Edith Stein. A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire. Edited by Carolyn Beard. Plough Publishing (2026). $12.95. 168 pp.

She was brilliant. She was faithful. In 1942, she was murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  The German-born Jewish philosopher Edith Stein was a Catholic nun who took the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross when she took her vows. She was canonized as a saint in 1998. 

Though I am not Catholic, I am a Jewish follower of Jesus, and have long been inspired by Stein’s courageous story. I’ve wanted to get to know her better, but haven’t always found her writing accessible. Her training as a philosopher and her mystic’s soul, combined with sometimes-wooden translations of her work, have rendered her a somewhat dense read.

Thanks to a thoughtfully-curated little sampler of Stein’s work, A Sure Way: Following Truth in a World on Fire, published by Plough as part of their Spiritual Guides series, there is now an entry-level invitation for contemporary readers to listen to what a modern mystic and martyr has to teach us about navigating our own turbulent era. Editor Carolyn Beard frames Stein’s unique role and essential voice in history in her introduction to the volume: “Stein’s wartime writings, some of which are included in this book, are a compelling testament to what it means to live a life of faith in dark times. Written from Stein’s unique vantage as a Jewish-Christian monastic, these writings are also cutting reprimands of Christians who failed to advocate for or protect their Jewish brothers and sisters in their time of need.” 

Stein’s words capture the push-pull that was constantly at work in her life. There was the push of the rationalist school of philosophy that trained her brilliant mind as an academic and the mystical pull toward her Messiah via the writings of Teresa of Avila, which immersed her thirsty soul in the mysterious and all-consuming love of God. Living in this seemingly-impossible tension turned out to be Stein’s superpower during a period in history that would lead to her murder in a gas chamber. 

Though she grew up in an observant Jewish home, by the time she was a teen, she had embraced atheism and set her course as an academic, studying philosophy at the University of Freiberg. But after reading a biography of Theresa of Avila, she entered the Catholic Church in 1922. She wanted at that point to live a life of prayer as a cloistered nun, but her superiors felt that her education and teaching gifts would be best used in the classroom. She taught at a Jewish school in Speyer until forced from her job in 1933 by the first wave of virulently antisemitic Nazi legislation. 

A Sure Way contains the text of a letter Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI that year, pleading with him to intercede on behalf of her Jewish people. She could see clearly what was coming next—and that it would not stop with the Jews. She warned that Catholics who wanted to survive in Nazi Germany would be required to abandon their faith and subsume their identity to the State. After detailing the horrors of what she was seeing in the early weeks of Nazi rule, she wrote: 

Everything that has happened and continues to happen on a daily basis originates with a government that calls itself ‘Christian’. For weeks, not only Jews but also thousands of faithful Catholics in Germany, and I believe, all over the world, have been waiting and hoping for the Church of Christ to raise its voice to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name. Isn’t this idolization of race and governmental power, which is being pounded into the public consciousness by the radio, open heresy? Isn’t the effort to destroy Jewish blood an abuse of the holiest humanity of our Savior, the blessed Virgin, and the apostles? Isn’t this all diametrically opposed to the conduct of our Lord and Savior, who, even on the cross, prayed for his persecutors?

The following year, she entered full-time religious life. By 1938, hoping to keep her safe, her religious order sent her to live in a convent in the Netherlands. She wrote prophetically during this period, calling her sisters and others who’d read her words to single-minded, courageous faith that would counter the oppressiveness of fascism and the anguish of war that had blanketed Europe. In a 1940 Epiphany message she penned these words:

…the more an era is engulfed in the night of sin and estrangement from God, the more it needs souls united to God. And God does not permit a deficiency. The greatest figures of prophecy and sanctity step forth out of the darkest night…Certainly, the decisive turning points in world history are substantially co-determined by souls whom no history book ever mentions. And we will only find out about these souls in whom we owe the decisive turning points in our personal lives on the day when all that is hidden is revealed.

The book is divided into five tight sections that offer a glimpse into Edith’s inner world: Ways to Know God, At the Foot of the Cross, Light Breaks In, Women’s Spirituality, and A World in Flames. Though many of the words in A Sure Way call for activism, they are drawn from a deeply contemplative well. An excerpt from a 1928 lecture she gave before the Nazis rose to power highlights the contribution that women-as-nurturers could make to German society no matter what her vocation or station. Stein roots this conviction in both a generous vision of the dignity of imago Dei in all of humanity and in her experience receiving spiritual nourishment and inspiration from the life of Jesus’s mother, Mary. 

Stein’s contemplative life held her during the final years of her life, but eventually, the walls of the convent could no longer protect her. She always maintained her Jewish identity, and never saw it at odds with her Catholic faith. And in the end, both of those things put a double bull’s eye on her back. She was rounded up along with some other Jewish Catholics and arrested on August 2^nd, 1942. She was murdered a week later.

Edith Stein’s brilliance found sanctuary in God in a hostile world. A sense of both earthy groundedness and soaring awe saturate her work as befitting someone who lived in the tension of complex questions of faith and identity. As she entered religious life, she wrote,  

How wonderful are your gracious wonders
All we can do is be amazed and stammer and fall silent
Because intellect and words fail. 

Those were not religious platitudes for Stein, but a revelation of what fueled her until she breathed her last breath of Zyklon B in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. For those of us who see our own world on fire, spending time with Edith Stein’s words may help orient us to what it takes to walk through the flames, one foot in front of the other, on the narrow path with Jesus.

My denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is currently bracing itself for an important and likely difficult time of discernment and conversation at our General Assembly this summer. When we gather in Denver in mid-June, at the center of our deliberation will be thorny doctrinal questions about the nature of sexual desire, the dynamics of temptation, the meaning of concupiscence, the possibility of the mortification of sin, and the extent of its indwelling power in those called to ordained leadership in the Church. Collectively we find ourselves taking a deep breath and steeling ourselves for what many fear will be a contentious gathering.

Controversy and strife are relatively new visitors to our common life. In the past, friends from other denominations would speak to me wistfully about the EPC—our lack of rancor, the familial feel of our church courts, the winsomeness of our stated ethos (“In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things, charity”). I would smile and concede the apparent truth of their description, but I’d also offer a caveat. While I was grateful for our relative peace, I also knew our day of difficulty was coming. Controversy comes for us all: in the history of the church, no part of the body has ever been excluded from conflict and even schism. Even while our relatively-young communion, made up mostly of refugees from other Presbyterian denominations, was enjoying the Pax Orlando, it was only a matter of time before the honeymoon would be over.

Well, the honeymoon is over. But that it is so is not necessarily a bad thing. Every good marriage must pass through its days of marital bliss and into the hard but good work of discussion, deliberation, mutual forbearance, agreement, and love. And as any student of church history knows, controversy can clarify and refine. Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, uses conflict providentially to preserve the truth of the Gospel and to help us speak confidently and precisely about the faith delivered to us.

Controversy can clarify, but it can just as easily malform. A good and right focus on a specific doctrinal discussion can cause us to be inattentive and even forgetful of the wider fabric of our particular tradition. That danger accompanies the EPC at this moment, particularly because there is no great clarity about precisely what our tradition is. When faced with a difficult moment, we don’t have the luxury of asking ourselves—as did one of the greater lights in another stream of the Reformed tradition—“What’s so great about the EPC?” We have to ask and answer the prior question: “What kind of Presbyterians are the EPC?”

In what follows, I’d like to try to answer this question. It seems to me to be an important and necessary thing to do, not least because whenever the dust settles on our current controversy, we’ll still have the everyday work of guarding the deposit of faith and proclaiming the Gospel. And I’d like to do so by appealing to two impulses found within Presbyterian history in this country, impulses that appear again and again within the tensions of our tradition. (Credit where credit is due: this description was first suggested to me by fellow EPC TE Zach Hopkins.)

Here is my argument: The EPC is an Old School/New Side denomination. In order to justify this not uncontroversial description, some historical explanation will be required.

The Old School/New School Divide

Old School Presbyterianism represents the confessional impulse within the Presbyterian tradition in the United States. In the early- and mid-1800s, a dispute arose within the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (at that time the only significant Presbyterian denomination in America) regarding the “New England Theology” of Charles Grandison Finney and others. 

The details of this controversy are well-documented and described in various histories of Presbyterianism, but at the center of the disagreement was the place of the Westminster Standards in the life of the church. Old School Presbyterians were instinctually committed to a close and careful adherence to the historic standards and the doctrines that they articulate. New School Presbyterians, on the other hand, could be identified by a concern to adapt historic doctrines to contemporary challenges for the purposes of evangelism and morality. 

So George Marsden writes of early New Schoolers in The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience, “Reflecting the spirit of the age, they were much more interested in morality. Their most pressing concern was to understand how sinners could be changed and how that process might best be effected by the human means through which the Spirit worked.” These were of course noble concerns, but they were pursued by way of revising historic Reformed doctrines of sin and anthropology.

The fault-lines became clearer as the conflict unfolded. On the one side, a concern to remain faithful to the Reformed tradition as expressed through the minds of the Westminster Divines; on the other side, an evangelistic zeal that demanded doctrine respond expediently to the spirit of the age. Marsden again, representing the Old School perspective: “The Old School’s objection was that the New School taught or tolerated an un-Biblical view of man’s nature. The New School’s confidence in the dignity, freedom, and ability of man, a confidence in many ways characteristic of the mainstream of American thought in the eras of Jackson and Emerson, was resisted by the Old School on the ground that it subverted the essential Scriptural teachings of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity.”

This same basic conflict between two divergent impulses took other shapes and forms in the American Presbyterian Church. New School Presbyterianism was marked by a spirit of moral activism. Sometimes this was right and admirable, especially when expressed in some (but by no means all) New School Presbyterians who advocated for the abolition of slavery. Other times, this activism was more ambiguous, as demonstrated in the significant New School participation in the temperance movement. New School Presbyterians were also eager to adopt the innovative “scientific” revival methods that were the mark of Finney and other leaders of the Second Great Awakening. Old School Presbyterians met these efforts and innovations with skepticism and dismay.

The two schools were composed of various parties, and we cannot devolve the differences simply to theological disagreements. Moreover, the history of these two schools is complicated and thus resists reduction. Nonetheless, it is possible to begin to trace the differences between the two impulses: for Old School Presbyterians, a conservative impulse to maintain the confessional standards of the Westminster Confession; for New School Presbyterians, an impulse to attend to contemporary controversy and to adapt to the perceived needs of the moment.

The EPC as an Old School Denomination

It is by no means obvious to everyone that the EPC is an Old School denomination. Indeed, none other than the author of the official history of the EPC, Don Fortson, argues that the EPC instead is a New School denomination. Let me give an account of why my own telling of our denomination’s story deviates from his.

In Liberty in Non-Essentials: The Story of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Forston writes that, “The New School spirit of a moderate Calvinism is reflected in the ethos of the EPC, which has chosen to put its accent on being broadly evangelical while maintaining its Reformed commitments—as opposed to a dogmatic, exclusive Presbyterianism that was more characteristic of the Old School.” Fortson’s description is correct insofar it describes the origins of the EPC. When the denomination began, there was a great deal more emphasis on the “E” than the “P.” The New School spirit was evident first in the EPC’s emphasis of the “Essentials of the Faith” (a broadly evangelical description of Christian faith) above the Westminster Standards. The New School spirit was also evident in the impulse of moral activism that was present in the early days of the denotation. When the EPC gathered for its first General Assembly in 1981, the two speakers who addressed the denomination were Dr James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ) and Francis Schaeffer (who was at that point in his ministry waist-deep in cultural activism).

But as the denomination matured, it moved away from those New School beginnings. When the EPC began, the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards was ambiguous at best and problematic at worst. Because of the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the “Essentials of the Faith” and the Westminster Standards, the EPC found itself in the embarrassing situation where a Teaching or Ruling Elder could affirm the Essentials but disagree with not-so-minor aspects of the Westminster Confession of Faith like infant baptism or the doctrine of election. As early as 1988 the denomination began a series of conversations with the hope of clarifying the relationship between these two statements. At the center of the conversation was a perennial Presbyterian controversy: the question of subscription to the Westminster Standards.

To make an already long story somewhat shorter, at the 2001 General Assembly the EPC arrived at a decidedly Old School solution to this drawn-out deliberation: the Westminster Standards would not be subordinated to the “Essentials,” but instead would be given a final authority in the denomination. No exceptions would be allowed to the “Essentials,” but also at ordination and installation Ruling and Teaching Elders would be asked explicitly to subscribe to the Westminster Standards, to name explicitly any exceptions, and make known to a church court if there was any change to this vow. The resolution was fundamentally an affirmation of the Old School understanding of the place of the Confession in the Church (and the practice of confessional subscription) and a rejection of the New School impulse.

The EPC is an Old School Presbyterian denomination. Another way to say this is simply to say that the EPC is a confessional denomination. But even as we state this, it is important to say at the same time that our confessionalism is in many ways an unfulfilled mandate still awaiting full implementation and practice. When in 2006 the EPC welcomed a large number of churches from the PC(USA), their arrival significantly changed the ethos of the denomination. (Full disclosure: I, and both EPC churches I have served, were among the number of PC(USA) congregations that joined the EPC.) These churches were both disconnected from the deliberation and discernment behind the 2001 decision and also, having come from the multi-confessional framework of the PC(USA), were unfamiliar with the confessional habitus of Old School subscriptionism.

The result was that the Old School consensus in the EPC has in many ways been forgotten. It is simply self-evident that in the life of our local churches, our presbyteries, and our General Assembly the Westminster Standards have more often than not been sidelined in our theological deliberation and ministry practice. (This was demonstrated most recently when a vote to state explicitly that baptism is a prerequisite for the Lord’s Supper failed at the 2024 General Assembly.) Our confessions and catechisms are often treated like the emergency boxes in public spaces: we can always break the glass in case of emergency, but otherwise they are left alone.

Because of this, our Old School identity is something still to be attained. Our constitutional framework is confessional, but we do not live up to or into the vision articulated by those who went before us. To say that the EPC is a confessional, Old School Presbyterian denomination is in many ways to say that we should aspire to become what our constitution says that we are.

New Side Presbyterianism

The category of Old School does not fully exhaust the EPC’s identity. Both the PCA and the OPC in different ways would also be understood to be Old School Presbyterians, and yet there are significant differences between each of those three denominations. Similarly, the Old School/New School division does not fully exhaust the different impulses within American Presbyterianism. In order to understand what kind of Presbyterians are the EPC, we need to give our attention to another Old/New contrast within the history of American Presbyterianism: Old Side/New Side.

The Old Side/New Side controversy actually predates the Old/New School debate, beginning in the mid-1700s in response to the First Great Awakening. The preaching and ministry of George Whitefield fanned the flames of revival that had first been kindled by the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards and the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent into a phenomenon that spread through the American colonies and across the Atlantic. Whitefield’s itinerant ministry and the emotionalism that accompanied the revivals placed a strain on American Presbyterianism as church leaders were forced to discern whether or not to welcome Whitfield’s version of extra-ecclesial “parachurch ministry” and how they would respond to the enthusiasms of the revivals.

Old Side Presbyterians felt that the First Great Awakening should be ignored or denounced because its emphasis on revival and religious experience ran counter to the traditional forms of Presbyterian life: strict confessional subscription, catechesis, the order of the church’s courts. New Side Presbyterians, in contrast, wanted to emphasize religious experience and the necessity of conversion. (These tensions are well-described by D.G. Hart and John R. Muether in their excellent Seeking a Better Country: 300 Years of American Presbyterianism.) The revivals of the First Great Awakening no doubt did at times run counter to the forms of Presbyterian polity and confession, but it is important to note that this was not necessarily the case. While there were definite tensions between Old and New Side Presbyterians, the two were always able to remain within the same denomination and it was not long before the two parties resolved their differences in the Plan of Union in 1758.

If we are looking for an example of what a New Side/Old School Presbyterian might look like, we should go no further than the Old Princeton professor and pastor Charles Hodge. Hodge’s life and ministry married a New Side appreciation for the best of Reformed piety and practice with an Old School adherence to the Westminster Standards. Thus in describing Hodge as a “New Side-Old School Presbyterian,” Andrew Hoffecker says in his biography of Hodge that he “manifested the attributes of associated with Calvinistic confessionalism (strong adherence to creedal religion, liturgical forms, and corporate worship) as well as the characteristics of evangelism pietism (the necessity of vital religion marked by conversion, moral activism, and individual pious practices).” The New and the Old can co-exist; Old School confessionalism can flourish alongside a New Side emphasis on conversion and religious experience.

The EPC as a New Side Presbyterian Church

That the EPC has the impulses of New Side Presbyterianism is, I think, an uncontroversial statement. It is evident even in the denomination’s name; preceding the anchoring noun “Presbyterian” is the important qualifying adjective “Evangelical.” The EPC is relatively untroubled by the kind of “religious enthusiasms” that were problematic for Old Side Presbyterians (as is evidenced in both cessationists and non-cessationists calling the denomination home). While the EPC does have its own missions agency, World Outreach, it is also marked by a trans-denominational cooperative spirit which at times troubled Old Siders but was a mark of the New Side.

If the argument that the EPC is an Old School denomination is an invitation to become what we are, then the argument that the EPC is a New Side denomination is an exhortation to deepen what we already know ourselves to be. If the impulses of our denomination are towards the practices of piety and the importance of experiential religion, then we should remind ourselves that the Reformed tradition has rich resources for us. Calvin was the theologian of the Holy Spirit, and from Augustine to John Owen we have been given a tradition of saints who can help us to live into the best of our theology. While we can always learn from other traditions and contemporary voices, there is simply no reason that we should forsake our inheritance in order to give ourselves over to the latest fad in spirituality. Sinclair Ferguson’s The Whole Christ—with its account of how the Marrow controversy revealed not just what the Confession teaches but how we can hold those beliefs with either a gospel or legal spirit—might be an example to us of the kind of marriage between deep, confessional theology and religious experience that our tradition possesses. Embracing the ways the EPC is New Side denomination is an invitation to bring the best of the evangelical tradition to our confessional roots.

Old School, New Side, So What?

I have argued above that the EPC, in its constitutional commitments and in its evangelical ethos, is an Old School/New Side denomination. This exercise has not been merely academic; this history has implications for those who of us call the EPC home. If these two strains of American Presbyterianism represent the best of our particular corner of the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church, and if they are the inheritance which those who have gone before us have passed on to us to steward, then what does this mean for us as we seek to serve today?

Confessional Reasoning

A confessional standard is more than a list of doctrines to be checked off upon admission to a denominational body. A confession of faith is a way of reading Scripture, a system of doctrine, a spirituality, and a philosophy of ministry rolled into a single document. Because of this, we can’t simply slap the Westminster Confession on to our churches like a new bumper sticker on an old truck. We must continue to learn to inhabit the Standards, to follow their reasoning, and to submit to the particular rationality that they provide for us.

Within American evangelicalism there is a strain of lean biblicism latent in many of our churches in the EPC. This biblicism is more nuda Scriptura than sola Scriptura, substituting the Reformers’ restoration of the authority of the Bible over tradition for the abolition of tradition. Reformed theology is rooted in the Great Tradition. As Calvin argued in his “Reply to Sadoleto,” the Reformation was more catholic than the Catholics. Part of what we must do moving forward is reintroduce ourselves to the tradition that is ours and do the deeper work of inhabiting its gifts with conviction.

