no interest need read this book no further, for in a sense the central story of my life is about nothing else.

What was it that so thoroughly arrested a young Lewis? This brief snatch of a myth, expansive beyond his own comprehension, was like the opening of a door from some Higher Country Beyond. And, for a moment, a chink of golden light fell down upon his face, before promptly disappearing.

This longing for the transcendent is what the poet and disciple of Lewis, Malcolm Guite, is seeking to do for our own generation with his new four volume epic of the story of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.

~

In 2022, when Queen Elizabeth died, this same golden light struck me. I peered in on it from a suburb in the Pacific Northwest of the United States–a place that has all the enchantment and tradition of an Applebee's or an apartment complex. Watching soldiers festooned in regalia like living chess pieces arrayed behind the Queen’s casket, marching through marble-pillared halls, awash in angelic choirs: it was like watching some fairytale come to life.

70 years prior, Lewis watched the coronation of the 25-year-old Elizabeth and commented that the poor young queen was overwhelmed by the tragic splendor of it all.

The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if he said, “In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.”

There is, Lewis assumes, in all of us a longing for the high, regality of kings and queens, because from the beginning God made us as those with dominion over this earth (Gen 1:28). And so the pageantry of the service tugs at some deep longing in us all for what we are made for. Yet all of us in a post-monarchical world feel the world of scepters and crowns to be rather anachronistic. My daily experience has no analog for this. Our political leaders do not evoke majesty nor do our sacred spaces seem numinous. All the churches in my hometown look like Costco warehouses or strip mall storefronts–they are, if anything, practical and unpretentious. Over here, we put a high premium on not putting on airs, on being “down to earth.” The Queen’s funeral service, on the other hand, was quite literally attempting to exalt us from the earth.

It was, in the most literal definition of the word, pompous–as in, full of pomp and circumstance. “The very fact that the word pompous is now used only in a bad sense,” writes Lewis in his Preface to Paradise Lost, “measures the degree to which we have lost the old idea of ‘solemnity’. What is that?

Lewis explains: “[Solemnity] is the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary.” This “does not suggest gloom, oppression or austerity…Feasts, in this sense, are more solemn than fasts….[Solemnity] is the festal which is also the stately and the ceremonial, the proper occasion for pomp.” Solemnity is the quality of “a court ball, or a coronation, or a victory march, as these things appear to people who enjoy them.” It is the reason figures of church and state don unusual clothes, march in choreographed synchronization, and bear symbols like scepters and orbs: “a celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade…all these wear unusual clothes, and move with calculated dignity.”

If you are reading this from a suburb similar to my own–a world of Chick-fil-A, athleisure, and self-deprecating humor–then maybe this all seems rather silly. Modern people tend to deconstruct ceremony to nothing but the sum of its parts–that crown isn’t magical, it is just a bunch of diamonds embedded in a circle. It is tempting to see the value of an act, object, or tradition exclusively in its utility or function. While showing the service to my son, upon seeing a close up shot of the Queen’s crown he wondered aloud (in true American fashion), “Wow, I wonder how much money that’s worth.” Lewis is suggesting, however, that this eye which “sees through” all ceremony and reduces it to the sum of its parts, is no virtue. In fact, it is a curse: “To see through all things is the same as not to see.”

Modest, pragmatic American though I am, I was surprised as I watched the Queen’s funeral to feel a stab of longing for this mysterious solemnity, as if some lost world I had, in truth, never known, cracked open its door to let its regal warmth stream out. I did not feel this because of my deep love of the Queen or England, nor for my secret pining for Anglicanism. Something else reached an invisible hand out and offered me an experience I had so rarely encountered in my deeply American fear of pretension. 

Where, in our perma-casual age who “sees through” all as nothing but, will we get to breathe this solemn air? 

One place, Lewis believes, is the realm of poetry: Balder the beautiful is dead.

~

Malcolm Guite also watched the Queen’s service and said it was as if, for a moment, Britain had “woken up” and reclaimed some of her former solemnity. He goes on:

People who’d been told they only had an attention span of five minutes queued for days to walk out of a noisy world and, in awestruck silence, stand and genuflect in the ancient chamber where Her Majesty lay with a guard of honor, with bright swords, with the fabled beauty of the crown resting on her coffin, laid aside for the greater glories of Heaven.

Guite wondered if now was the time to act upon an old desire he had to “take up the tale” of Britain’s most ancient myth: King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail. Guite’s project is to take this myth and translate it into the high, heraldic solemnity of a ballad; not a modern deconstruction of Arthur or a familiar ready-for-television crossover, but an epic, long, rhymed ballad. Why? “What is the point of having a poet, inspired by the Muse,” Lewis suggests, “if he tells the stories just as you or I would have told them?” It is precisely because the form is unusual that it pulls us in. What will deliver us from what author and neuroscientist, Erik Hoel, calls, “disappearing up our own brainstems,” from hyper-addictive, low-brow, short-form media? We need to breathe that bracing, unfamiliar mountain air of what is above us from time to time. 