Practically, this means intentionally teaching and utilizing the Standards within our presbyterian institutions. At least one thing this means is that among Teaching and Ruling Elders and in our presbyteries and church sessions, the Westminster Standards should be taught and utilized in our deliberations and officer examinations in the way I have described above. Sessions can set apart time to deepen their knowledge of the Confession – and not just during officer training and then reason according to their wisdom when shepherding and deliberating. Presbyteries can not only take their confessionalism seriously when candidates are examined or teaching elders are admitted from other presbyteries, they can also—as my own presbytery has done recently—set aside time to resource and equip teaching and ruling elders alike with the riches of the Standards and remind them of their importance.

Warmly Reformed

A particular charism that the EPC possesses within the larger church catholic is the marriage of the New Side and the Old School dynamics of American Presbyterianism. One fruit of this marriage is that we can hold in tension the warm evangelicalism of the New Side (a hunger for revival, experiential piety, mutual forbearance for the sake of mission) with the historic confessionalism of the Old School. In many ways these two impulses helpfully supplement one another. Without our New Side spirit, our Old School Presbyterianism might become dead orthodoxy. But without our Old School instincts, our New Side impulses could easily devolve into sentimental biblicism. The two need each other. 

When the EPC embraces both our Old School and New Side inheritances we have a great gift to offer both our own communion and the world: warm piety that is formed by deep theology, missional hunger that is confessionally rooted, precise doctrine that is humbly inhabited.

Institutional Stewardship

We live in an anti-institutional age, and as those who bear the name “evangelical” we are identifying ourselves with those who may be great at starting new institutions but who are less proven at maintaining them. There is a symbiotic relationship between a tradition (here Westminster Presbyterianism) and institution (the EPC). Much of what I have argued is that we in the EPC must reclaim our tradition. But there is a corresponding truth that is just as important: we must care for and maintain the institution that is the EPC.

Admittedly, this work often feels tedious and boring. It is the work of attending presbytery meetings, of reading dockets in advance, of learning parliamentary procedure, and of comprehending the Book of Order. Few of us took vows of ordination with this kind of thing in mind. But the longevity of the work we have put our hands to depends in some way on this ministry of little things. As Yuval Levin has argued, our institutions should not serve merely as platforms for our public-facing preaching and teaching. They should instead form and even restrain us as we submit to the wisdom they have accumulated over the years of their existence.

Conclusion

We don’t know what kind of gathering the 46^th EPC General Assembly will be, nor do we know what the subsequent months and years will hold for our denomination But no matter what, on the other side we will need to get on with the ordinary and everyday work of proclaiming the Gospel and stewarding the institutions—local churches, presbyteries, and the EPC itself—that God has entrusted to us. The best way to do that will be to inhabit the best gifts of our own particular version of American Presbyterianism: an Old School denomination bearing the best of the Westminster Confession of Faith with the warmth and evangelical spirit of our New Side heritage.

Who does the kingdom of God belong to? In Luke 18:15–17, Jesus welcomes children. He takes them up into his arms, blesses them, and declares that the kingdom of God exclusively belongs to those who are like little children. This is a difficult text for us to hear, for several reasons.

Sometimes this is due to over familiarity with this passage, such that it can seem quaint, cliché, or sentimental. But often we cannot hear it because we have become cynical. Rather than being attentive to God with earnestness and sincerity, we are jaded. Underneath our smirk, there might well be a broken heart. Due to our sin, our suffering, our broken dreams, or some combination of them all, being ‘child-like’ might feel hopelessly out of reach for us.

Differently, it can be hard to listen perceptively to this passage because of our attitudes towards children. 

On one hand, children and childhood are superficially idealized. Popular culture today often pays lip-service to children and childhood; in some ways ‘youth culture’ is increasingly becoming the culture of adults, from the ‘Disney adults’ trend to the juvenlization of American Christianity. Decades ago, concerns were being sounded about adolescence being extended well into adulthood for many. 

On the other, the shadow side of the trend above, children have been treated with contempt in both the ancient and modern worlds. In his 2005 book When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, O. M. Bakke notes how the spread of Christianity overturned attitudes towards children in the Greco-Roman world, most notoriously the exposure of unwanted infants, and the several terrible ways that children were exploited. Sadly, in the modern world some of those attitudes towards children have re-emerged, especially when the value and worth of human beings is reduced to our ability to produce, consume, our expressive ourselves. 

Writing about the feast day of the Holy Innocents last year, Wes Hill notes from writer B. D. McClay’s bluntness about an uncomfortable but unavoidable observation, that people hate children. Not only in faraway places, but all too often in our local contexts in advanced industrial societies, the hospitality and care Jesus exhibits in this passage is denied. What is a child? What are children for? Are children’s qualities desirable, or undesirable? 

It is unsurprising, in their context, that the disciples rebuke those who are bringing children to Jesus; what is shocking is Jesus’s hospitality for these children. The church’s contemplation of what Jesus says and does with children in this passage ultimately led to the assumptions about childhood and rights for children that are common even to non-Christians in the Western world today. 

The narrative itself is ultimately quite simple. While Matthew and Mark include this story, Luke stresses that they are quite young children, “infants.” Helpless infants are being brought to Jesus. The disciples, astonishingly, rebuke this practice. Perhaps they are overly concerned with efficiency or optimizing Jesus’ time and energy. But Jesus is extremely inefficient. What kind of people does Jesus make time for? Here, Jesus welcomes very young children, declares the kingdom of God belongs “to such,” that is, to those who are children and those who are like children.” Mark adds an arresting image, that Jesus “took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them” (10:16). In this stunning moment, Jesus issues an astounding rebuke to the world in our conceitedness and pride: only those who receive the kingdom like a child enter it. How do we do that? We should be wary of drawing abstractions about children in general and then projecting those onto this passage, but we are given crucial context for discerning what it means to receive the kingdom like a child in the surrounding stories in Luke ch. 18. 

All of these stories are about the same basic thing: the posture of heart needed to receive God’s kingdom. In vv. 1–8, Luke introduces the parable of the unjust judge and the persistent widow by expressly telling us its main point: we “ought always to pray and not lose heart.” In vv. 9–14, Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector summons us not to trust in ourselves, but to come to God in an unassuming and unpresumptuous manner, with penitent hearts. In vv. 18–33, the story of the rich young ruler summons us to regard God as our chief treasure, and unconcerned with fleeting wealth. In vv. 35–43, the story of the blind beggar reveals a heart that is unconcerned with pleasing others. This one is especially notable, because it closely parallels Jesus’s encounter with the children. The blind man is crying out “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” He wants to see Jesus. And the people in front of him rebuke him. But rather than complying, he starts crying out even louder than before, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” This is certainly a moment of desperation on the part of this man; those rebuking him seem to think this is an embarrassing moment, or at least a highly inconvenient one, which he should be ashamed of. But they are wrong; Jesus explicitly commends his faith. All of this is crucial context for what it means to become like a child in vv. 15–17: namely, like a helpless and trusting child, the kingdom of God requires a heart that is persistent, penitent, and so captivated with Jesus as to be unconcerned with wealth or the opinions and opposition of other people. 

We become adopted children of God through our union with Christ. We who “by nature are children of wrath” (Eph 2:3) due to our sin become adopted sons and daughters of God by grace (Gal 4:4), because the Holy Spirit unites us with the only Son of God by nature, such that we now address God in him and with him, as “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15).

As the Hymn, “Jesus Friend of Little Children” notes, the incarnate Word knows what it is like to be a child. And as the Christmas hymn “Jesus, Joy of the Highest Heaven” sings, though the eternal Son of God took to himself a truly human nature, he knows what it is like to be a crying baby taking his first breath. As a child, he was “Held by His mother, helpless/ Close to her beating heart” so that you and I might no longer be strangers but become a child of God in him.

Consequently, in the mystery of the gospel, we mature through childlikeness. To be sure, God calls us to become mature in our faith, and naïve towards evil. Paul writes: “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Corinthians 14:20). Simultaneously, in a certain way we nonetheless should also to be infants towards the good, towards God our heavenly Father, like the children Jesus takes in his arms and blesses in this passage, to whom the kingdom belongs. 

For an example of how we miss this, there is a beautiful tradition of Christmas liturgies beginning with the majestic hymn: “Once in Royal David’s City.” Speaking about the mystery of the one who is “God and Lord of All” being born in a stable and placed in a manger, the third verse speaks about the relationship between Jesus and his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom he honour and watched and loved, and was loved by: 

And through all his wondrous childhood
he would honour and obey,
love and watch the lowly maiden,
in whose gentle arms he lay:
Christian children all must be
mild, obedient, good as he.

The immature will dismiss such lyrics as a paean for the young to comply with the fifth commandment and have good manners. However, the mature will perceive in these lines that “Christian children” actually refers to us; Christ’s “wondrous childhood” is paradigmatic for the whole of the Christian life, as we continually rediscover the depths of what it means to be a child of God. That is actually the secret to the verses which conclude the hymn, wherein we advance as children as we grow further up and further into the place where he is gone in heaven:

For he is our childhood's pattern,
day by day like us he grew,
he was little, weak, and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew;
and he feeleth for our sadness,
and he shareth in our gladness.

And our eyes at last shall see him,
through his own redeeming love,
for that child so dear and gentle
is our Lord in heaven above;
and he leads his children on
to the place where he is gone.

Not in that poor lowly stable,
with the oxen standing by,
we shall see him; but in heaven,
set at God's right hand on high;
where like stars his children crowned
all in white shall wait around.

The posture of heart Jesus summons us towards is something so demanding that many of us can scarcely imagine it. Psalm 131 aids our hesitating imagination with an image of such tenderness and beauty that should stir us to reimagine our life before God: 

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time forth and forevermore.

Despite all we must forsake that hinders our attentiveness and vulnerability to God from being like a weaned child with its mother, the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

In my congregation we tend to welcome a lot of babies.

Just this month we saw four new image bearers take their first breath and vault into the first stage of action in the world. Apart from sheer joy for the parents, newborns contribute nothing to the productivity of society. They do not advance the plight of humanity through their efficiency. As Shakespeare says in “As You Like It,” they came in "mewling and puking in their mother's arms". They are, in the best possible way, a burden. Yet the dignity they carry is not dependent on their actions or abilities, but on their personhood.

The reason for this is that from conception we share a common name, the name "human". When a new life enters the world, they are given a personal, human name, signifying their dignity as a person. To take away someone's name is rightfully considered a great evil. In a just society, no one should be fearful of losing their name: even if they are good-for-nothing, or even if they have committed a great crime. The name "human" is given, and the name "human" cannot be taken away.

The art of naming creation is God’s gift to man. What a name does is provide meaning, shape, order, and density to what is named. An unnamed object is a thing, but a named thing becomes a defined being, something alive, something personal. Sometimes we name boats or cars or other inanimate objects, such as AI chatbots, but we do so because they remind us of life and are in themselves “icons” of life. The Christian novelist and poet Madeline L’Engle says it this way: 

God asked Adam to name all the animals, which was asking Adam to help in the creation of their wholeness. When we name each other, we are sharing in the joy and privilege of incarnation, and all great works of art are icons of Naming.

This is what we are created for. Adam and Eve were made by God to “fill the earth and subdue it”, that is: to birth and name human beings and to birth and name the beauty in the world. But as the history of our world continues on from its infancy into greater degrees of societal, cultural, and technological advancement, it becomes harder to enjoy the simple “joy and privilege” of incarnation.  It shouldn't be a surprise that as processors get faster, AI gets smarter, and manufacturing gets easier, that we begin to define our value and worth by means of production and efficiency rather than beauty and relational unity. The more powerful, unnamed “things” we launch into the world, the less capacity we seem to have to take up the sacred work of “naming” and creating living things. 

This is the great warning of Magnifica Humanitas, the recent encyclical written by Pope Leo XIV. In the words of the introduction, "every era runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world... humanity is in danger of marring its true identity." The danger of humanity since the fall of man is not simply that we have the potential to  “unname” or “unhuman” ourselves, but that we have the potential to create an inhuman and “nameless” world, a world where it becomes harder to live humanly. 

As a protestant pastor, I find myself confronted continually with questions from parishioners about how they can maintain humanity in the world we live in. They are concerned they are over-busy, over-distracted, and over-sold. They worry that their children will suffer greater isolation and economic insecurity than they have. Much of this is perceived to be the result of rapid technological advancement creating a more inhuman world. The question before us in 2026, so aptly posed by Magnica Humanitas, is whether we are aware of the potential of such a danger and willing to do something about it.

The Danger of Babel

The negative Biblical example given by Leo of the danger of building an inhumane world is that of the tower of Babel found in Genesis 11. 

[Babel] was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.

Babel was the height of human civilization post flood, the zenith of development, technology, production, and efficiency. "All mankind shared one language" is not just a description of their linguistic unity but their organizational and aspirational unity. They had two goals: first, to get to God, which is why their city became known as Babylon, "gate of the gods"; and second, to achieve cultural and political unity, which is why they feared being “dispersed over the face of the earth”. The problem with Babel was not their goals, but their motivation and methods. Instead of embracing the God-given identity of the name “human”, they sought “to make a name for themselves” (Gen 11:4). 

The primary motivation of Babel was self-glory, and their desire for unity was to build higher and stronger. The fear of being “spread” was simply a fear of the thinning out of influence and power. But what they forgot is, as Leo affirms, the “The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer.” 

But even if we have good motives, we can have bad methods. This is often where we fail in our technological society. Perhaps we desire to do great things for God, but we are not humble enough to depend on God to do them through us. So we expedite the process: we use bricks to get to heaven, rather than suffering. We outsource devotion and prayer to devices that give us answers.  We trade relationships for entertainment. We attempt to multiply and fill the earth not through the slow and patient steadfastness of love, but the frenzied hurry of the next advancement.

The primary method of Babel is technocratic ambition. Their project was technocratic because they based their decisions on the newest technology available to them: hardened bricks and water-proof mortar. They had no time to chop lumber and gather stones, bricks are easier and stronger. No doubt their decision to waterproof their tower was also an attempt to God-proof their tower. Our methods of work in the world become likewise technocratic and “God-proofed” when, in Leo’s words, we let “the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions.” When this happens, technology ceases to become a “tool” and instead becomes a “standard by which everything is judged, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” Our thirst for more powerful and advanced technology is one way we attempt to protect ourselves from the slow and often painful methods of God. Real humanity takes time, and real relationships take attentive focus, sacrifice and suffering. The best way to avoid confronting God is to try to become so technologically powerful that you believe you can afford  to forget him. 

But no matter how tall the tower is built, it cannot reach Heaven apart from God’s methods. In one of the most striking parts of the Magnica Humanitas, Leo affirms the necessity of suffering, dependence, and limitation. 

Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it. To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.

To be a human is to live with and embrace the reality of dependence, and even at times, futility. To try to escape our dependence is to trade eternal goods for temporal gains. Calvin calls this the “world’s perpetual folly: having neglected heaven, to seek immortality on earth, where everything is perishable and passing away.” Until our motivation ends with the increase of God’s glory and not our own, our ambition will always be futile.

In our culture, we use phrases like “find yourself” or “make something of yourself”.  But no one can know himself apart from God and others. No one can name himself. No one can reach Heaven from earth. No one can build a legacy that lasts for eternity. No one can become more than human, regardless of what kind of machine they build. What Babel is teaching us is that such an effort is entirely fruitless, futile, and in the end, destructive. 

Born Again

Magnifica Humanitas ends on a redemptive note, recognizing the only way to protect and recover our humanity in a technocratic age is through incarnation, “the flesh of the Son, poor and vulnerable.” It is in the incarnation where God takes a human name, the name of Jesus. And it is in the incarnation that we receive the grace of being named by God.

What happened at Babel in response to their foolish and godless attempts to get to God is that God himself, in great mercy, “came down” and confused their unity. In giving them multitudes of languages, he gave them all sorts of different “names”. He created the beauty of diversity—but not as an affront to the beauty of unity. What God mercilessly protected the world from was false unity, an inhumane name and an inhumane language, in order that he might deliver them in time back to true unity and heavenly language.

God still frustrates our plans for false unity today. Although our best technological tools can remove the barrier of language and offer instant translation, none of our tools can unharden human hearts towards mutual love, respect, and honor. None of our tools can give humanity back the name they were created for, the name of God. But such frustration need not distract us from what God is really doing. Neither our technological achievements nor our technological failures can prevent God’s plan of unity. Listen to how Herman Bavinck masterfully puts it:

The false unity [of Babel] was violently broken, making room for true unity; the kingdom of the world was shattered, so that the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. Henceforth, the peoples were dispersed and scattered over the earth. Israel was chosen from among these peoples to be the bearer of God's revelation. General and special revelation, hitherto united, separated and remained apart for a time, only to converge again at the foot of the Cross.

Jesus is the king who unbuilt the palace of his presence, brick by brick, so he might rebuild here on earth. This is why we pray “let your kingdom come.” Jesus came down so that he might be lifted up on another man-made instrument, the Roman cross. And the reason for the cross was, in his words, so that “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:38).  What was attempted at Babel in man’s way is fulfilled at Calvary in God’s way. 

As the church just celebrated Pentecost, I am surprised Pope Leo does not bring Pentecost’s promise into his Encyclical. At Pentecost, we see the great glimpse of the way that the earth is unified. Of course, it is not through human power and technological achievement, but through heavenly power and human trembling. The only way for God’s kingdom to come is for him to send it and for us to receive. The only way to learn the language of God, the language of grace and mercy and the language of Heaven, is to learn it as a child does: slowly, by immersion in the love of God and dependent on the speech of God. The only way to be named not just with the name of humanity but the name of God is to be born again, welcomed into the world as a newborn, not of flesh but of Spirit. 

And in the mercy of God, when through the incarnation of God we take on the name of God by the Spirit of God, we are welcomed into the joy of naming and making the world. There lies a great potential for the church to “be fruitful and multiply and have dominion.” With God’s help, and in God’s way, the church of Jesus Christ does not have to settle for an inhumane world of lifeless things, but one alive with the creative diversity and beautiful unity that comes from belonging to God and bearing Christ’s name.

One of my strongest memories from the late 1960s, when I was immersed in what was then called the counterculture, was sporting colored shirts and pink-striped, grey trousers. My colored clothes gave me a deep sense of having been freed from the conformity of early-1960s male fashion with its white shirts, a mark of the chromophobia that has lurked in the Western culture for centuries. 

Chromophobia is, of course, not restricted to the West. An Iranian woman in her twenties recently commented on the various security patrols and checkpoints around the city of Tehran: “I always wear colourful clothes. But now I don’t. I’m afraid of their patrols, worried that if I wear something too bright it might annoy them.” Still, conservative Christianity has often been a purveyor of this distinct suspicion of color. 

Alongside this chromophobia, though, the West, like most other cultures, has long used chromatic terminology to highlight thought and affections. Consider the iconic folk song from the mid-1960s, “California Dreamin’.” It seeks to evoke the bleakness of winter through the use of two chromatic terms: “All the leaves are brown/And the sky is grey.” Brown and grey are the two key words in these lines; they capture perfectly the way that northern climes can be quite depressing during the winter months.

Given the way that our world is flooded with color, it is not surprising that Western culture has frequently turned to chromatic terminology to express ideas and perspectives. Here, for instance, is Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892), the evangelical wonder of Victorian London, commenting on Psalm 19:13a (“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me,” KJV):

This earnest and humble prayer teaches us that saints may fall into the worst of sins unless restrained by grace, and that therefore they must watch and pray lest they enter into temptation. There is a natural proneness to sin in the best of men, and they must be held back as a horse is held back by the bit or they will run into it. Presumptuous sins are peculiarly dangerous. All sins are great sins, but yet some sins are greater than others… It is wrong to suppose that because all sins will condemn us, that therefore one sin is not greater than another. The fact is, that while all transgression is a greatly grievous and sinful thing, yet there are some transgressions which have a deeper shade of blackness, and a more double scarlet-dyed hue of criminality than others.

In this commentary, Spurgeon adroitly uses two colors, black and scarlet, to drive home his argument that there are certain sins, “presumptuous sins” in the words of Psalm 19, that are worse than others. The association of scarlet with sin has biblical warrant (see, for instance, Isaiah 1:18), but the description of sin’s stain as having “a deeper shade of blackness” does not. Spurgeon’s use of the term “blackness” is shaped rather by a cultural idiom that had become commonplace in the Western tradition. That this cultural idiom is alive and well today can be seen in what is sometimes called a “witness bracelet,” worn by some Evangelicals and which is composed of different colored beads with a black bead standing for our sin. In a world where skin color has major social ramifications, this identification of black with sin is profoundly problematic.

My training as a historian in the late 1970s and early 1980s was in the realm of doctrinal concepts, tracing the way that Christian doctrine developed, especially in what is now called Late Antiquity. In other words, I was trained to be an intellectual historian. By the late 1990s, though, influenced by the Annales school of historiography, I had become convinced of the importance of socio-cultural dimensions in all historical research and writing. One cannot divorce the people who wrote works of Christian doctrine from the cultures in which they were immersed. To understand their doctrinal convictions, both their cultural contexts and their lives had to be taken into account. In other words, my concept of what it means to do history became far more holistic.

As I began to broaden my practice of history-writing, I came across the work of Michel Pastoureau (1947‒), the renowned historian of color who is the director of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. His series of works on color as “first and foremost a social phenomenon, one with historically grounded realities and effects” (to quote Roland Betancourt’s foreword to White) has profoundly shaped aspects of my research over the last eight or so years on the way that color has been employed to convey and accentuate elements of the Christian Faith. My new monograph, A Thousand Beauteous Dyes, is an initial attempt—a taster, if you will—at formulating a history of color in the Christian tradition.

The first essay in the monograph traces some aspects of the reception history of Song of Songs 5:10a (“My beloved is white and ruddy,” KJV) from the Reformation to the long eighteenth century, particularly, as it concerns the colors red and pink. The other three essays are more narrowly focused. They look at the chromatic theology of two English Baptist hymnwriters, Anne Steele (1717‒1778) and Benjamin Beddome (1718‒1795), and the assertion by the New England theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703‒1758), who has been well described as “America’s Augustine,” that green was God’s favorite color!

HBO’s Hacks made a splash when it began in 2021. The lead actress is Jean Smart, who plays Deborah Vance, a veteran stand-up comedian looking for a comeback. She finds herself working with an inexperienced comedy writer, Ava Daniels, played by Hannah Einbinder. What initially surprised and captivated audiences was the casting. Jean Smart happens to have been born in 1951. Einbinder was born in the mid-1990s. Audiences and award shows alike have been intrigued by the show’s dark humor and unprecedented celebration of older women. Now, in 2026, the show’s finale has set a different kind of cultural precedent. (Warning, series finale spoilers ahead.)

As we’ve reached the show’s finale, Deborah Vance has achieved everything she hoped for from the first episode of the series. Already a comedy legend, she has regained center stage on her own terms. She has also managed to learn from Ava, while helping Ava mature. Though Deborah has not lost her edge, she is a bit kinder and certainly more capable of friendship at the end of the series. She has even become more open-minded on certain topics.

The show has had a good run and Deborah has had a good run. Should Deborah ride off into the sunset? Comedy shows are notoriously difficult to end well. Despite the passage of time, still no one likes the Seinfeld finale.

Hacks makes a bold choice. In the very final episode, we learn that Deborah has cancer, it is likely fatal, she does not want treatment, and she wants to take a vacation to Paris and then go to Switzerland for assisted suicide. She also wants Ava to come with her. This is one of the first instances of normalizing assisted suicide through plot on a show which is not about medicine or law and which has not had an ongoing illness narrative.

Hacks chooses to interpret assisted suicide through the lens of empowerment. Deborah is sick, but she looks fine and she still feels fine. She wants to die “on her own terms.” She is not choosing death to be put out of her misery, but to avoid misery altogether. Only Ava and Jimmy seem to know about Deborah’s plan. They are both sad and both try to talk Deborah out of it, though Jimmy respects her decision. Jimmy tells Ava that he doesn’t like it, but it is consistent with “her body, her choice.” He understands why Ava doesn’t want to go to Switzerland with Deborah, but says “if you can, I think you should.” Ava is angrier and less accepting. She tries several times to dissuade Deborah from suicide, and is confrontational and openly disapproving. Deborah reminds Ava that she is always preaching about listening to women and respecting women’s right to do what they want with their bodies. In these conversations, Ava feels like her own words are being turned against her. She is always talking about women’s rights and respecting people’s autonomy. Eventually, reluctantly, Ava agrees to go to Europe.

In recent years, assisted suicide has become increasingly legal and mainstream. Once a rare phenomenon in some corners of Europe or a media spectacle around Dr. Kevorkian in America, it is now something else. Assisted dying laws have been hotly debated in England in the past year and medically-assisted dying may soon be legal there. In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) has been shockingly rapidly adopted. MAiD was responsible for 5% of Canadian deaths in 2024. People can seek assisted suicide for a variety of conditions, not all of them fatal. Where assisted death has become legal and more common, it is seen by proponents much like it is portrayed on Hacks, as a way for people to address their illnesses and meet death “on their own terms.”

In 2023, I wrote for Mere Orthodoxy about the need to make MAiD unthinkable. In 2026, it has clearly become more thinkable. The final episode of Hacks ends with Deborah deciding not to do it and agreeing to try medical treatment. This will no doubt allow the episode to be controversial and attract extra attention while avoiding extreme blowback. But it doesn’t negate the episode’s social commentary. By the time Deborah arrives at her ultimate decision, the show has affirmed her right to suicide and has normalized assisted suicide. Even Ava is on board. In fact, she’s literally about to board the train to Switzerland when Deborah slows down and decides against it.

In recent years, many people have taken up the pen to outline the reasons for Christian opposition to assisted suicide. They are worth reviewing, but I will not revisit them here. I would like to examine the nature of this portrayal of assisted dying on Hacks and what makes it more serious than some others.

All television shows involve fiction, but there is more than a stretch of the imagination between Deborah Vance and most people who pursue assisted suicide. The fictional comedienne is absurdly rich, in her right mind, and not yet feeling the effects of any illness. This presents the decision as something not brought about by necessity. And Deborah has told almost no one, so she is under no pressure to pursue it. If anything, she is only receiving pressure to try medical treatment instead. 

The reality of medically assisted suicide is very different. Not only are most people not extremely wealthy, they are often suffering in some form. That may be from a terminal illness or it may be from a long-term condition that seems overwhelming. In Canada, people have ended their lives because of depression and anorexia, in addition to more expected conditions. Deborah makes her decision under no pressure from pain, but some form of pain is nearly always at play with assisted dying. 

On Hacks, euthanasia was clearly Deborah’s choice, one which should be respected. In reality, some people are pressured to accept MAiD. It may be that the burden of caring for them seems overwhelming to those around them. Sometimes assisted suicide is the result of caregiver burnout or patient guilt. Though it is a criminal offense to pressure someone into MAiD in Canada, there have been safeguard failures. Some doctors in Canada have expressed concern about pressure to recommend MAiD to patients. In the UK, opponents of a recent assisted dying bill highlighted that the bill had insufficient safeguards for protecting patients from pressure, from family or medical professionals. Assisted dying is likely not to be an expression of autonomy as it is on Hacks, it can actually signal a lack of autonomy. 

On Hacks, Deborah’s ability to choose her own death affirms her dignity. So much of the entire series has been about her overcoming stereotypes and limitations and taking on the world, in her own way. Assisted dying would mean taking on death in her own way, too. When we look at the scope of conditions and suffering among MAiD patients, we see that MAiD denies the dignity of the suffering and those who need care. It denies the possibility of a meaningful life for many people. The representation on Hacks is harmful because it is dishonest about dignity in assisted dying. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian critic Vissarion Belinsky became known as the “conscience of the intelligentsia.” He evaluated books for their writing, but he also judged books as good or bad based on their relationship to the truth. He expected fictional characters and entertaining plots, but if a book was dishonest about the nature of reality and social conditions, he judged it a bad book. When Gogol, who Belinsky had idolized, wrote a book which portrayed serfs as happy in their oppressed state and upheld the knout and illiteracy as proud traditions, Belinsky was beyond disappointed. His public, scathing “Letter to Gogol” was so widely read and appreciated that it was memorized by many young Russians. In the opening salvo, Belinsky wrote that “one cannot endure an outraged sense of truth and human dignity.” 

Everything about the portrayal of Deborah’s decision on Hacks is so distant from reality as to be a harmful distortion of reality. It leaves one with an “outraged sense of truth and human dignity.” At the end of that letter to Gogol, Belinsky writes directly to his former idol: “This is not a question of your or my personality; it concerns a matter that is of greater importance than myself or even you; it is a matter that concerns the truth, Russian society, Russia.” To echo Belinsky, this is not a matter of liking or disliking Hacks, which most Mere Orthodoxy readers likely already do not watch (it is pretty R-rated). Even if they did, the show is over now. This is a matter of greater importance, concerning the truth. Our response should be directed beyond Hacks, to broader society.

Belinsky understood the importance of literature. In nineteenth-century Russia, especially, literature was more than only entertainment, it was a method for communicating worldview and political ideals. In all times and places, stories have a way of sinking into how we view the world and a way of shaping our opinions on things. This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin affected people in a way that many existing non-fiction abolitionist efforts did not.

At present, we have an existing and growing body of non-fiction essays and books that argue for a Christian view of human dignity that is inherently opposed to medically assisted dying. What we need more of, and more attention to, is stories—books, movies, television—that emphasize human dignity, in suffering and dying, and which affirm Christian beliefs about suffering and death. And those stories need to be good. In the Hacks series finale, Ava’s grief and distress is moving and portrayed sympathetically, but so is Deborah’s desire for dignity. The scales tip, but not so dramatically that we feel we are being preached at, even if we are.  

Joan Didion wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We also need stories to know how to die. For a long time now, most Western Christians have participated in the broader cultural trend of looking away from death and avoiding thinking about it very much. During the Civil War, Americans still had a sense of a “good death.” Now, we don’t know enough about death to grasp the relationship between human dignity and death. This has probably never been healthy for people whose faith hinges on Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. But now our ignorance about death and dignity poses an increasing threat to life. It is time to get our story straight.

John presses a finger to his terminal. There is a soft chime. Therapy has begun. 

Some text appears on the glowing screen. “(I’m registering that you’ve selected the ‘Simply Human’ agent for today’s session. You can return to the ‘Ancient Light’ module at any time.) Hello, John! It’s good to see you. Would you like to continue where we left off? How is work at your dad’s restaurant going?” John slowly types away: “It’s been really busy. We’re still understaffed and Dad can’t afford to hire anyone else. It’s been 10, 12 hour days sometimes, a lot of work. But the restaurant is struggling, so I think it’s worth it. It’s important to honor my dad. The restaurant is all he has after leaving Cambodia.” 

The screen answers: "That’s a heavy load to carry. That reminds me of something you brought up five sessions ago: working somewhere else could mean getting to do what you love, with clearer boundaries, without the family pressure layered on top. Some people find that actually strengthens their family relationships too—when work stress isn’t constantly mixing with family dynamics. So it might be worth just sitting with one honest question: if the family obligation weren’t part of the equation, what would you actually want to do?” John stares at the terminal. Maybe it is time to leave."*

***

What Leo is Trying to do

Pope Leo XIV’s chosen name is a deliberate callback to Leo XIII’s work, which addressed the pressing concerns of labor during the Industrial Revolution. Magnifica Humanitas describes Leo XIII’s major 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, as a “milestone in the development of the Church’s social teaching,” centering “the dignity of work and of workers,” a “‘Magna Carta’ of Christian social action” (§30). It is no accident Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, signaling a document that will revisit and expand these questions around “work and workers” in light of the artificial intelligence revolution, proposing a variety of measures to protect human dignity from the excesses of the machine horizon.

Leo frames the encyclical with an arresting image of the paths before us (§§7-10): on the one, the socially flattening, language-unifying Tower of Babel, which reduces humanity to efficient means in pursuit of self-glory, and on the other, Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem, the solidarity of a people who value the weak and forgotten, working together in harmony to build the earthly city brick by brick.

Far from treating it as ontologically evil, Leo approaches artificial intelligence as a non-neutral tool (§104) with great potential for both good and evil. Many of his concerns on the negative front will be familiar: job disruption, mass unemployment, autonomous weapon systems untethered from human decision-making trees, algorithmic credit sorting and approval systems—a panoply of dehumanizing automation that artificial intelligence threatens to greatly accelerate. Leo also rightly worries about the models themselves; artificial intelligence is not neutral, and any sort of post-alignment settlement will simply let the models perpetuate the secular moral values of their creators (§§102-107).

Leo proposes a variety of anthropological and structural responses to the risks artificial intelligence poses to human dignity. Critically, these prescriptions are grounded in a continuation of traditional Catholic Social Teaching, emphasizing religious freedom (Dignitatis Humanae, §34) and a pluralistic approach that rejects empty proceduralism (§134) while centering the objective truth of the Gospel, each of us interpreting and reflecting truth through interwoven lives (“a multifaceted polyhedron,” §25).

This vision of the Gospel “is not imposed from above, but grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures” (§25). The anthropological, character-forming strategies are grounded in natural law that exists prior to (rather than dependent on) state power and is accessible to all who seek it (§56), are witnessed to in a wide variety of paragons across traditions (§§124-126, §223), and find their ultimate expression in the Eucharist as celebrated within the bounds of the Church (§229, §§234-235). 

The structural responses operate at the political level and involve a defense grounded in Catholic subsidiarity–the notion that matters of governance should be resolved at the lowest possible level. The structural solutions are pluralistic in nature: refuse the monopolistic tendencies of megacorporations, ensure regulatory frameworks allow for data to be treated as a common good, ensure democratic participation in the moral alignment of models, and so on. Perhaps most importantly, in §107, Leo writes:

We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.

And instead of elite (or American) values determining the moral structures of AI, Leo argues that a faithful commitment to and recognition of social justice “is not only a goal to be safeguarded after technologies are deployed, but a condition that must shape their very design from the outset” (§109). In other words, it is not enough to tack on some sort of post-training moral correction after the models and their behavior are largely settled in non-neutral (perhaps anti-human dignity) ways, but to ensure the models are trained under Catholic Social Teaching through social and political mechanisms routed through democratic participation.

***

Why Magnifica Humanitas Falls Short

Magnifica Humanitas offers freely chosen prescriptions to correct the defective secular anthropology at the heart of modern culture’s use of artificial intelligence. Leo writes eloquently about us coming to recognize truths available to reason, such as the innate dignity of humanity, but the full mechanism that would enact this internal change across the institutions that affect artificial intelligence at the development and policy level is not entirely clear, and perhaps this is because it is unlikely to prevail. 

There are three reasons for this. The first revolves around the nature of the institutions that shape our artificial intelligence models. The second has to do with the nature of the cultural and political order in which these labs operate. The third rests in the formative nature of the technology.

First, a cluster of network-level difficulties exists at the lab and training level. The moral structures in this space, as Leo recognizes, are characterized by technocratic efficiency and self-actualization, a spiritual “sickness” where “modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society” (§133). These moral values exist as a kind of ambient framework, something readers familiar with Charles Taylor will recognize as a particularly strong expression of the dominant Western social imaginary, or something like the preformed assumptions about life and practice that form a culture’s tacit boundary of internal plausibility. 

Top AI engineers and researchers are often drawn from a remarkably small set of elite university programs governed by a secular monoculture, skilled professionals who then work in environments that share this monoculture. Silicon Valley may fight (often viciously) over philosophy and business practices, but these conflicts are more intramural than truly cross-cultural, occurring within a Western framework that tilts strongly toward secularism. And so the labs in this space tend to converge on similar post-training RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) alignment or behavioral policies—largely harm reduction and valuing individual autonomy and expression. 

As a result, the idea of spending resources to push the models’ weights toward an ethical system that, they believe, treats women as ontologically incapable of becoming priests and is staunchly anti-choice is spiritually repulsive to the researchers who run these labs, to say nothing of governments that will regulate out of existence any alignment training that condones Catholic sexual ethics more broadly. It may be true that “the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us” (§130), but such formation must still survive through and then operate in an overwhelmingly secular landscape.

Even if these spiritually formative practices successfully inculcate Jerusalem-over-Babel into a new class of Catholic technologists, it is unclear how the anthropological postures Leo celebrates could reach technological design as it is currently implemented, for the problem exists down a layer: if every frontier lab were founded by members of Opus Dei and adopted rigorous, Thomistic-inflected alignment practices on “social criteria for innovation” (§156), the training data would still be largely secular and Western, overwhelmingly produced by people formed outside the faith. 

Not only is the grain of the data secular, but the process of using training data is itself a kind of technical proceduralism that flattens normative authority. Artificial intelligence models are built on a process that starts with reducing both a Papal encyclical and an anonymous Reddit thread down to statistical noise. Attempts to inject a distinctively Catholic social justice into the current models are a category error—these parameters are fundamentally mathematical and can neither internalize nor relate the non-propositional content of Catholic Social Teaching. Frequency patterns cannot experience the Eucharist. The “invisible infrastructure” (§107) Leo worries about is already here. True, both the network effects and the training data are contingent rather than necessary facts. But so is the Pacific Ocean.

Yet even if we granted all the contingent factors (the leaven is not extinguished, the seed is not choked, §34, §210), the design-shaping solutions on offer face another set of severe problems. There is a world in which frontier AI labs largely adopt the calls of Magnifica Humanitas. The top three AI corporations, whoever they might be in this rapidly changing ecosystem, having met the capital-intensive demands of initial training and now focused on inference and deployment, all decide to refuse further consolidation. They largely decline to service autonomous weapons platforms. They reduce or curtail algorithmic credit sorting. They create a “common good” framework for data sharing. And in an unprecedented move at significant cost to themselves, these megacorporations spin off a couple dozen smaller institutions that cater directly to particular industries or demographics, consciously modifying post-training alignment to include a variety of moral and cultural perspectives that are attentive to regional and religious backgrounds. All of these models include the option of selecting which general moral framework the user would like to operate under before beginning some line of inquiry or work—say, Catholic Social Teaching for a Washington, D.C. think tank, Halakha for a synagogue in Manhattan, or Maqasid al-Shariah for a town council in Michigan. These are the runtime parameters of the new social order: “human-friendly and restoring [technology] to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life…disarmed, welcoming and accessible” (§110).