And it is this Arthurian myth in particular, Guite believes, that possesses a kind of “incantatory power” to aid in breaking the bindings of unbelief for our generation today and root us into Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

~

As Lewis grew into manhood, there were two sides of him growing in tandem: the Romantic, whose imagination was baptized into the world of myth and fairy tales, forever chasing that light he first experienced as a child; and the Rationalist, the rigorous mind which sniffed out fallacies and cynically demanded proof, who “saw through” charades and charlatans alike. His Romanticism led to a fertile imagination. His Rationalism led to a bleak atheism. Both led to a painful schizophrenia: “Nearly all I loved,” he wrote, “I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.” 

Lewis’ conversion to Christianity is more winding and protracted than one turn, but the famous conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in 1931 proved to be pivotal. It also sheds light on the essential breakthrough Lewis needed to not only see the truth of Christianity, but how the Christian faith reconciled these two warring halves of his brain. Lewis loved the beauty of myths, but they were “lies,” he told Tolkien and Dyson “even though…breathed through silver.” No, Tolkien replied, they are not. Myths, according to Tolkien, are “splintered fragments of the true light” of Ultimate Truth: beams of gold cast like sparks into the dark, glimmers of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty embedded in the stories we tell. The reason that chivalry, sacrifice, and love conquering death resonate with us so deeply isn’t because they are false, but because they echo the True Myth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Much later, Lewis referred to the power of myths and fairy tales to captivate the emotions and imaginations of a reader with the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the gospel, even if the readers’ prejudices were against Christianity. Lewis referred to this as “stealing past watchful dragons” so that the heart could soar with Christ and, in time, tug the mind along with it. 

Guite notes how both Lewis and Tolkien did this in their own myth-making: 

I saw how beautifully writers like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien had reawakened our desire for the marvellous and mysterious, and how their stories, often drawing subtly on Arthurian motifs, had reached out with truth and beauty to so many who had scarcely known, until they turned the pages of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, how much they longed for these tales of imagination and how these tales reawakened what Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, called that “inconsolable secret,” our yearning for the “far-off country,” which we glimpse when, for a while, the veil is lifted and we see how God moves in and through His creation and draws us back to Him.

So, he has taken up his recent project to "continue the vital mission to ‘slip past the watchful dragons’ of secularism and awaken again in the modern world that openness to beauty and mystery which prepares the heart for the coming of Christ.”

A ballad of King Arthur may seem like a strange resource for evangelism and discipleship. There will be many who will likely never give it a chance because they dislike poetry out of hand. But I want to persuade you to try. I believe that Guite’s work, in profound ways, will be a kind of hammer to break up the hard hearts of the secular West and make us receptive to Jesus Christ, in three primary ways: the True, the Good, the Beautiful. Let’s examine them in reverse order.

The Beautiful

Guite’s attention to beauty and the wonder of creation–what he calls “the world’s bright edge”-– is one of the most refreshing aspects of Galahad. His poetry demonstrates that Guite himself is a true lover of the created world–not one who looks upon it as mere matter to be utilized, but as something that possesses a nature, a proper giveness that should be respected as well as admired. In Susanna Clarke’s foreword, she explains that Guite’s ballad “sweeps you onward into adventure, solemn magic, and beauty” with its “jewel-like colours.”

“The whole poem,” she goes on, “has the mesmerizing brilliance of the little paintings in the margins of illuminated manuscripts.” And, of course, the very form of the tale as a rhymed ballad makes Beauty the air the entire story breathes. The printed edition of the book is meticulously crafted with lovely wood-cut illustrations from Stephen Crotts. But the audiobook is perhaps the most enchanting version of the book, since Guite himself reads the ballad with all the care and gravitas one would expect (plus, there is the charm of hearing Cambridge, pipe tobacco, and tweed trousers come through his voice). The poetic nature may be what wards many new readers off, but the rollicking rhythm is simple and begins to bear you along as you read, as if it is weaving a spell. 

This story is Beautiful, in both content and form, and fills one with a sense that there is, in the words of Tolkien, “light and high beauty” forever beyond the reach of this world’s Shadow. Dostoevsky once remarked “Beauty will save the world.” Why? Because Beauty is self-evident and like a candle in the dark, always outshines what is foul. Beauty is not all, but it is an indispensable element of the human experience. And Christians must be able to not only explain where that longing comes from (God), but also must contribute works of art that feed our craving for Beauty. If we do not, then we run the risk of ceding one of God’s attributes to the world, and mislead the next generation into thinking that God may be Good and True, but aesthetically chilling or (even worse) boring. 