The difficulty here is one Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Some policy wins in this space would be goods that could operate in principle, but they are orthogonal to the anthropology being shaped by the technology. A world of Catholic-aligned labs and models would still be one dominated by a culture and polity in which a secular juridical and administrative frame imposes its liberal tradition under the guise of neutrality, for there is no tradition-neutral viewpoint that can adjudicate them. The religious pluralism of Dignitatis Humanae (§34) acts like a vise here. Integralism is surely wrong, but refusal comes with costs: if the Church, as Leo has argued, must not impose its metaphysical values on the surrounding culture but allow them to be freely chosen, then it necessarily enters the modern square as one option among many. The Thomistic tradition may claim that reason discovers values that apply to everyone (§56), but the liberal order will transmute a claim of universally available reason into a contestable metaphysics. Either a shared commitment to thick moral standards must be imposed or the democratic dialogue of “openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved” (§107) subjects Catholic Social Teaching to the commensurability demanded by the procedural system. John might choose a communitarian honoring “Ancient Light” model for his therapy sessions, but the very act of choosing is to submit to the framework in which a Christian anthropology that demands we honor our parents is but one menu option among many.

How could Christians advocate for theologically informed changes to secular AI models in a system that seems to foreclose their distinctive moral claims? MacIntyre’s resolution would sit outside the liberal framework rather than within it. Christianity and liberalism will likely continue as competing traditions, handing down knowledge and practices to their adherents, generation after generation. Eventually epistemological crises will rise in liberalism that cannot be resolved on liberalism’s own terms, but can be answered by Christianity’s resources, and this is where Christianity would be vindicated. It is in this diachronic, tradition-laden process that, perhaps over centuries, Christianity (or Thomism on MacIntyre’s account) will triumph. At least that is the wager. So perhaps Leo could be content with sitting at the table of liberal proceduralism rather than hoping to argue through it—a living witness to the Church’s social teaching and practice, a means of eventually persuading the world to adopt what can be knowable by all who are rightly formed.

MacIntyre’s process of rational vindication requires communities and subjects inhabiting traditions and arguing over generations. In particular, it requires individuals to be willing to live within traditions long enough for them to become legible and navigable, something like learning a second language enough that it becomes the first. Leo’s position, if it admits the contingent infrastructure difficulties outlined above, would be similar, requiring faithful dialogue in the public square over decades, even centuries, with rational interlocutors from other traditions. Perhaps we can grant that the frontier labs decide to decelerate the technology and “slow things down” (§107) enough to give dialogue some breathing room. The challenge here is not so much in persuasion but in having a culture that has the patience required to deeply know—to inhabit—competing traditions. 

Older forms of technology, like books and television, formed their audiences in specific ways but still pointed to encounters with real communities of shared practice, environments where novices could be apprenticed under masters and inculcated into a living tradition. Artificial intelligence models that are aimed at the wrong ends can create an ersatz form of this encounter, with dialogue and engagement wrapped in sticky anthropomorphic feedback mechanisms—available around the clock, open to chatting about virtually any subject, customized to know your history, and designed to speak in ways that are attentive to your unique preferences. A living tradition stands above its subject, disciplining and correcting it, while a chatbot aimed at formation pretends to be the servant while ever shaping its user. Even if a Christian artificial intelligence model were to teach Christian doctrine to its users, the mode can never replace the full teaching relationship Christ has set out for us, that between the Church’s elders—her pastors, bishops, and priests—and its faithful members. These models are not just secular as static entities, but continuously and pervasively secular interactive mediums, their priors and unique mode of engagement relentlessly reinforced and reiterated across multiple domains of society. The Church has the formative tools to resist this. But those outside will be more susceptible and the public vindication of one tradition over another risks becoming impossible.

Soon Leo will be dialoguing with a people formed by a machine intelligence that propagates counterfeit inhabitation, one that accustoms people to experience Christianity by asking a chatbot to teach them the Nicene Creed.

***

Outside the Camp, Bearing Disgrace

For those of us outside the Catholic tradition, our posture of faithful witness should remain the same. We will continue to form communities that refuse to adopt wholesale the most disfiguring aspects of modern technology. The same shared theological culture that domesticates cars, television, computers, smartphones, and social media as means rather than ends can also refuse to deploy artificial intelligence in ways that undermine our commitment to faithfully receiving and preaching the Word in a fallen world. The costs will be real, sometimes staggering, but so it has been for Christians in every age, even the age of artificial intelligence.

“Let us, then, go to him outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come.” –Hebrews 13:13-14

***

Sometime later John meets with his father. He is leaving the restaurant. “Self-care is important too, Dad.”

The tower rises to the heavens, fired brick by brick in the kiln of proceduralism.

* This dialogue is designed to resonate with §100 of Magnifica Humanitas and is partially drawn and paraphrased from several therapy roleplay sessions I generated in Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7. I drew on my childhood growing up in a mixed Chinese-American house to develop plausible scenarios driven by a fundamental conflict between communal honor or filial obligation and individual happiness. The resemblance to AI output is intentional.

For the past few months my daughter has been talking about “Lincoln Lincoln.” When she was about a year old, my wife and I stopped by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield. We walked through and took it all in as it traced Lincoln’s life from his small Kentucky upbringing to the White House and ultimately to his death.

This time my daughter was a bit older. During that first visit we had bought her a little Abraham Lincoln board book, which she loves — especially its description of Mary Lincoln as “short and plump.” But this time I was coming off several harder months with anxiety, something I have battled for much of my adult life. It isn’t fun, but it isn’t defining either. It is not what I am but something I deal with — part of living in a fallen world, and a constant reminder of my creaturely dependence.

As we walked through the museum, I was encountering a side of Lincoln I hadn’t before. Lincoln was certainly endowed with gifts. That much is apparent to anyone who has ever read his writings — he belongs, in my estimation, alongside Whitman and Twain. But Lincoln is also very human: a man with his own struggles and weaknesses, his own darkness and his own hard-won resilience. It was this Lincoln I had in mind as I walked through the museum, and it is that Lincoln who has inspired me to write this piece.

In modern American memory, there are few leaders as towering as Abraham Lincoln. And yet Lincoln often thought very little of himself. He was of course known for his humor, often self-deprecating. Lincoln, always the master of locution, used such humor to disarm opponents, charm audiences during speeches, and to manage his lifelong battle with “the hypo” — short for hypochondriasis — or what we would simply call melancholy.

During a debate in 1858 with Stephen A. Douglas, his longtime Illinois rival, Lincoln once responded to Douglas’ accusation of two-facedness with the rebuttal: “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I’d wear this one?”

It is ironic, of course, that Lincoln would make light of his homeliness — because his face was always easy to read. Joshua Speed, one of Lincoln’s early Springfield friends, commented that he had never seen “so gloomy and melancholy a face” as that of young Lincoln. Speed owned Bell & Co., a general store, and would be Lincoln’s roommate for several years.

I’m certainly not the first one to see the theme of melancholy in the life of Lincoln. Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy covers the topic in full. Shenk writes about Lincoln less in mythic imagery and more in human terms. The Lincoln he presents is a man, not a legend — one who struggles, deals with internal contradiction (especially regarding slavery), but who returns again and again to one recurring theme that prompted this essay: melancholy.

Lincoln’s correspondence throughout his life is punctuated with this reality. When Joshua Speed confided his fear and anxiety at the thought of marrying Fanny Henning — caught up in internal torment, wondering if he could ever love her the way she deserved — Lincoln, no stranger to such nascent doubts, replied in 1842: “Remember in the depth and even the agony of despondency, that very shortly you are to feel well again.”

It is this side of Lincoln that is most endearing to me. I too battle anxiety — often debilitating, though by no means a defining feature of who I am. When life changes, as it often does, my body responds with a cocktail of upset stomach, racing heart, insomnia, and a sense of impending doom. But as I listen to Oates tell about Lincoln, I can’t help but find inspiration in the man.

So where did it begin? It was most likely hereditary — but Lincoln also suffered a series of crippling losses: the deaths of his brother, mother, and older sister. And yet, despite all of this, he would rise to become one of the giants of American politics. There are of course those who criticize Lincoln’s presidency. Some argue he was the seed of an ever-expanding federal government. The suspension of civil liberties during the Civil War lends further weight to the charge of tyranny. Yet even those who hold such views — and I do not, though I was once tempted — will find it hard to deny that Lincoln’s melancholy reveals a leader who was a man before he was a monument. Without Lincoln, the Union would not have been preserved. If the cloth that held the Union together could be reduced to a single thread, that thread would be Abraham Lincoln.

Modern leaders hide their sorrow and pain. For the better part of a century, the presidency has projected a polished image — a facade of splendor that is rarely the reality. The presidential life is not a blessing but a burden, however much the public celebrates it. Lincoln was the right leader for his times precisely because he was not perfect — he was a man endowed with gifts and humbled by the melancholy that plagued him.

So how does this encourage me? If Lincoln could face melancholy and press on — if he could persevere until he reached the highest office in the land — it gives me courage that I too can push through my own battles. It is Lincoln the man, not Lincoln the monument, whom I most relate to. And so we turn to the origins of that melancholy.

Lincoln had two notable breakdowns in his life — one in 1835 and another six years later in 1841.

Young Lincoln was engaged to marry Ann Rutledge. He had met her while boarding with her family during his early days in New Salem. When Lincoln arrived, Ann was still a teenager of about eighteen. She was short and commanded the attention of many a suitor. In 1832 she became engaged to John McNeil — a young man so embarrassed by his father’s business failures that he changed his last name from McNamar to escape the burden of the family name. McNeil was determined, however, to reclaim his father’s name and honor, and so he set out for New York to help his father settle his debts. While he was gone, young Lincoln swooped in. Despite his misgivings about his own abilities, Lincoln began to court Ann. When it became apparent that McNeil was not going to return, they prepared to wed.

One summer day in 1835, Ann fell sick with typhoid. She died in August of that same year.

Lincoln was torn apart by her death. Robert Rutledge commented that “the effect upon Mr. Lincoln’s mind was terrible; he became plunged in despair, and many of his friends feared that reason would desert her throne.”

Not long after, Lincoln met Mary Todd, whom he would eventually marry in 1842. But on January 1, 1841 — a day Lincoln would later refer to as “that fatal first of Jany” — he broke off the engagement. Reasons abound as to why, but recalling the advice he would later give to Joshua Speed, it seems reasonable to presume that Lincoln likewise battled an anxiety of love — a hesitation he could not overcome.

Upon calling off the engagement, Lincoln wrote to his first law partner, John T. Stuart: “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.” William Herndon, Lincoln’s third law partner and one of the men Lincoln trusted above all others — Herndon would remain by his side through many political failures — described his friend as “a sad-looking man; his melancholy dripped from him as he walked. His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him.”

Lincoln was well acquainted with loss. It touched nearly every walk of his life. Before Lincoln was old enough to remember, his infant brother Thomas Lincoln Jr. died.

In 1818, his mother Nancy Hanks died an untimely death from milk sickness. According to Francis Browne, as she lay ill, young Abraham would sit by her bedside and read whatever portions of the Bible she wished to hear. As she listened, she would occasionally interject — encouraging him to walk in honor, goodness, and truth. She died, and Abraham, not yet ten years old, felt the full weight of loss for the first time.

Later in life Lincoln would lose not one son but two. Eddie died of tuberculosis in 1850. Willie — by many accounts the son Lincoln loved most deeply, intellectually gifted and temperamentally close to his father — died of typhoid fever in 1862, in the White House, at eleven years old.

Lincoln was well acquainted with grief, and his melancholy was more than justified by what he had suffered. What is remarkable is not that he felt it but that he carried on. Melancholy has a way of making the next step feel impossible — the weight of what has been lost presses down on the present until forward motion seems not just difficult but meaningless. And yet Lincoln moved forward. He bore not only his private grief but the accumulated sorrow of a nation tearing itself apart (as we will see) — and he did so with a tenderness and a moral seriousness that the losses themselves had formed in him.

As I walked through the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, I couldn't help but reflect on this. Lincoln — the man, not the marble monument we have made of him — was a deeply broken man. And yet he carried on.

Lincoln walked up the steps of the Illinois statehouse — the building stood like a Greek pantheon in the center of Springfield. His law office, which he shared with Billy Herndon, overlooked the capitol. From his second-story window he could see the building’s towering Greco-Roman pillars rising at the back.

He had been up late waiting on the tallies. Now it was settled: Lincoln had won the presidency. The rail-splitter candidate — born in the backwoods of Kentucky — was president-elect of the United States.

The race had been anything but ordinary. The Democratic Party had imploded. Stephen Douglas, a short, stocky, fiery man from Illinois, had split from John C. Breckinridge, a Southern Democrat from Kentucky, and the fracture had proved fatal to both. Douglas was hard to pin down on slavery — if not downright contradictory. Would slavery reign in the territories or not? Would popular sovereignty rule the land? Douglas often dodged the question with the vague phrase “unfriendly legislation,” a formulation that satisfied nobody. Breckinridge was harder to misread. A thoroughgoing Southern hardliner, he ran on an explicitly pro-slavery platform, demanding federal protection of slavery in the territories — no hedging, no ambiguity.

The split fractured the Democratic vote and opened the door for Abraham Lincoln — who detested the moniker “Abe” — to walk straight into the presidency.

As Lincoln climbed the statehouse steps that morning, men pressed forward to hail him president-elect. He received their congratulations with the quiet dignity that would come to define him. And yet there was a weight beneath it all, a burden he carried even in the moment of triumph. The death threats had been arriving almost daily — scrawled notes, anonymous and ugly, stacking up on his desk (one showing the Devil casting Lincoln into the fires of hell). Southern newspapers were savaging him. In some towns his effigy had been burned in the streets. He was president-elect of a nation that was already coming apart at the seams — and he knew it.

Lincoln was always a melancholy man. Carl Shurz, a Lincoln biographer, would write that while Lincoln was a man who enjoyed reading and pondering — often staring off into space and thinking — he was also given to “strange spells of melancholy, from which he often would pass in a moment to rollicking outbursts of droll humor.” Francis Browne called this his “pensive melancholy” disposition which he inherited from his mother.

As Lincoln marched up the stairs, he was marching toward the future — a future marred by uncertainty. The nation was threatening to break apart at the seams, and yet it was to him they turned.

There are a few reasons for Lincoln’s resilience. First, he had been forged by failure. His story was not built on success after success but rather on the ruins of crushed attempts and broken dreams. He had lost races for the Illinois state legislature, two races for the U.S. Senate, and a race for the vice presidential nomination — all of this on top of the personal losses already mentioned.

What these failures produced was a man undeterred by defeat and undaunted by the prospect of failure. Most of the generals and politicians of his era were always positioning themselves for the next political opportunity. General McClellan is a perfect example. During the Civil War he was conflict-avoidant, in part because he knew he would eventually — and indeed did — run for the presidency. His caution on the battlefield was inseparable from his ambition off it.

As Doris Kearns Goodwin has shown in Team of Rivals, Lincoln had been forged by failure in a way his rivals had not. He was immune to the threat it posed, and as such he was able to carry on in spite of it.

Lincoln was also, as this essay aims to show, chronically melancholic. Joshua Shenk writes that:

“Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.”

In other words, Lincoln’s melancholy was far from a liability — it was an asset. It fueled him. He wrestled with it, and often won. His lifelong experience of contending with darkness gave him a moral register that more cheerful men simply could not reach. He had lived too long in the shadows to flinch from what he found there.

And so when he assessed the challenge of a nation split in two, he felt it. Lincoln understood the cosmic weight of what had been placed on his shoulders. He felt the burden of the Union’s cause as a man feels grief: personally, physically, without the comfortable distance of mere political calculation.

In his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, he closed with words that captured this sense of sacred obligation: “The struggle of today is not altogether for today — it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.” And likewise, in the very same speech, he called the present war a “fiery trial.” An ordeal unlike anything the nation has known.

Lincoln, whatever challenges his melancholy pressed upon him, was always thinking about the cause he believed had been Providentially placed in his hands. In a letter dated December 22, 1860, to Alexander Stephens, he wrote: "I fully appreciate the present peril the country is in, and the weight of responsibility on me." Lincoln bore the weight of the nation as his own — the country's burden became his burden. This is the mark of a great leader, and only a man with his own long experience of struggle could write such a sentence and mean it.

On September 24, 1862, responding to the Emancipation Proclamation, he said: “What I did, I did after very full deliberation, and under a heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. I can only trust in God that I have made no mistake.” Again, he framed his actions in the context of divine will.

Allen Guelzo has written a helpful assessment of Lincoln’s faith in Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President — I won’t rehash the whole argument here. I remain fairly ambivalent about Lincoln as a Christian in any formal sense, and instead follow the line of thought that he was deeply indebted to his Calvinist upbringing. Whether that amounted to a genuine personal faith, only God knows.

The most private expression of Lincoln’s anguish is his “Meditation on the Divine Will,” written in 1862. Oates describes this as something of a turning point in Lincoln’s discourse about God. This meditation is lesser known — so much so that the collected works I employed for this piece did not even include it. The fragment was found and preserved, according to Abraham Lincoln Online, by John Hay — a White House secretary who noted that it was written not to be seen by others but as a personal reflection. Lincoln was a serious, anguished soul, and this document shows it more plainly than almost anything else he left behind. I am going to quote it in its entirety:

“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party — and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true — that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”

Lincoln, just as he had come to understand that his own suffering was preparation for a greater purpose, found in this meditation that God’s purposes were at work in the conflict itself. Despite the human carnage, the destruction, the immense loss — God “wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.”

In the same year, Lincoln wrote a letter to miss Fanny McCullough dated December 23, 1862. In it Lincoln extends comfort to Fanny on the loss of her father. He writes that “in this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares.” It’s hard not to hear Lincoln’s own loss at a young age — the loss of his mother. He goes on: “the older have learned ever to expect it.” To expect loss and sorrow is certainly true and yet Lincoln doesn’t leave her in her anguish. He offers a glimmer of hope: “you are sure to be happy again…I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once.”

As I walked around the Lincoln Presidential Museum, I was struck by how Lincoln’s struggle was itself a blessing — without it he would not have been the person he was, nor the president he was. The nation would not exist today were it not for Lincoln. He bore the struggle as his own, carried it as his own, and ultimately sacrificed for it.

Biographers capture an unsettling story. One day Lincoln, seeking some much-needed rest from the many political friends pressing him for positions in his administration, went home and lay down on the sofa in his chamber. As he rested, he looked across the room at a looking glass on his dresser and saw his own reflection. But his face had two separate and distinct images. He got up, walked over, and the illusion disappeared. He went and lay back down — and saw it again. This time it was clearer than before. Two faces: one alive with color, the other pale and deathly. When he told Mary, she was disturbed and believed it foretold that he would survive his first term but would not live through his second. Lincoln reflected that “the thing would come up once in a while and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened.”

As someone who deals with anxiety, it was encouraging to find Lincoln wrestling with the “hypo” that shadowed him throughout his life. And yet despite his battle he overcame — he grew, he learned how to look his suffering in the eye and draw from it rather than be destroyed by it.

As a Christian, I take comfort in the fact that Jesus is neither stoic nor aloof, but intimately acquainted with suffering. I’ve been reflecting on Hebrews 2:17, which says that “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.” Jesus sweat drops of blood in Gethsemane. He felt the full anguish of impending suffering — and yet he endured it.

I am glad to worship a God who knows what I am going through. But it was also quietly comforting to walk through that museum and encounter Lincoln — this towering figure in American history — and discover that he was, like me, a regular person who had to face his struggles one day at a time and press on anyway.

God whose service is perfect freedom ~ Book of Common Prayer

Psalm 1 begins: “Blessed is the man . . . [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord.”

But we live in a time when many loud voices defiantly cry out like the kings in Psalm 2: “Let us break their bonds asunder and cast away their cords from us.” 

An advertising jingle I heard some years ago has stuck with me. It echoes the rebellious cry of the kings in David’s time:  

To know no boundaries,
To let yourself run free,
To know no boundaries,
That’s what the world should be.

I don’t remember what that jingle was advertising, but I do remember thinking: “What a succinct encapsulation of one of the world’s headiest ideals—no boundaries, complete freedom!” But the world doesn’t think it through. What, after all, would a world without boundaries look like? 

Consider the picture that accompanied the jingle. It showed a handsome, powerful bull trotting along a shoreline. A bull, of course, has very clear boundaries. Without boundaries where is his beauty of shape—in fact, where is the bull? Without boundaries there is no bull. Without boundaries where is his graceful trot and untapped power? Without four legs as distinct from the head, the torso, the horns, and the tail, his beauty of movement would not be possible. 

Further, it would be impossible without each of the muscles involved performing its particular function in rhythm with the others. Without boundaries there would be no beauty of shape or grace of movement. There would not even be a shoreline for the bull to trot along, and such a visually appealing and rhythmically catchy commercial would have been impossible.

I have removed only a few of the boundaries from that picture. What would the world be like if there really were no boundaries? Shakespeare answered beautifully in Troilus and Cressida:

Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite. [1.03.109-124]

Before Creation there were no boundaries. “The earth was without form and void; and darkness was over the face of the deep.” Then God said . . . and God separated . . . and God formed. . .  “And God saw that it was good.” [Genesis 1:25b]

But man has rebelled against boundaries from the beginning. In Eden God set a very limited boundary regarding the eating of fruit. He put a boundary around only one of the many trees in the garden. But when Eve and Adam ate fruit from the bounded tree, they were driven out of the garden. They didn’t gain freedom; they lost the garden. Freedom didn’t come from violating the boundary. It would have come if they had obeyed God’s restriction and respected the boundary. Obedience would have led to freedom; disobedience led to slavery, a paradox Thomas Howard explains well in An Antique Drum (later published as Chance or the Dance?).

The implication of the Adam and Eve story is that if they had bowed to the interdict placed in the forbidden fruit, life and not death would have been the guerdon. That is, paradoxically, if they had knuckled under to what looked emphatically like a denial of their freedom (“Thou shalt not” is not a very convincing corollary to the “Have dominion” charge), they would have discovered something unimaginable to them—something that, according to the story, was at that very point lost to them and us for the duration of human time. 

Psalm 104 tells of a time when God removed a boundary as punishment. When he “saw that the wickedness of man was great in earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” [Genesis 6:5], he removed the boundary between the waters above and the waters below. He covered the earth “with the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.” [Psalm 104:5] But in his kindness he restored the boundary.

At your rebuke the waters fled; 
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight. 
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down 
to the place you appointed for them. 
You set a boundary they may not pass
so that they might not again cover the earth. [Psalm 104:6-9]

Startling juxtapositions of law and freedom run throughout Scripture. The God who gave the Law—boundaries—to his people is the one who delivered them from “the house of bondage.” The author of Psalm 119 wrote, without flinching, that keeping the law results in freedom. 

I will keep your law continually, 
forever and ever; 
and I shall walk at liberty, 
for I have sought your precepts. [vs. 44-45] 

Paul, in one breath, says “you were called to freedom” and “be servants of one another” (Galatians 5:13), and James wrote to his church about the “law of liberty” (1:25). Since then many theologians have joined the choir, adding variations to the theme. 

Rudolph Bultman:

Genuine freedom is freedom from the motivation of the moment. It is possible only when conduct is determined by a motive which transcends the present moment, that is, by law.

Eugene Peterson:

Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.

Stanley Hauerwas

Christians are called to faithfulness and obedience so we can be free from the tyranny of those who would enslave us in the name of freedom.

Christianity teaches that there is a sense in which Sam Levenson’s phrase, “the statutes of liberty,” is not tongue-in-cheek. G. K Chesterton, as one would expect, had a witty way for explaining how walls—statutes, laws, boundaries—lead to freedom and joy. In Orthodoxy he wrote:

Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a play-ground. . . . We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.

When Israel was about to enter the promised land, God, through Joshua (1:6-8), told them to be “careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded. Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left.” It sounds so restrictive. But if they obeyed, God promised joy; they would be “prosperous” and “have good success.” The author of Psalm 119 speaks repeatedly of delight and joy that the law brings.

Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it. (vs. 35)
Your precepts are my heritage forever,
for they are the joy of my heart. (vs.111)

In a recent article in “Public Discourse” titled “Embrace the Limit: And the Limit Shall Set You Free” (April 7, 2026), Marianna Orlandi gave several examples of “limits that are far from restraints to our happiness.” Among them is language.

Being bound by an alphabet and a common language, one we did not invent but inherited, we can communicate and learn, including from our past. We can ask for help and laugh at someone’s jokes, we can sing, scream, and pray. But for all this to happen, there are rules to follow and grammar to learn.

Or take the arts for example. Nowadays there is widespread belief that great art results from unbounded expression. Edgy and transgressive are popular terms of choice. In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus, the protagonist, when he announces that he has decided to be an artist, says, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.” Quite to the contrary, George Herbert—no small artist—wrote, in wonderful “bounded” poetry, of his rebellion, only to be called up short when he “heard one calling, Child.”

I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit? (“The Collar,” ll. 1-6)
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed:
I will abroad. (ll. 21-28)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, My Lord. (ll. 33-36)

In Orthodoxy Chesterton countered the myth of artistic freedom with characteristic bluntness. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “to be an artist and not care for limits. Art is limitation.” Great artists agree. Shakespeare’s encomium on boundaries in Troilus begins with an example from music: 

Take but degree away, untune that string, 
And, hark, what discord follows!

Orchestra players know that full well! Good composers know it too. Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the finest composer of the previous century, wrote in his Poetics of Music: “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.” He went on to say: 

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.  

Christopher Hoyt, in a recent article in Touchstone (Jan./Feb. 2026), describes the Miserere nostri by a 16th-century composer, Thomas Tallis. It is a work in which the composer surrounded himself with obstacles and imposed many constraints. It is scored for seven voices. The two soprano parts are in a strict canon (rule, law) in which the second voice imitates the first exactly, as in a round. At the same time the alto begins another melody which turns out to be the lead voice of another canon. This one, called a mensuration canon, is in four parts. The lead voice, alto, is imitated by tenor 1 in notes eight times longer! Basses 1 and 2 also sing the alto’s melody, also in proportionally longer lengths. Bass 1 sings the notes four times longer while bass 2 sings them twice as long. Furthermore both basses sing the alto’s melody inverted—up-side-down! And it all fits and produces a thing of ethereal beauty. Hoyt comments:

In this way, composing musical counterpoint is often more discovery than invention. The composer is not so much creating something as finding it. He is solving an intricate puzzle, and in the process, uncovering a pattern that God has embedded in the natural order.

He concludes:

Tallis’s counterpoint turns a listener away from himself and toward the timeless serenity of measure and proportion, toward the unfailing order of the stars in their dance, toward the song of a harmonious universe, and ultimately toward the divine Maker.

Hearing music as “serenity of measure and proportion” and the “order of the stars in their dance” calls to mind what Martin Luther wrote about music in his preface to a collection of Latin motets by early Renaissance composers. That collection was aptly called Symphoniae jocundae—pieces that “sound together joyfully.” At the climax of an encomium in praise of music, Luther described a prevalent type of music in which the tenor carries the basic tune while the other voices, bound to the tenor, dance around it “in a divine roundelay.” In such music, Luther wrote, “it is possible to taste with wonder (yet not comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom in his wondrous work of music.” 

I have no doubt that Luther would agree that Bach’s music is such music. Out of his vast output, for the purposes of this article, I select just one of his smaller pieces for illustration—the organ chorale prelude for manuals only (no pedals) from Clavierübung III based on Luther’s chorale on the ten commandments, “Dies sind die heiligen zehn Gebot” (“These are the holy Ten Commandments”). In this setting Bach bound himself not only to one of the most binding musical forms, the fugue, but also to the melody of the chorale as the fugue subject. Although he could vary the chorale melody, it still had to bear an audible resemblance to the chorale. 

As if those restrictions were not enough, he set himself the additional task of filling the piece with the number ten, the symbol of the Law. He made the fugue theme ten beats long and ten half-steps in range and stated it ten times. And for good measure, he concluded the piece with a ten-beat note in the bass. Further, he chose to write the fugue in the rhythm of a gigue—yes, a jig! And a wonderfully exuberant gigue it is, literally exulting—jumping—for joy. In two minutes Bach expressed as much delight in the Law as did the author of Psalm 119. The freedom with which this gigue, with all its restrictions, joyfully skips along is but one small testimony, among so many bigger ones in Bach’s works, to the relationship of law and boundaries to freedom and joy. It is as if he were saying with the Psalmist:

Your statutes have been my songs
in the house of my sojourning. (Ps. 119:54)

In the 1998 psychological satire The Truman Show, Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey) discovers his entire life has been a fabricated social experiment televised to the world. Orchestrated by a director named Christoff, Truman’s experience is situated in a highly choreographed, repetitive, and completely artificial environment. Every relationship is with a paid actor; every decision is ultimately controlled to keep Truman fearfully tied to his small town, lest he adventure too far and realize the horizon is really the wall of a painted dome. 

Such satire is an apt example of one anti-human aspect of our increasingly artificial environments. Even though Truman is unaware of the artificiality of his world, it slowly but nevertheless hinders his flourishing as a human being. He begins exhibiting a disturbing dissonance as he grinds against his simulated existence.

This is the same danger situated as the philosophical spine through Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. Throughout his robust treatment of humanity’s nature, uses and concerns over AI, and a charge to Christ followers to rebuild together is this implicit reality: that humanity––being made in the image of God––has a unique means of flourishing in this life, and that our technology has a great potential to mislead us in the very ways we seek to flourish. That is, our various technologies are increasingly offering a manufactured resonance. 

Resonance as Flourishing

In his 2019 book, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues that resonance is foundational to human happiness and flourishing. Rosa defines resonance as a responsive and mutually transformative relationship between subjects––to resonate is to be in right relationship with others and the world. 

While such resonance according to Rosa is not exclusive to people of religious faith, the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck argues that no one can resonate with the world unless a feeling for its beauty is placed in their heart by God. Resonance––genuine flourishing––happens when we are in conversation with the created order. Vigen Guroian poetically affirms that, “man is a microcosm in whose flesh resonates and reverberates the pulse of the whole creation.” Biblically speaking then, we can think of resonance as the very vibrations of shalom––resonance happens when we tap into what Alvin Plantinga calls the,

rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. 

When we resonate with something, then, we are experiencing a tinge of shalom––of things as they ought to be. Understood this way, resonance can be yet another sense in which we flesh out biblical blessedness. Blessed––happy, fortunate, flourishing––is the one who resonates with things as they ought to be.

Such blessed flourishing is the fundamental desire of every human being. We are all after fullness of life, with varying visions of what such fullness looks like. However, this fullness is at risk in unique ways, as laid out by Pope Leo XIV:

Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness. 

While we are increasingly aware of our need for resonance in a digital age, it is the very digital environment we inhabit that threatens to cut off pathways to resonate with the world. The end of technology is control, yet nothing stifles resonance quite like control.

Resonant Design in AI

One growing area in the development of algorithmic technology and artificial robotics is Resonance Theory. Not to be confused with Rosa’s theory of resonance, this is the science of statistically engineering environments for resonant responses. Essentially, machines—both algorithms and physical machines—are equipped, calibrated, and trained to mimic the stimuli most likely to trigger resonance in humans. 

In his recent book, Superbloom, Nicholas Carr notes how such advancements can help us understand how mindless machines can command so much of our attention––they are calibrated to analyze our behavioral variables and adjust in ways that foster resonance. This is uniquely insidious, as it offers the husk of what we deeply desire––flourishing via resonance––while void of its substance.

In a 2022 journal article from Frontiers in Neurorobotics researchers Lomas et al. proposed that resonance can serve as a design strategy to guide human relationships with artificial agents. They argue that resonance is a physical mechanism that can not only be measured, but harnessed. Their research is based on identifying “external oscillations”––outside vibrations––that align with an individual’s natural vibrations, thus likely causing “synchronization and amplification effects.” In layman’s terms: they identify stimuli that are most likely to trigger meaningful attunement with humans and then design robots to engage accordingly.

The goal, says Lomas, is that perhaps “resonant robots” might dance with us, show love for us, or even offer spiritually fulfilling interactions. 

However, I believe most of us intuitively see the folly of such aspirations. This was, in fact, the downfall of Christoff’s experiment with Truman. His entire world was calibrated to create resonance––for Truman to flourish through simulated relationships and surroundings. But the artificiality of these could not sustain meaningful flourishing. The more he realized this, the more he exhibited all the symptoms of late modern life: skepticism, cynicism, agitation, depression. 

As the “Creator” of Truman’s world, Christoff wanted an authentic, unscripted human experience. However, his techniques of executing on this vision cut off the very possibility of authentic resonance he was after. 

Likewise, these researchers cite Rosa for their understanding of resonance as a physical mechanism needed for well-being, but they cut off any possibility of manufacturing such resonance by ignoring Rosa’s core tenet: unpredictability. 

The Essential Unpredictability of Resonance

Harnessing “external oscillations” to produce resonant responses simply cannot result in meaningful transformation. Rosa takes pains to show how inherently uncontrollable resonance is! However, while unable to be manufactured, Rosa does identify what he calls “axes of resonance”––pathways where resonant encounters are more likely to occur. For Rosa, this is not an exercise in harnessing an external force to behave synchronistically. Rather, it is a matter of placing oneself in the way of unpredictable vibrations.

Rosa’s three primary axes are:

1. Meaning — art, history, religion
2. Relationships — family and friendships
3. Objects — food, music, work

Each of these, Rosa shows, are inherently uncontrollable. They uncover in unique and unpredictable ways various frictions, limitations, and weaknesses. These are the paths to flourishing.

Pope Leo XIV agrees:

Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. The light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the “contingency” of the things of this world.

Limitation is one shade of unpredictability. That is, our initial experience with what is uncontrollable is fundamentally limiting. But limitation––unpredictability––is prerequisite for flourishing. Lomas’ attempts to design, measure, and harness are antithetical to this. Such attempts, by nature, remove the unpredictability needed for resonance. Lomas admits the difficulty of controlling the uncontrollable:

Part of the challenge of operationalizing human resonance from a brain-to-stimuli correlation measure comes from the challenge of decoding how a stimulus produces a brain response.

In other words, the challenge of making resonance operational is due to the fact that it is deeply unpredictable! 

For Rosa, this unpredictability of resonance lies in it being between two subjects, each with distinct otherness. A robot designed to analyze behavior and synchronize oscillations cannot meaningfully be understood as a subject. Truman only truly resonates with a woman outside of the simulation—a subject whose unpredictability gets her removed from the experiment.

Pope Leo likewise notes:

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean… They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

Thus, a “resonant robot” is an ontological oxymoron. The reason resonance “works” is because a personal Creator has woven it into the fabric of his creation. This personal Creator then entered into his creation as the Subject, Jesus Christ. Therefore, to resonate with others and the world is to be aligned with the oscillations of his general revelation in creation, which is able to result in common grace flourishing. On the other hand, true flourishing––shalom in the fullest sense––is an encounter with the Spirit-spoken oscillations of his special revelation in Scripture, himself being its fulfillment. Thus, resonance resulting in genuine human flourishing can only result from an encounter with the otherness of the Divine Subject, either in his creation or in his person. 

No matter how advanced AI’s resonant-mimicking capabilities become, it simply does not have the ontological ability for this resonance. Further, attempts to manufacture such resonance with humans will stifle the very ability to flourish it seeks to simulate. 

Keeping the Axes Clear

To experience true resonance in the way Rosa means it, it is important that we keep the three axes he describes relatively clear of technological interference or planning. Because the use of AI is such a unique and complex issue, there will be as many specific uses and philosophical approaches as there are individuals. However, we can at least start with Rosa’s identified axes—pathways to—resonance. 

Rather than offer practical guidance (which too will be unique and numerous) we can consider questions that will encourage keeping these axes “clear” of too much dependence on AI:

Axis of Meaning:

• How has my knowledge of or familiarity with a topic or idea deepened recently?
• How have I experienced or pursued beauty recently?

Axis of Relationships:

• What was the most meaningful face-to-face conversation I had recently? How would I describe that person's voice––their tone, inflection?
• How could I make one person feel known and loved?

Axis of Objects:

• What’s the last thing that made me pause (Tree, sunset, meal)? Can I describe it in detail?
• What song, image, poem do I keep coming back to? Why is it capturing my attention?

***

The hope of the Christian faith is shalom—resonance in the fullest sense, in a new heaven and new earth in right relationship with our risen Lord. This is the fullest vision of what it means to be human. 

Regardless of our convictions on AI, we must resist overtly anti-human outcomes. Using AI responsibly is not anti-human; AI using our behavioral variables to manufacture flourishing is anti-human. May we seek flourishing along the paths given to us by God, and seek it not alongside AI servants but alongside the Subject, Jesus Christ.

The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity. Carl Trueman. Sentinel Press, April 2026. $29, 256 pp.

-

Over a century ago, Max Weber characterized modernity as a period of disenchantment, inspired by Frederich Schiller's poem, Die Götter Griechenlands, where lamentation is raised for the disappearance of supernatural creatures and the world of divine significance:

But lost and never to return again
Is all that I had known of these fair worlds,
No more can one this earthly bliss regain—
Gone is all which breathed life into these words.

The absence, even forceful eviction, of the weird and the divine, Weber's Entzauberung, has haunted the pages of criticism of modern times ever since. In Weber's hands, disenchantment was a way of capturing the rationalizing dispensation which loomed over modern society. The arenas of politics, philosophy, and science had sloughed off the past's deposit of mysterious rites, folk tales, and strange beliefs, and replaced them with measurable, quantifiable systems. There was nothing else to uncover beneath dead matter. Divine nature, if it was real, was not present, and if present, not felt. Its many deputies, emissaries, and diminutive expressions -- influential planets, fairy, angelic and diabolic powers -- had gone out of sight, out of mind, out of belief.

Drawing on Weber, Charles Taylor would later give students of modernity an array of tools for reflecting upon the nature and effects of disenchantment in our secular age. Reading him more than a decade ago, I found his distinction between the porous and buffered self especially illuminating, where the porous person believes there are powers in the world capable of entering in and influencing his life, while the buffered self imagines a barrier between himself and the exterior world, granting each individual a walled-off space for self-determination.

For all its explanatory power, disenchantment does not capture our modern crisis without remainder. Nor did figures like Charles Taylor or others imagine it was so. As a way to capture the malaise of a materialist world, the spiritual void left over when our tie with the transcendent was cut, disenchantment provides a needful part of a more complex account.

All the same, there are domains where disenchantment may be unfit for, perhaps even a distraction from, a far more pressing crisis than belief in the mysterious. We need more than one framework to diagnose the modern crisis. Is it enough to say that man has been disenchanted? Or is something else also at work?

This is where Carl Trueman, in his new book The Desecration of Man, proposes the adoption of a different framework. In the case of anthropology -- what it means to be human -- he calls for the use of more serious terms. The term Trueman points us toward is desecration.