The Good

What was the last piece of pop-culture you interacted with regarding Arthurian romance or the Holy Grail? If you are like me, it was probably Monty Python. Or, perhaps if you are more sophisticated, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Both of these are so fun (and popular) because they do what all good satire does: skewer pretensions and expose what is ridiculous for what it really is. But man cannot live on satire alone. Guite’s tale provides an earnest, ambitious, and sincere attempt to make chivalry, romance, and virtue both attractive and believable. Many times, people are duplicitous and ulterior, but not always. And if all the art we consume portrays nothing but that? If we only ever hear Handel’s Hallelujah chorus in the context of Clark Griswold finally getting his Christmas lights to work? Are we not impoverished? Is there not some slot within our hearts that remains unfulfilled, some essential nutrient of the soul we become deficient in?

Throughout Galahad’s tale, knights act with the kind of chivalry that is pantomimed in Monty Python or Cervantes, but instead of being the set up for a punchline, they deliver in earnest. Knights defend maiden’s honor, die courageously for brothers, and maintain their vows in the fiercest of temptations. And all of this is done while honestly admitting human sin and flaws–Guite doesn’t flatten characters into tropes. Lancelot’s secret love for Guinevere and abiding shame (despite his reputation for honor) is a worm that gnaws his conscience throughout the tale, and proves to be a surprising and compelling arc of redemption. But, a weakness of modern storytelling is to so emphasize the flaws of mankind that we subtly begin to believe that anyone daring to be heroic is really only doing so with dark, or at the very least, compromised motives. Not so in Galahad. One sees healthy ambition to “dare to do the deed” of whatever virtue, faith, and chivalry demand in the moment, no matter how dire the cost.

And, through it all, the knights are seeking the Holy Grail–a symbol of the presence of Christ Himself. Though Guite is using mythical imagery and symbolism throughout, the book is suffused with Christianity, and is able to cast the familiar into the frame of myth that makes it both fresh and attractive.

The True

How can a ballad about a mythical figure on a mythical quest seeking a mythical object have anything to do with truth? The story is full of magic, elfs, naiads and dryads, and much, much more fantastic material. At one point, a block of marble (with sword plunged halfway in) floats upon the water to Arthur’s castle in Camelot. The book is fanciful, without a doubt. 

Yet, as Christians, we are reminded that reality is stranger than it seems. Elisha makes axe heads float (2 Kings 6:1-7), Balaam’s donkey speaks (Num 22:21-39), and Moses makes water gush from a rock (Ex 17). When Christ resurrected from the dead, it was with such concussive force, that the tombs of the dead in Jerusalem cracked open and resurrected saints wandered the streets (Matt 27:51-53). And, of course, the mundane and ordinary is littered with magic, if we have eyes to see: through some mystical alchemy, a tree can transform a flower into an apple, using nothing but sunshine, water, and air. A kind of secular enchantment can fall over our eyes and we can come to believe in a mechanistic materialism that explains how things “really work” and “see through” all: that crown is nothing but metal and stone, shaped in a certain way. Reading Galahad is an imaginative exercise to pop that illusion, to expel the reductive eye that “sees through” all, and pay attention to deeper truths. In Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace gets a chance to meet Ramandu–a living star–and speak with him:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” 

But more true than anything is the story’s expectation that a long awaited hero, a knight (literally) in shining armor, will come to heal the wastelands and set right what has been wrong. The ache we all feel for a Savior, a Deliverer, a Righteous One who uses His power and might to save–all of which is cast into mythical story in Galahad–points to the truest thing this world is waiting for: the King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, who shall come in might and wrath, in love and truth, in mercy and healing, to banish darkness and establish a Kingdom of Light, forever and ever, amen. 

~

We possess a deep longing for that golden light, the murmur in our souls of some expectation that beyond, in another realm, there is majesty and awe and splendor that we are on the outside of, but ache to be welcomed into–to bathe in so that we become like the Beauty we are beholding. All the faint, far off echoes of it that we catch in snippets through books and art and nature, all of it is making a promise to us: one day. 

“That is why,” Lewis writes, “the poets,” like the wonderful Mr. Guite, “tell us such lovely falsehoods.”

They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can’t. They tell us that “beauty born of murmuring sound” will pass into a human face; but it won’t. Or not yet. For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendour of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.  

Guite’s second installment in his Arthuriad, The Coming of Arthur, releases on November 9^th, and the first installment, Galahad and the Grail, can be purchased now. I hope you will take up the tale and break the dark enchantment the secular West has languished under for too long.