As Trueman admits, "Desecration is a strong word, stronger than others that have been used to describe the modern world such as disenchantment." He argues on two points that the word is nonetheless more fitting. First, it captures an essential quality of those things which have fallen victim to modernity's nihilism and wanton disfigurement. He primarily focuses on how we have depreciated our human nature. Desecration better names what sacrality and holiness has suffered than disenchantment does. Humans are no longer seen as exceptional, unique creatures, placed higher than the animals and lower than the angels. Our persons and our bodies have been reduced to objects. How we choose to live our lives, how we choose to treat our selves, what counts as our final end have all turned into an array of options and preferences provided by technological research and legal license.

With an eye for these consequences, Trueman surveys such topics as sexual ethics, abortion, IVF, surrogacy, and man's war against mortality. In every case, Trueman points out that if our souls and bodies are in fact sacred gifts given into our care by God, there are ways in which their treatment can only be described with the same language we would use for the act of burning down a church, violating the altar, or destroying a relic.

The analogy between body and building of course harkens back to Paul's reminder to the church in Corinth, that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and we ought not to defile it with sin. With such a governing image, one can see more clearly how disenchantment's demystification gives way to the violence of desecration. Disenchantment may have provided the conditions, but desecration best captures the results.

There is another aspect of modernity's rejection of human nature which the idea of desecration captures more strikingly than disenchantment. Those who commit acts of desecration understand their behavior as a form of trespassing upon sacred ground. There is a rush and a thrill in the act of violating the sacred. While unintentional acts of desecration are certainly possible, Trueman notes, "the person who topples the gravestone or smashes the windows of a house of worship knows what they are doing: They are striking at the heart of what the religious community considers most sacred" (16). Trueman observes the common experience of the violators: desecration is exhilarating. "The sheer delight taken by many in toppling the moral codes of the past cannot be explained simply by the loss of an enchanted world. … There is a delight being taken in destruction" (21).

"Put provocatively, [what is happening to man] is not disenchantment. The death of God in modernity has led to the desecration of man. And many of us seem to find that exciting" (21).

The unsettling lens of desecration is what gives new force to the litany of biological and technological challenges which are otherwise familiar topics of concern. Addressing technological advancements, the ethical and legal battles, the surge of research and funding from institutions and governments, and our expanding powers of manipulation in areas of sexuality, fertility, and life-extension, Trueman's analysis is rich in both research and reflection. Many cases are themselves the best warrant for desecration as the more fitting term. Certainly the awful threat of such trends as womb surrogacy, artificial wombs, or the eugenic potential in IVF companies such as Orchid strike the moral imagination no less than the violation of an altar in one's local parish.

In one way, Trueman is arguing that we place at the center what has been on the periphery of our analyses. Scientific advancements, which one might have judged as a network of neutral methods employed at times for horrifying goals, are colored red from the moment the idea of such research enters into the minds of scientists. The outcome is not disbelief in the divine but the destruction of its embodiment. The excitement surrounding scientific and technological progress echoes the cries of revolutionaries. The vapor from heating vents atop an artificial-womb research lab blends with the smoke rising from a smoldering church.

Desecration requires nothing less than a wholistic response, and Trueman argues for three elements which must remain integrated with one another for Christians truly to survive and flourish in an age where the holiness of embodied souls is under threat. Christians must adopt orthodox belief, right worship, and proper practice, a trio he summarizes as creed, cult, and code. Adopting one or two and leaving the others will not do.

He points out the trend among some intellectuals to defend the cultural effects of Christianity or its aesthetic beauty – without submitting to the wholistic Christian way of life. Richard Dawkins's praise for the cultural benefits of Christianity falls flat, for those effects are nourished by genuine, not selective, belief. "The problem is not solved," writes Trueman, "by living as if Christianity were true" (187). Beliefs based on mere benefit, he argues, amount to a Christian nihilism. The beliefs are made subject to our will, to the condition that they be useful for us. The irony, as Trueman points out, is that Christianity can be misunderstood as merely useful because of the profound belief of those who came before us, who surrendered themselves to the faith and shared with their children and grandchildren the harvest of their simple submission. Belief must be placed into our hearts and minds, our imaginations and actions. Better perhaps to say, we must be taken into it.

"The truth of Christianity," he writes, "must reshape our intuitions so that our moral limits, or obligations, and our ends dictate how we relate to our bodies, our loved ones, our neighbors, our communities, and the world around us, near and far" (187).

The quiet obedience to the creed, cult, and code of Christianity points us to our larger aim: we must reconsecrate the world. This comes in many forms, and Trueman gives a series of examples, all organized into instances of creed, cult, or code. We must train our beliefs by reading and understanding the Genesis story, through catechisms asking the believer what is the end of man; our worship should emphasize prayer, song, reciting and speaking with each other. Our rites must re-member us with our bodies. We must be a cult of nativity and funeral. Our buildings must be restored as venerable places, and in this way will we see more easily the respect owed to the temples of our bodies.

Last, Trueman turns to code, the way in which our beliefs and worship is carried into the wider world through moral habits. As Trueman sees it, this must begin through Christian hospitality and kindness. As he turns to offering a path forward, he writes, "The battle against desecration does not begin so much with boycotts of blasphemous arts as with acts of human kindness extended to neighbors" (207). A time of desecration is sure to be full of souls neglected and mistreated by systematic sacrilege: The elderly, for whom assisted suicide is offered at state expense. The sickly and malformed, for whom early scanning might have saved the soul from the pain of existence. The infants born from an artificial sack swirling with industrial fluids. Children whose parentage is either anonymous or mechanically fabricated. The mothers whose babies were handed over to others through a moneyed transaction. These, too, must be shown their humanity, and invited into places of comfort and holiness.

These strangers must be welcomed in. Trueman reflects on the passage in Deuteronomy where the Israelites are enjoined to welcome in the stranger, as they too were strangers once. The relevant part reads, "for the Lord, your God ... executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." Thus, Trueman argues, is desecration challenged: by the loving invitation into a consecrated space filled with a consecrating people: a friend to church, the lonely to a conversation, the lost to a home.

Trueman has paved for each of us a "little way" to walk in. Instead of chasing the elusive and perhaps undesirable qualities of enchantment, persons, families, churches, and communities are oriented toward a concrete vision of reconsecration, to love the human in a hostile world.

This, however, is not the end of the story. Trueman proposes the turn from enchantment toward consecration in the context of modernity's abuse of human nature and the physical distortion of human bodies. This is a fitting place for its introduction, yet the language of consecration invites wider application. After all, surely desecration is not found solely in the treatment of our bodies, but can be found throughout society. What does it look like to reconsecrate an economy? What about a reconsecration in education? What does political reconsecration demand?

Seeing how many forms of desecration have invaded not only technological or scientific development but a richer tapestry of bonds and relationships between souls, such questions linger after reading Trueman's account. They promise to bear fruit for Trueman and others who investigate them.

Trueman, however, expresses some hesitancy. Near the end, Trueman gestures toward some of the political consequences, by way of a warning against Christian nationalism. "Of course, the wannabe Christian warlords who talk tough online will dismiss this as pietism or ineffectual intellectual idealism. But that is only because they want power and they want it next week." However true this may be -- it seems hard at times to pin down what Christian nationalism is, much like enchantment -- Trueman frames his caution in terms of acting too quickly in too short a period of time. He argues that the Christian nationalists are fantasists, since they imagine a recovery of Christendom in the short- or medium-term. "Christianity is too weak and too fragmented to be a significant ecclesiastical or political force in the world at large." Reconsecration is a long-term vision, whereas many a political movement seems to overextend itself. The local church may have the resources to effect their neighborhood, county, or city in profound ways, but nothing at the scale of organizing a nation.

All the same, this caution against fantasies of imminent political change does not extend at least to intellectual reflection. If desecration is indeed definitive of our time, this seems all the warrant one needs to consider the effects of desecration on, say, politics, even while Christian traditions and communities lack the integrity and strength to effect change. Even if prudence discourages us against incorporating consecration into political action, it seems that consecration would provide a clear and deep source for consideration, especially in the sphere of politics. This can, and I think should, be explored alongside our daily practice of hospitality. We needn't wait for, or indeed plan for, political influence before we see how consecration shapes our concepts of the political, the economic, or the technological. Hospitality already stands within a political philosophy, with implications for many areas of life. 

There is another influence upon our notion of political consecration, however, which offers ample material for thought. The history of the Church, in Europe especially, is bound up with that of Christendom, a period in time when the institutions of palace, cathedral, and university were deeply shaped by Christian virtues, and vices. The period between the 9th and 14th centuries is an unsettling time to look into, full as they are with creeds, cults, and codes that disturb our modern predilections. In the Middle Ages, there were seasons of stability and cycles of warfare. Scandals and superstitions and saints abounded. People walked through the mud; Crusaders had blood on their hands, yet consecration was in the air. Not that consecration is peculiar to an era of fiefdoms and holy empires. Throughout its history, Christianity consecrated whatever and whomever it touched. What could we learn from past eras of Christian presence regarding what reconsecration looks like?

As Trueman pointed out, desecration is a strong word. He might also have called it a perilous word. Unlike disenchantment, it has the power, once deeply felt, to move people to action. His call for hospitality seems laudable, but the term implies more than an invitation to the stranger. Desecration is not only something, at least historically, that people have rescued others from, but have defended themselves and others against. This seems to be the challenge of the term which Trueman has chosen. It carries within it more than what Trueman attends to. I might agree that Christian response to desecration does not begin with boycotting art, but surely it includes it. Does it entail more than boycotts?

Desecration demands of us a great deal of wisdom to handle, but if Trueman is correct, handle it we must. He is to be thanked for taking the first step in turning our attention in its direction. As Christians and other believers ponder its significance, a rich and sober conversation awaits our minds and hearts and hands.

My family recently bought a Yoto for our son’s birthday. Some of our friends mentioned enjoying it for their kids, and it had come recommended elsewhere (including the Mere O Discord server). Yoto has a great library of short stories, songs, and audiobooks for listeners of all ages. 

As part of its offering, Yoto also sells ‘Make Your Own’ cards. These cards can be loaded with up to 99 tracks of audio. That’s where I want to direct my attention in this piece–Christian families will be greatly helped by this little device for its simple and convenient opportunity to help conduct catechesis. (This post is not sponsored by Yoto nor am I receiving any commissions from them.)

Why the Yoto?

Before I share my process, let me answer a preliminary question for those unfamiliar with the Yoto. Why bother with it? What’s the difference between it and, say, playing an audiobook or a podcast on Spotify with your phone?

From my experience and understanding, the Yoto is different and better because of how differently it presents to parents and kids. To parents, it’s obviously a digital technology–WiFi enabled, uses NFC cards, requires phones to connect, offers a subscription with streaming options, and is mostly controlled via mobile application. But for kids, it’s an analog experience. To my son, the Yoto is not Mom or Dad’s phone, he can only push three buttons on it, there’s no touch screen or moving pictures, he has to put a card in the slot for it to play music or stories, and he can carry it around (unlike Mom and Dad’s phones). The simplicity of the Yoto as a kind of alternative neo-analog device is exactly why we enjoy it so much. 

Anyone raising kids in the Year of Our Lord 2026 is doing so in the shadow of harmful digital technology. As we try our best to raise our kids, it’s become increasingly clear that part of our task is to strive toward a generational weaning from our dependency on mobile devices. Any tool or feature we can take away from the iPhone is, for us, a win. With the Yoto, my wife and I reap the benefits of the convenience of digital technology (to upload custom playlists and adjust settings, for example) while our son reaps the benefits of it as an “analog” medium. And the medium, as they say, is the message.

Given that, here’s my recommendation: if you have young kids, get the Yoto. It’s better than an iPad because it requires attentive listening without an addictive screen. It’s intuitive, easy for kids to use, and can be set up in the background for kids to listen to. Kids can stream the Yoto Daily Podcast, play a music card, or listen to an audiobook–it’s great. 

But for the Christian family, here’s the cherry on top: This is a prime opportunity to set a vision for discipleship in your home and to carry it out. 

My Family’s Process 

Buy a Yoto.

We started by purchasing a Yoto from a nearby Target. Each Yoto comes with a Make Your Own card and this Target happened to only have Laurie Berkner song cards on the shelf, so our son started without any story cards.

Set a vision for discipleship in your home. 

Our family has adopted a vision for discipleship in our home, thanks to many people and resources, but especially folks writing about this today like Adam Griffin, Danielle Hitchen, and Justin Whitmel Earley, among others. 

This vision is especially situated around a rhythm of three things: (1) the reading of Scripture; (2) traditional Christian catechesis through the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer; and (3) keeping time with the church calendar. We also make a serious effort to read good literature to and with our kids, to include classics like Aesop’s Fables and Mother Goose, and relatively newer works like Curious George, Little Blue Truck, and whatever the library may have available on a given day.

Buy books, borrow books, get creative, collect songs & stories.

The next step in our process was to gather stories and songs that we aspire to be the heart and soul of our home’s collective imagination. This is essential because it makes my wife and I the active curators for our children, instead of the passive consumer of whatever Walmart’s marketing team or Meta’s algorithm pushes. What I mean by that is, if we aren’t making an effort to pursue our vision for discipleship, especially through stories, it will be far too easy for us to simply receive what Amazon or Walmart or The Algorithm is pushing at any given time. 

In other words, we began to build a family library that is at the service of our family’s vision for discipleship. We save websites, resources, links, videos, and conference materials. We occasionally print off what we can, and put it in a place we know we will remember it. We have been blessed in that our oldest was the firstborn grandchild for both my side and my wife’s side of the family, so we have plenty of books. Our aim has been to cultivate interest, active listening, and patient attention so that we can nourish our kids’ wonder and imagination. All of that comes with reading, telling stories, and singing together.

As an example, we are now the proud owners of three entries in Lexham Press’s For All God’s Children Series. These books serve as concise and easy-to-follow teachings on the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. 

Read and sing to kids.

Naturally, after setting a vision and accumulating stories, we read and sing them to our children. On Sundays, we make a special effort to read the For All God’s Children series and to memorize these foundational parts of the Christian faith. As I’ve read to my kids, I’ve gotten more comfortable reading at different paces and tones that suit the book being read. It’s been especially helpful to find the places where I can pause and look over to my son and expect him to “fill in the blank.” 

Try recording some things by yourself.

Here’s where we get into the actions that actually involve the Yoto. After nurturing some familiarity with the books we love, I have started to record myself reading them so they can be added to the Make Your Own cards. Oftentimes, I’ll also read a chapter of Scripture verbatim where I may not always do so when we tell the story. 

For example, our son loves David and Goliath (classic!), but we will typically read a condensed version of it together. For the Yoto, I recorded myself sharing a little preface about how David was anointed king just before this and so was a “secret shepherd king” that came to fight the giant, followed by a verbatim reading of 1 Samuel 17. To close the reading, I say, “This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.” We could purchase one of the many Bible cards available in Yoto’s library, and we probably will, but these little details and repetitions are things we want to teach and put on display in our home. So we do it ourselves.

To record, I open the Yoto mobile application, go to the Create tab, and tap Record. When I’m finished, I can go to My recordings to change the title or listen back to each track. So far, I have kept eighteen recordings. I’ll talk about how to create a playlist and upload it to a Make Your Own card below.

Record yourself reading/singing to your kids.

Another thing I have begun to do is record myself reading while I am with my son. We’ve done this with all the For All God’s Children books, which is a lot of fun because Yoto offers a Page turn chime button that my son is always delighted to push. It’s also great fun to hear him “fill in the blank” when we’ve read together and point out the hidden cat on each page. When he listens to these recordings, he can do so with the book in his lap to follow along, or he can listen without it. The other stories I’ve recorded have been what you might call “of the oral tradition”--some that I’ve made up. These are fun to tell and listen back to because they’re spontaneous and totally unserious. In one recording, my wife accidentally interrupts by asking if I can take the trash out. In another, my son forgets I’m telling a story and asks if he needs to get in his jammies. We hear these little bloopers every time we replay the Make Your Own card, but my son still happily declares “it’s the giant gilded saber-claw crab!” at just the right time.

Create a Yoto playlist, add tracks, and upload to the Yoto player.

To record a playlist, here’s what I do. Go to the Create tab and tap Record if you haven’t recorded anything. 

After you have at least one recording, go to the Library tab and tap Make a playlist. After adding a name and a description, you have the option to add recordings from your library, add audio files recorded elsewhere, or add a radio stream. 

I’ve only ever recorded in the app and added tracks the first way. After you’ve selected the tracks you want to add, tap Create playlist. 

By the way, it’s worth noting that you can add up to 100 tracks to a playlist. I haven’t pushed this to the limit, but one of my tracks is eighteen minutes long and there’s been no indication that tracks are limited by time. When you have a playlist, you can open it up and tap the Link to card button. 

I’ve only used the NFC option, which you can do by tapping Use your phone. 

All you have to do then is set your card down and tap it with your phone. When you have your playlist downloaded to your card, you can have the Yoto player download it by leaving the card in the player without any audio playing. I’ve found this process to be really easy, and there are many how-to articles to walk you through anything you may prefer to do differently than I have.

What’s on our Make Your Own card?

1. An intro where I say hi to our son, tell him what’s on the card, and tell him I love him
2. Jack & the beanstalk
3. The hare and the tortoise (Aesop’s Fables)
4. Fighting roosters and the eagle (Aesop’s Fables)
5. Psalm 23 (Theopolis version, sung)
6. David & Goliath (1 Samuel 17, read verbatim)
7. Ten Commandments and All God’s Children
8. The Ten Commandments
9. Apostle’s Creed for All God’s Children
10. The Apostle’s Creed
11. The Lord’s Prayer for All God’s Children
12. The Lord’s Prayer
13. The boy and the red shell (a story I made up and tell to my son)

We let our son listen to the Yoto mostly at his leisure during the day. We also let him play the Make Your Own card during his nap and at bedtime because we adjusted the Yoto to turn off after it finishes all the tracks on a card.

The repetition of the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Psalm 23 have been instrumental in our work to collectively memorize the articles of our faith and the songs of the Church. Hearing our toddler “fill in the blanks” as we recite the Creed or sing a psalm together has paid for the Yoto one hundred times over. 

It’s a joy and a privilege to stumble through the journey of raising kids, especially as we find what works and what helps. The Yoto has proved itself as a reinforcing tool for catechesis in our home. Making our own recordings forces us to recite the things we are teaching our children. Having a card with his parents’ voices helps our son to know that what he’s hearing is particular to the life of our home. 

My wife relayed a story to me that our son picked up a book at home and started “reading her the Bible” and just combined the story of David & Goliath and the Apostle’s Creed. “Giant of Gath! ..and ..and ascended into heaven…” Praise God for the gifts of repetition, imagination, and, yes even devices like the Yoto.

When Pope Leo XIV was elected in 2025, he made clear that a chief focus of his pontificate would be the rise of artificial intelligence. My ears immediately perked up, for the topic is uniquely relevant to me. I am a writer, one of the professions often thought to be most at risk from large language models. My husband, on the other hand, is an electrical engineer who currently works with LLMs for a living. 

Oh, the conversations we have had in our home! There have been points of strong disagreement where we looked at each other oddly and wondered how the other could possibly hold such erroneous underlying assumptions. There have also been points of compromise and even, dare I say it, agreement. 

When it was announced that the pope’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, would be dealing heavily with the issue at the center of our household discussions, we were both highly interested. This was notable, for our choices of reading material tend to differ significantly. But now I was eager to read something about AI and my husband was at least willing to read a summary of something theological. As it turned out, he watched the pope’s speech and read through multiple summaries long before I could wade through all 42,300 words of the text. 

“At least he didn’t ask ChatGPT to summarize it for him,” I reasoned, but the frustration of doing things the old fashioned way—with a printed copy that I marked up with pens in between shuttling my son to his various activities, preparing dinner, and all manner of other household tasks—was acute. Within a few hours of the encyclical’s release, the internet had read and digested it. Quotes were popping up all over social media. Long-form analyses had been posted to YouTube. Still stuck on page twenty, I had a serious case of F.O.M.O., but I told myself it was alright: sometimes family responsibilities are more important and slow ways are better. Yes, I told myself that, but it was hard to believe. When I finally read the whole encyclical, I reflected upon its contents and saw reason for both concern and hope.

The opening paragraph of Magnifica Humanitas reveals the themes that will dominate the encyclical. “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together,” the pope writes, setting up a contrast between the biblical examples of Babel and Jerusalem. Whereas Babel “reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing,” in Nehemiah’s Jerusalem we find “a common language—not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord.”

Having established this dichotomy, the pope continues, “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible.” His choice of the terms dignity, justice, and fraternity reveal the three foundational principles which he will seek to uphold:

1. human dignity derived from the imago Dei and in need of preservation through humanization,
2. a renewed evaluation of the demands of justice in light of the new things of history,
3. the common good as chiefly seen when we encounter one another in community.

The purpose of Magnifica Humanitas is neither to fully condone nor fully condemn artificial intelligence, robotics, and other developing technologies. For,

the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.

Dignity and Humanness

The term dignity occurs often in modern parlance, but its meaning can shift with circumstances. Nowhere is it more prevalent than in the debate over medically assisted suicide, another matter that strikes at the purpose of human life. The Catholic Church has previously spoken to that issue, and now Pope Leo XIV invites us to consider how we uphold the same principles in light of new things. “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.” This was my own conclusion recently upon re-reading T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”: that I will be human if it is the last thing I do. This is a great rallying cry for our time.

The pope identifies four understandings of the word dignity. Moral dignity is “the way in which a person directs his or her choices and actions.” This is what we mean when we say someone acts in a dignified manner. Social dignity indicates “a person’s living conditions and the concrete respect received from society.” This is part of what is meant when people speak of dying with dignity. Existential dignity is “the way in which a person perceives his or her own worth and the value of life” and is therefore a matter of subjective self-analysis. Ontological dignity, on the other hand, is “the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.” It is therefore supremely objective.

This distinction is important, as when he uses the word dignity throughout the encyclical, the pope is referring to ontological dignity: the significance that a human being has as the result of bearing the imago Dei. It is an inextricable part of human nature such that to speak of “dehumanization” is to speak of the denial of the imago Dei and an offense against humanity’s Creator. The pope writes that the gospel “provides the criteria for recognizing what humanizes or dehumanizes and what liberates or oppresses in ever-changing situations,” precisely because it is in God’s Word and his actions in history that the true dignity and telos of humanity is revealed. (Some may object to the way he uses the term gospel here, but the general point holds.)

Pope Leo sees many ways in which emerging technologies are dehumanizing us, from algorithms viewing individuals as a data set rather than a person, to our relentless efforts to remove any limitations upon our nature, to the quest for endless knowledge without growth in wisdom. But of chief concern to the pope is the ideology “that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.” According to this perspective, human beings are “reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized.”

It is the Church’s job to remind the world “that true fulfilment is not achieved by eliminating weakness but through harmonious growth,” as opposed to the technocratic or post-humanist mentality which asserts that the human person is “an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit.”

Here the chief fear of many regarding artificial intelligence—that it will put them out of a job—is not merely an economic concern but one of human nature itself, for “work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.”

Given these potential threats to human dignity, the pope uses what has proved to be a headline friendly turn of phrase, stating that artificial intelligence must be “disarmed.” But many who see that word out of context will not understand his intent, for he clarifies, “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussions and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” 

This is one of many occasions on which the pope’s themes overlap and converge, for disarming artificial intelligence is not just a matter of preventing dehumanization and upholding dignity. As his clarifying comments show with their emphasis on open access and pluralized control, disarming artificial intelligence is equally a matter of justice.

Justice

When Robert Prevost was selected as the latest bishop of Rome, there was considerable speculation over whether he would be as “woke” as Pope Francis. As it turns out, Pope Leo XIV holds to a similar understanding of justice as Francis, but one that is equally similar to the tradition of every pope going back to his namesake Leo XIII. Simply to proclaim the traditional social doctrine of the Catholic Church is, for some, a step into wokeness. But in Magnifica Humanitas, the present pope argues that the Church’s understanding of justice is as old as Scripture itself.

“Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice,” he warns, appealing to the Church’s understanding of the ultimate destination of goods to argue for equal access to the benefits of artificial intelligence. So far, so basic. But he goes on to use a term often shunned in conservative theological circles: social justice.

“The idea of ‘social justice’ helps us recognize that injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically,” the pope writes. Anticipating potential objections to the language of systems, he further insists, “To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence. Unless transformations at the design stage prioritize the prevention of new and further disparities, technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities.” Perhaps we can put him down as a skeptic about trickle-down economics.

The pope would have us look to the example of our Lord to find the rationale for pursuing social justice. “For the Christian community, social justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and remaining faithful to the Gospel,” he says, adding that Christ “teaches us that justice is born from, and fulfilled in, fraternity, because the way we approach and relate to the least among us becomes, in concrete terms, the measure of our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters.”

This discussion about the just use of technology makes me think of President Trump’s second inauguration in the Capitol rotunda, which was perhaps most memorable for the lineup of tech titans standing behind him. There in a row stood Elon Musk (owner of X and founder of Tesla and Space X), Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and founder and owner of Blue Origin), and Mark Zuckerberg (founder and owner of Facebook/Meta). Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) stood further away. I could not help wondering if the man being sworn in as president would have as much power over American lives as the men standing behind him. 

The pope evidently shares my thoughts and views the situation as one of potentially great injustice. “When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.” Perhaps worse still are decisions made not by humans at all, but algorithms. Choices involving “employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation” are now handled by “automated systems that do not know ‘compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,’ and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion.”

In one of the passages that has drawn significant attention on social media, the pope expresses concern about the way justice is currently perceived in relation to warfare. “Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated.” 

The phrase “Pope Leo calls Just War Theory outdated!” has been making the rounds, but it is misleading. For the pope is not arguing here for more warfare, but less. “Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts, such as dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. The use of force, violence, and weapons reflects a relational poverty that always has disastrous consequences for civilian populations.” This is an acknowledgment that the realities of modern warfare could not have been anticipated by St. Augustine of Hippo, and therefore we need to find ways of extending the same principles to new things.

When tech companies consider only their profit margin while deciding who to hire and fire or when countries pour public money into expensive weapons systems rather than social welfare programs, it amounts to a grave injustice. But fears of losing out on the battlefield or in the marketplace are leading to the rapid expansion of many AI programs without taking time to properly evaluate safeguards. 

This is what the pope calls a “globalized technocratic paradigm,” and it is used to justify all manner of injustices. But injustice could also occur if we fail to make appropriate use of technology to reduce human suffering. He tells us that “the true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear, but between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the mentality of power.”

It is this relationship between the individual and the communal that constitutes the pope’s final major theme.

Community and the Common Good

Pope Leo writes in his encyclical that “when the economy turns against the person or science oversteps the limits of its competence, the Church—together with other Christian denominations and believers of other religions—must make her voice heard, not in order to dominate, but to promote communion.” This word communion holds an important place both in Scripture and in the mind of the pope. He urges us to be “builders of communion, rather than architects of Babel. We are to be servants of the coming Kingdom, instead of lords of towers destined for ruin.”

Communion is linked to two of the key principles of Catholic social doctrine: subsidiarity and solidarity. According to the pope, subsidiarity means that “whatever can be carried out by individuals, families, intermediary organizations and local communities should not be carried out by higher-level authorities,” whereas solidarity is “the concrete recognition that the future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” 

Here we see a two-part recognition of the role of community and the fact that humans are communal beings. Government has its place in providing social care, but this does not remove the primary duty of the local community, e.g. family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and co-religionists. Neither should any person think themselves totally independent, without duties to their neighbors or reliance upon the products of their neighbors’ labor.

“The digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction; yet, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness,” the pope stresses, speaking perhaps to what is often termed the loneliness epidemic. He argues that “what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.” This is true not only in terms of human relations, but also to our ultimate redemption through the Son of God who came to dwell with us. In the light of the Incarnation, we see the true telos of humanity as communion with our neighbors and with God himself.

Large language models, on the other hand, “do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance.” This is not to say that they have no positive role to play, but the telos of artificial intelligence must be the betterment of humanity, not its domination. We must not lose sight of what makes humans human. “We can embrace the technological progress that alleviates suffering and unlocks new possibilities, provided we do not abandon the very essence of our humanity, namely the capacity for relationship and love.”

The rise of globalization in the past century means that “the common good is taking on an increasingly universal dimension, with rights and duties concerning the entire human family.” We must therefore avoid insular thinking that shrinks community down to those who are exactly like us, expanding our notion of community to include all who are made in God’s image. “This is the guiding principle for technological processes: it is not enough for artificial intelligence to make us more efficient or connected; it must also serve to build a universal human family, with shared rights and duties, where digital proximity becomes a real opportunity for encounter and mutual care.”

This leads into the pope’s consideration of our present geopolitical moment, in which great powers are increasingly abandoning diplomacy in favor of military action. The pope laments that “rather than automatically generating unity and peace, globalization has provoked fundamentalist, identity-based and nationalistic reactions.” This results in a world where international relations are characterized by distrust. 

Multilateralism has led not to greater balance and harmony, but a more fractured communion. He urges us to welcome the possibility of encounter with those unlike ourselves: to hear them and know them as precious creations of God. “For if we experience authentic encounters with others, with those who are different, strangers and migrants, it becomes much more difficult even to imagine war.”

These days, it is far easier to imagine a world with unending war than one where it never begins. Building what the pope envisions will therefore require something else: genuine hope.

Hope

In the traditional Christian understanding, hope is one of the three theological virtues, relying on its sister virtues of faith and love. It also supports and draws from the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. Disconnected from these other virtues, hope becomes unworthy of the name, but when they are all brought together, it is strengthened into something that can bear the weight of our anxieties. The pope assures us, “In fact, peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war; instead, it is always possible as the fruit of justice and charity.”

The hope of a Christian is based on the Incarnation of Christ, in which he redeemed us and through which he will bring us to life everlasting. The pope writes, “We view history in the light of the crucified and risen Lord, to whom the Father has given ‘all authority in heaven and on earth’ (Mt 28:18). We do not consider the present as a predetermined fate, but an opportunity for personal and collective conversion.” The power of Christ’s kingdom is like a mustard seed that grows to become a great tree. “While the tumult of confusion is all around us, goodness grows silently from the earth.”

This means that it is not up to us to save the whole world by ourselves. “The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” In our limited areas of personal influence, “we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force (even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies or hatred), or to preserve the mindset of peace (with truth, moderation, closeness and care).”

As a believer in the doctrine of total depravity and a long observer of the evils of this world, it is easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking that things will always get worse, people will always choose evil over good, and we will not have peace before Christ’s return. But the pope rightly reminds us that, “History does not appear solely as a record of human violence, but also as evidence that humanity is capable of creating institutions that protect our shared life.” I must remember this, or I will be tempted to deny the goodness of God and the possibility of redemption for myself and my fellow humans. 

In one of the most beautiful passages in Magnifica Humanitas, the pope touches upon our resurrection hope in a rapidly changing world.

No computational system, however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil. Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history. This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving. It is the mystery of ‘recapitulation’: the certainty that the Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head (cf. Eph 1:10) In this plan, nothing will be lost that is authentically human. Indeed, everything will be purified and reunited in the One, who gathers every fragment of life, every tear and every authentically human achievement, rescuing them from nothingness and delivering them, redeemed, to the Father.

The call for Christians is therefore to be like Nehemiah and his fellow countrymen rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. We must not be “passive spectators of social and cultural fractures, nor mere commentators on what is crumbling.” Rather, we must “enter the construction sites of history—research laboratories, technology companies, schools, the media, institutions and local communities—in order to rebuild what has collapsed and protect what is threatened.” Because Christ has already triumphed and we know he will one day restore all things, we can do this with confidence, not fearing the changing times.

Encounter

In emphasizing the need for genuine human encounter, Magnifica Humanitas echoes something else I have recently been reading: the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the chief theologians of Christian community. In works such as Life Together, Bonhoeffer stressed the importance of genuine encounter between human beings and with God himself. Without such an encounter, he argued, community cannot exist.

Therefore, when I finished reading the encyclical, it was time for an encounter: a real moment of human connection. I found it in discussing the work with my husband. I thought perhaps he would accuse the pope of overstatement in his warnings about artificial intelligence. But no, my husband agreed with the pope’s assessments, especially a paragraph that highlighted the way workers can be locked into an endless cycle of repetitive tasks, unable to keep pace with the development of AI, feeling their dignity has been eroded.

My husband confessed that much of the stress he experiences at work is because he is expected to know all there is to know about AI, but it is literally changing every day. This, he explains, is why he spends hours at night watching YouTube videos, attempting to understand the latest twists and turns of the machine. This is what raises his blood pressure when he questions what his company’s future, or indeed his own future, will be like. For just a moment, I saw the immense stress he was under as I had not before, even as I recognized his continued passion for the subject. 

I also could not help but think that in choosing the path of slow contemplation rather than rapid summary, I had honored the very intent of the pope’s encyclical. For I uphold the dignity and humanity of my disabled son when I put my work aside to care for him. I act justly when I divide my time equitably between my vocations in proportion with God’s calling. I cultivate community when I take time to talk to a friend or simply keep our house running. And when I get out of bed in the morning to serve another day, I declare my hope in the restoration of all things.

That is the challenge and the hope of Magnifica Humanitas. It is a message we would all do well to heed. Times change and technology changes, but Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

To begin, we need to cover two key topics: the words, behavior, and associations of Zachary Garris and the teaching record of the Presbyterian Church in America on issues of racial sin. After that, I want to move toward a broader point regarding the stewardship of our institutions, including our denominations.

The Words, Behavior, and Associations of Zachary Garris

Rev. Zachary Garris is a teaching elder (TE) in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Rev. Garris pastors at Bryce Avenue Presbyterian Church in White Rock, New Mexico, which is part of the Rio Grande presbytery. (Presbyteries are bodies of regional governance in presbyterian congregations, roughly equivalent to a diocese in churches that use an episcopal polity rather than presbyterian.)

In addition to his work at the church, Rev. Garris is a regular conference speaker, author, and runs a publishing imprint called Reformation Zion. In the past, Garris has authored a book with the independent scholar and ethnonationalist Stephen Wolfe and initially accepted an offer to speak at a conference alongside the anti-semitic white nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, which he later withdrew from after a number of pastors in the PCA strongly encouraged him to do so. The launch video for the event, however, is still visible on YouTube and includes Garris's photo alongside the other speakers. One of the promotional graphics for the conference, created when Garris was still scheduled to speak and featuring his photo, is used as the feature image of this essay.

In his work as a publisher, Rev. Garris has published Assailing the Gates of Hell, a book by the South African Calvinist author Adi Schlebusch. Schlebusch is a self-described kinist. Schlebusch himself works at the Pactum Institute, a South African think tank that has in the past published a series of essays by defrocked presbyterian pastor Michael Spangler on what Spangler calls "race realism." Spangler has also posted many times on social media regarding the supremacy of the white race and has said that the Nazi treatment of the Jews was not a failure in Christian love:

Spangler also argues that, "This is the secret reason violent crime rates are so high in America, and especially in the South: it’s not our guns, it’s our blacks." Wolfe has made similar claims in his own work, arguing that "blacks in America, considered as a group, are reliable sources for criminality, and their criminality increases when constraints diminish." Both Spangler and Wolfe have also claimed that interracial marriage is (or can be) sinful:

Garris's own writing also aligns with the general viewpoint of his friends and associates. For example, in 2019 Garris wrote an essay on the southern presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney, whose own views on race were quite clear. Writing in reply to a critic of his original piece on Dabney, Garris said,

There are two issues raised in Mr. Whealton’s response. The first is whether biblical hierarchy extends to racial hierarchy. The Bible does not specifically address this. Though the Bible affirms that all humans are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) and that Jesus redeems people from every nation (Revelation 5:9), there is nothing in Scripture that teaches that all men are created equal.

While Garris does not explicitly say here that the white race is superior, he does possibly accept the reality of "racial hierarchy" and then goes on to note that the Bible never explicitly teaches that all men are created equal. The conclusion one would be expected to draw from the above is fairly obvious, I think, even if Garris does not explicitly spell it out.

Additionally, Garris has been published by New Christendom Press, which is operated out of Refuge Church in Ogden, UT, a non-denominational congregation which is pastored by Brian Sauve and by Eric Conn. New Christendom Press has also published the work of the anti-semitic author Andrew Isker. Sauve and Conn have both in the past boosted social media posts made by the white nationalist Ethan Holden, and appeared in a video produced by Holden which spliced footage of Sauve, Conn, and Wolfe into a video alongside a variety of white nationalist and Nazi figures and designs. The video was sufficiently explicit and extreme that even Moscow, ID pastor Douglas Wilson, who has himself in the past defended southern slavery, expressed concern about it.

Finally, Garris contributed a book foreword to a recent volume published by Sacra Press. Sacra Press is notable because it is run by Cody Justice, who cohosts a podcast with the aforementioned Michael Spangler. Sacra Press has also published volumes from Schlebusch and Spangler (an adaptation of his essays on race realism for Schlebusch's Pactum Institute). Most notably, Sacra Press has published a volume by an early 20th century German Lutheran called Positive Christianity which sought to reconcile Christianity and Nazism. This is a publisher Garris is plainly willing to be associated with.

Later this year Garris will be speaking at the New Christendom Press conference alongside Conn, Sauve, and Wolfe. Additionally, Garris has in the past defended chattel slavery on social media.

He has also liked social media posts claiming that racism is not a sin:

This, then, is an overview of Garris's speech, behaviors, and associations as they relate to questions of racism, kinism, and Nazism. It is not in any way ambiguous. His record is quite clear. Garris has a direct commercial relationship to a self-described kinist in Schlebusch. Garris has co-authored work with an ethnonationalist in Wolfe. And we see that Garris's own commercial associates, Schlebusch and Justice, are closely tied to a self-described white supremacist and defrocked minister.

In his publishing, writing, speaking, and public associates Garris is deeply intertwined both financially and through professional connections with a network of public and avowed ethnonationalists, white supremacists, and kinist thinkers. These ties go back a number of years. To whatever degree an interrelated network or project of far right Christian kinism exists, Garris is an active associate of this movement.

The PCA's Handling of Racism

The Presbyterian Church in America is a denomination of roughly 2,000 congregations and 400,000 members. The PCA has on at least four separate occasions taken some kind of formal action to address the sin of racism.

In 2004, the denomination's General Assembly, the highest authority in the church, formally adopted a pastoral letter addressing racial sins and the denomination's own history with racism.

In 2016, General Assembly passed an overture which amongst other things said that the PCA resolved to,

recognize, confess, condemn and repent of corporate and historical sins, including those committed during the Civil Rights era, and continuing racial sins of ourselves and our fathers such as the segregation of worshipers by race; the exclusion of persons from Church membership on the basis of race; the exclusion of churches, or elders, from membership in the Presbyteries on the basis of race; the teaching that the Bible sanctions racial segregation and discourages inter-racial marriage; the participation in and defense of white supremacist organizations; and the failure to live out the gospel imperative that “love does no wrong to a neighbor."

In 2018, General Assembly received a report on the sin of racism drafted by an ad interim committee of the church.

Finally, in 2025 General Assembly affirmed,

That the 52nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America does hereby join with the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (221st General Synod) and with the Reformed Presbyterian Church in North America (193rd Synod) in condemning without distinction any theological or political teaching which posits a superiority of race or ethnic identity born of immutable human characteristics, and does call to repentance any who would promote or associate themselves with such teaching, either by commission or omission.

It also should be noted that there is a theological reason the PCA has staked out these positions. The PCA is a confessional denomination, which means that ordained leaders in the PCA take vows to uphold a certain confessional standard. In the case of the PCA, that standard is the Westminster Confession of Faith as well as the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms.

One of the strengths of the PCA's confessional standards is the expansive way they treat the Ten Commandments, which is fully in keeping with the way the Reformed tradition has always understood them. Following the example of Our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount, who argued that hating our brother is a form of murder (and therefore a violation of the sixth commandment), the PCA's confessional standards adopt broad readings of each of the Ten Commandments—which you can read for yourself in the Larger Catechism particularly.

So when addressing issues of racism, the PCA has often linked sins of racism to specific violations of the Ten Commandments. In the 2004 Letter, for example, it argues that the sin of racism is a violation of the first, sixth, and ninth commandments in as much as racism involves having other gods before God, leads to hatred of other racial groups, and requires lying about the status and capacities of other racial groups. So the argument the PCA has made on this issue is not simply driven by 21st century egalitarian politics; it is rooted quite explicitly in our confessional standards.

Given all of this, it seems almost self-evident that Rev. Garris is in violation of the teachings of his denomination on the issue of racism.

Even if you only considered his associations with Schlebusch, Wolfe, Isker, Webbon, and Spangler and set that next to the 2025 General Assembly's call to repent of "any who would promote or associate themselves" with racist teaching, Garris is in violation. He has, since the church adopted that statement last summer, co-authored a book with a man who, as noted above, says that Black people are a reliable source of criminality in the USA and who has suggested that inter-racial marriage is sinful—a position explicitly condemned by the PCA's own past statements on the issue. That alone seems like a quite brazen and obvious act of defiance directed at last year's General Assembly.

If you take the broader scope of Garris's work and the broader scope of what the PCA has said about race, the problems become even more apparent and undeniable.

That, of course, is why it was no surprise that Garris was brought up on charges over precisely this issue. Unfortunately, that is the last part of the story that makes sense. Because after charges were filed, the process seems to have fallen apart. Since Rio Grande Presbytery has not issued any statement at time of publication, we cannot definitively say why the process failed. But that it has seems difficult to deny.

To begin, it took roughly two years from the time Garris was first accused at the presbytery level to when the trial was completed. Regardless of what one thinks of the merits of the case against him, it is highly irregular to initiate a process that could lead to the revocation of a pastor's ordination credentials (and thus the loss of employment) and then leave that pastor (and his family and his church) dangling for two years. It may be the case, of course, that Garris himself contributed to the slow process—he has several cases already pending with the PCA's Standing Judicial Committee, so that may have contributed to the delay or Garris may simply have dragged his feet at certain points. We cannot say for sure unless the presbytery releases information regarding the process, which they have not done so far.

Then last week, when the trial finally took place, the rulings were even stranger. The presbytery exonerated him of the charge related to racism, which suggests that they either failed to do their due diligence, which is a failure of process, or that the prosecutor did not present all the relevant evidence, which is also a failure of process.

Additionally, the presbytery found him guilty of intemperate speech, citing two tweets he sent to Dr. Anthony Bradley several years ago and which, it must be said, are relatively innocuous, particularly relative to the ways in which countless other teaching elders on all sides of the PCA have sometimes spoken of one another. Again, there may be more here than has been publicized so far—other examples of Garris's speech that the presbytery considered and caused them to make these charges.

Yet since the presbytery has not made any public statements, we are left with a minister charged with a ninth commandment violation over what are pretty innocuous tweets, relative to how ordained ministers in the church routinely speak on social media. Not only that, but because he was formally charged and because he did not repent, the PCA's Book of Church Order (30-1) requires his indefinite suspension—meaning that the presbytery's decision to make this particular charge in the way they did combined with Garris's refusal to repent automatically triggered an indefinite suspension.

One hopes that more information about the proceedings of Garris's trial will be made public soon. But based on what is publicly verifiable at time of writing, it certainly appears that the Rio Grande presbytery handled the affair poorly by failing to do due diligence regarding Garris's words, behaviors, and associates, by failing to anticipate how this case would affect the purity and peace of the denomination, and by failing to make details of the case which can be publicized public in order to avoid outcomes in which onlookers lose faith in denominational processes. We can only hope that when the meetings of the presbytery's meetings on this are produced that a less incompetent picture emerges.

In any case, as things stand right now the outcome of all this is likely to be quite bad for the peace and purity of the PCA. The presbytery took what ought to have been a fairly simple case regarding the sin of racism and managed to handle it in a way that has made Garris a sympathetic figure both by the way the timing of the trial was stretched out and by convicting him over what is, if an offense at all, a fairly minor one—and one that would, if applied equally across the denomination, tie the church up in endless trials and adjudication. And that, of course, is precisely what may happen if things continue to go poorly.

Why Organizational Competence is a Non-Negotiable

There are many things one might say about this sad affair. But the main thought I have had is the same one I've had for years when I consider the health of the PCA, which is my home denomination and has been for 20 years.

The challenge for the PCA is that the overwhelming majority of our teaching elders are simply ordinary pastors. They love to preach, to shepherd, and to evangelize. They are not terminally online. They do not know the ins and outs of esoteric political theology disputes. They are not kinists. And yet a sizable portion of our communion, precisely because of their admirable and good pietism, are radically unprepared to navigate the procedural rules that govern presbyterian churches. If it is accurate, as some have reported, that Garris's defense was led by multiple lawyers while the prosecution in his case had no lawyers... well, there you have it.

Too often, these common failures of the pietists in our church have been minimized or dismissed by many. Set next to the realities of preaching, shepherding, and evangelization, knowing the ins and outs of the Book of Church Order (the rule book which defines how our denomination functions formally) seems unimportant. But a case like this highlights precisely why procedural competence is so important.

This ought to have been a simple and straightforward case. You take Garris's words, behavior, and associations. You take the PCA's official position on racism. You compare the two. You conclude that Garris either needs to repent or he needs to be suspended because he has violated the first, sixth, and ninth commandments and is not repentant. It should not be hard—the publicly verifiable record here is quite clear. Yet because too many in the PCA have an indifferent relationship to polity and procedures, we make it difficult.

I am writing this not only because I care about the PCA, which I do, but because I care about the state of the broader church around the world. The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has had its own struggles with institutional mismanagement in recent years, after all, as have most other evangelical denominations that I know of, to say nothing of the many non-denominational independent congregations that have had similar issues.

There is a broader difficulty here, of which the PCA and ACNA's difficulties are exemplary: Evangelicals as a class tend to have an indifferent relationship to procedure, policy, and institutional norms. We value charisma and talent, but charisma and talent cut loose from the constraints and demands of healthy institutions have, repeatedly, proven themselves to be enormously destructive. That is the thread that runs through so many of the depressingly long list of stories that have plagued American evangelicalism over the past 10 years—whether it is the death of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, the decline or collapse of so many evangelical colleges and churches, the shocking waste of denominational funds across many different communions, or the specific scandals currently vexing so mny of our churches, far too often our organizations have been led by people that may be personally virtuous but who lack institutional competence. The outcomes of this are never good.

What we need—and I am inclined to place this quite high on the list of our needs—are healthy groups and movements that learn how to become healthy institutions. But if that is to happen, we will have to learn to care about administration, about policy, and about procedure. We will need to spend far more time in our proverbial Books of Church Order than most of us have to this point. Such work is unglamorous and even boring. But if good things are going to endure, that will usually require the support of an institution. And for institutions to endure, they need to be led by people who understand and value the procedures that govern and guard an institution's life.

As I was writing my book, I was exploring the nature of Christian history. Christian history is not just the past, though it encompasses that. It is the meeting of past and future in the present. Eliot captured this well in "The Dry Salvages" from his "Four Quartets":

Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

For many, this is untenable. We only want the potential of the future — the better job, the better car, the better partner, and more. The present is where we situate our lives. It is the all-encompassing base from which we operate.

In my reading, I stumbled upon a quote by Joseph Ratzinger. In his book In the Beginning, he sets out to ground the creation narrative in its proper context as a story of all existence — naturally the origin, or pre-history, from which we draw. He writes: “Past, present, and future must encounter and penetrate one another in every human life.” In other words, a Christian view of history and reality must take into account the past, the present, and the future. He goes on: “Our age is the first to experience that hideous narcissism that cuts itself off from both past and future and that is preoccupied exclusively with its own present.”

Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy, in his book The Christian Future, writes that the Christian is “the founder and trustee of the future, the very process of finding and securing it, and without the Christian spirit there is no real future for man.” For Rosenstock-Huessy — and I find myself convinced by his argument — the Christian life is lived at the crossroads of four fronts.

The first front looks backward, toward the past. Christians look back at what happened in order to understand what is, and what is to come. The second front looks forward, into the future — and this is the uniquely Christian contribution. The past met the future at the Cross, transformed reality, and set humanity on a trajectory toward something more. The third front looks inward, among ourselves: this is the front of personality, of our dreams, feelings, and wishes. The fourth and final front is outward. This front presses in on us from all sides — the external world with all its demands and pressures.

To neglect any of these fronts is fatal. Rosenstock-Huessy calls this intersection the “Cross of Reality” — the crossroads of all four fronts — and argues that it keeps us rooted and guards us from what he calls “complete contemporaneity.” This is what Lasch hints at as the permanent present, and what Frank Furedi, in his book The War Against the Past, refers to as “presentism.”

It is painfully obvious that modern man has detached from the past, but he’s also removed any means of thinking about the future. Limitations are viewed not as reminders of the fragility of life, but of the need to transcend reality. That hideous narcissism that Ratzinger talks about reigns supreme. Of course it would help if we did a bit of work on what we mean by the term itself. Narcissism is a term often thrown around. “He’s a narcissist.” “That person is a narcissist.” But Christopher Lasch, the culture critic and writer of the mid-twentieth century, found that narcissism isn’t just a personality trait. When psychoanalysts talked about narcissism they were often referring to self-love — a person so obsessed with themselves that they are incapable of thinking about another. For Lasch, narcissism was a cultural force, not just a personal character issue. He noted that the writer Tom Wolfe had highlighted—in his essay “The ‘Me’ Decade”—the mid-twentieth century as akin to a Third Great Awakening, an outbreak of “orgiastic, ecstatic religiosity” — the worship of the self.

The self is something of a loaded term. Thinkers like Taylor, Ricoeur, and MacIntyre view the self as narrative: who you are is a thread of meaning derived from the story of how you got here and where you are going. Others view the self as a social construct. George Herbert Mead understood the self as derived from social engagement — you come to know yourself by how others see you, the “looking-glass self.” Some New Age thinkers posit that the self is an illusion, not a coherent core but individual fragments that, when assembled, form something like a cohesive unit. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger pushed back against all of this and tried to ground the self in existence: the self must be embodied, located in a place, in a world, with others, and in a language. It is specific and particular.

But what about the self today? As I read the Ratzinger quote, and as I’ve been reading Lasch and reflecting on his work, I can’t help but think we are at a time where the “narcissism” they spoke of, has not only expanded, but it has morphed.

What I mean is that today the self is dominated by narcissism — though it has shifted back into being a personality trait rather than a cultural diagnosis. This is driven by social media and psychology, which through therapy helps people identify how their boss is a narcissist, their roommate is too self-focused to help clean the apartment, or why their last relationship failed. We have moved the narcissistic trait back from a social diagnosis (where Lasch situated it) to a personal one. One major effect of this is that relationships and work become inundated with attempts to escape the trait in others, and we operate as if our problems come from outside ourselves, not from us. For instance, if our boss is too demanding, if any form of discomfort is introduced, we quit.

The modern self desires many things, and we can trace several defining features. I hope to offer a sketch here of what makes up the hideous narcissism of the modern self and some of the key things missing from the modern self. I’ve already written a bit on the “self” before. So I apologize if you are “selfed out.” However, I do think Ratzinger’s warning is important for us today. That hideous narcissism threatens all aspects of life, including my own. If we don’t understand what it is, and how it plays in our lives, it’s much harder to fight against it.

So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.

Authenticity

The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.

Consumer aesthetic

Modern identity goes hand in hand with lifestyle and trend. What we wear signals status. As American culture grows more complex, subcultures multiply, and identity becomes a matter of curation. If you spend all of five minutes on Instagram, you’ll see what I mean. Every other video is a person showing off style. Style is class and class is status.

Psychological interior

This is evident in the enormous popularity of books like The Body Keeps Score, which affirms the trauma-informed development of the modern person. The language that dominates this version of the self is therapeutic: trauma, attachment styles, triggers, boundaries. Each of these terms conveys that the self is developed by what happens to us, not what we commit to, or what we believe about ourselves and the world. We often mistake therapeutic language for self-knowledge, and self-knowledge for growth. If we are moving so far forward in our understanding of our trauma, why are we more miserable than ever? Rosenstock Huessy writes about “suburban man” but it seems apropos here: “there is a paradox about suburban man: he lives amid too much peace, but he knows little peace within.”

Performance and recognition

The self is not only authenticity-seeking but audience-seeking. We post online to give meaning to the self through recognition — the self is performed in the theatre of modern opinion. Mead’s looking-glass is prescient for social media. Lasch found that the self is empty at the center and requires constant external input to feel real. The metrics of recognition — likes, follows, engagement — become proxies for self-worth.

Identity category

Here again Critical Theory shapes the field. The self is understood as a constellation of categories: gender, sexuality, race, and more. When we identify with a category, that category must be affirmed without qualification. Any divergence from this expectation is treated as a social infraction akin to soft murder. Community forms not around growth and productive tension, but around affirmation.

Autonomous will

Running through all of this is what Michael Sandel called “the unencumbered self” (his essay is well worth reading when you have the time) — a self whose defining feature is not the ends it chooses but its sheer capacity to choose them. Sandel wrote this in the 1980s during the Reagan years, but his words feel more urgent now. No matter the consequences of certain decisions — gender reassignment surgery, MAID — the modern self demands the freedom to make them. The choice itself is sacred; the result is tertiary.

So what is missing today?

Obligation and commitment 

Obligation is increasingly experienced as tyranny. We dislike being bound to someone else’s time or needs, preferring instead to be our own autonomous agents. And yet commitment is not a cage — it is the very condition in which character and love become possible.

I’m reminded of a job I had out of college. I was juggling seminary alongside three part-time jobs, trying not to go into debt. One summer, at the pool store where I worked a third of my hours, I was tasked with interviewing a few high schoolers for seasonal work. One of them sat down across from me, and I asked the standard question: “So what does your schedule look like?” He thought for a moment and said, “Well, I’d like to have weekends free to hang out with my friends. Fridays too.”

I was dumbfounded. Growing up, my parents had drilled into me that in an interview you say: I will work whenever and however long you need. This young man had apparently received different instruction entirely.

It would be easy to chalk this up to one kid, but it isn’t one kid. Our lives are increasingly organized around fun and pleasure, and obligation is recast as an obstacle — a limitation on our freedom to pursue what we actually want. Commitment, in this frame, is something you tolerate until something better comes along.

Suffering and limits

Pope Leo recently wrote: “Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” This is one of the great ailments of modern society. Constraints are viewed as impositions, roadblocks on the path to happiness. When we see a path that may have them, we don’t turn around but instead try to go off roading and find our own way. But they—limits—are in fact what enable us to flourish as finite beings created by an infinite God. To accept limits is to accept our nature as created things. We despise them, perhaps, because we secretly wish to be like God. I’m reminded that Eve was tempted to transcend the limits of her present situation. To become “like God.” This temptation is ever calling and ever more appealing to the modern self.

Similar to Pope Leo’s comment, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy writes that:

“The greatest temptation of our time is impatience, in its full original meaning: refusal to wait, undergo, suffer. We seem unwilling to pay the price of living with our fellows in creative and profound relationships. From marriage to teaching, from government to handicraft, man’s relation to man has become segregated, impatient, non-committal in the machine age.”

We are unwilling to suffer for through suffering we are reminded of our own limits and finite reality.

History and tradition

Lasch found that the tyranny of the present leads us to view the past not as a resource to mine and learn from, but as a reminder of an inferior time. Lasch writes that:

“The narcissist has no interest in the future because, in part, he has so little interest in the past. He finds it difficult to internalize happy associations or to create a store of loving memories with which to face the latter part of his life, which under the best of conditions always brings sadness and pain. In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits—the cultural devaluation of the past reflects not only the poverty of the prevailing ideologies, which have lost their grip on reality and abandoned the attempt to master it, but the poverty of the narcissist’s inner life.”

Yet as Christians we are called to hold a faith deeply rooted in history — it is from the past action of God in Christ that we draw present and future hope. To remove the roots is to down the tree. Christians must be at the forefront of the valuation of history — that those who came before us matter and have much to teach us.

The self in relation

Online life thrives in part because within its confines the self is rarely confronted. We choose our relations and remove those who impact us negatively. Dating apps extend this logic: we swipe away who we don’t want and meet those we do, but only momentarily. To settle down is to place yourself in genuine relation to another person — and that is precisely what the modern self resists. Yet the creation was declared good, and the only thing that was not good was for man to be alone. We were made for one another. The church as body is meant to invoke this reality: each person needs the other, and the other needs each person.

A telos

When we remove the beginning — history — we also remove the end. Time collapses into the present: our present desires, present wishes, present dreams. But the self cannot flourish without knowing it is for something beyond itself. We live not for ourselves. Paul writes that “you are not your own” but belong to God. And yet we fear death. MAID is an egregious blight on modern life — the destruction of persons because they choose it. The self wants no part in the uncertainty of the end, so it seeks to control and harness it. We try to give life, and we try to choose when we leave it. Foucault, for all his faults, made an interesting observation about asylums: by removing the impaired from society, we created a space where we defined sanity — and those who didn’t conform were cast out of sight. We suppressed what we didn’t want to see. Modern society does the same with death. The more that the limits of life — and its end — are moved from our sight, the more the self imagines it can flourish. Instead, we are left ungrounded. We are all going to die, and those who have been most shielded from this reality will have the hardest time accepting it.

All in all, the modern self is remarkably free and remarkably miserable. Liberated from limits and boundaries, we find we are not walking toward anything — only away from something. The hunger we feel for meaning, purpose, permanence, and recognition points beyond the self, revealing what it is missing. And ultimately, it is the good news of Jesus Christ that can fully root and give the self what it so desperately needs.