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

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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.

Theodore Dalrymple. Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder. $19.99. 168 pp.

When I was in high school, I read Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None at breakneck speed to figure out the identity of the murderer. The shocking ending left me desiring more and was the beginning of my enjoyment of Christie. I am not alone, it seems. Whodunits remain popular, as readers delight at the prospect of an evening armed with their favorite blanket, beverage, and (paradoxically) a cozy murder. At the center of this genre is Christie, “the Queen of Mystery,” the best-selling novelist of all-time for her brilliant Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series, as well as numerous standalone mysteries. Her writing established the genre as we know it. Today’s mystery writers still rely on her techniques and tropes.

Retired physician, prison psychiatrist, and conservative social critic, Theodore Dalrymple, combines his professional experience and knowledge with his enjoyment of Agatha Christie in this short volume, Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder. The title is appealing; however, the book does not offer a retired prison psychiatrist’s look at the metaphysical nature of murder. Instead, Dalrymple’s main aim is to justify the merits of reading Christie and her ilk. He does so by answering literary critic Edmund Wilson’s rebuke of Christie as “mawkishness and banality which seems to me literally impossible to read.” 

Dalrymple brushes away part of Wilson’s ridiculous claim as pure “intellectual snobbery” rather than a real technical issue with Christie’s writing. After all, she has gained global appeal since the appearance of her first novel over a century ago; her novels have sold in the hundreds of millions across dozens of languages. Therefore, it must be that Wilson’s critique really means that Christie is not a writer worthy of “close attention” by the serious literary world. Dalrymple notes that in no way was Christie disillusioned with her merits and literary standing. She called herself middlebrow. In the introduction, Dalrymple argues that Christie’s shrewdness and observations of human nature are remarkable. As a result, her novels are full of insights of notable social, psychological, and philosophical substance. 

The introduction offers a glimpse of what the volume could have been as Dalrymple provides a brief example of Christie’s talents in her breakout novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Then instead of a psychological look at the top-tier books among Christe’s canon, he decided to pick a novel at random and evaluate it. The novel of choice is a Miss Marple mystery, They Do It with Mirrors, a middle-of-the-road volume that holds neither universal praise nor scorn. Dalrymple selected this novel based solely on the fact that he owned a copy but had no familiarity with it. While his efforts to remain unbiased and to tackle Wilson’s critiques are commendable, it is interesting to entertain what Dalrymple could have produced in evaluating the psychological depths of some of Christie’s greatest contributions and those of the whodunit genre more generally. Dalrymple’s method is to walk the reader through the novel, discussing along the way anything he considers worthy of note—socially, psychologically, and philosophically. 

While Dalrymple rarely deals with the metaphysical nature of murder, he attempts to make up for that with great social commentary and insight. At times he focuses on larger topics and ideals while on other occasions zooming in on a few words or simple phrases from They Do It with Mirrors, such as the description of Miss Marple as “every inch a lady.” Dalrymple examines the “social, educational, cultural, and behavioral background” contained within this short simple phrase. His analysis leads him on the path to explain and picture the bygone social caste in England of gentry.

In these few words, Christie gives the reader a great deal of insight into Miss Marple as someone born into a higher class than the one she currently occupies. The impoverished genteel class was displaced by circumstances, but the manners and beliefs of their previous station never left them. Dalrymple seeks to turn his readers’ attention to this brief but witty insight offered by Christie as she attempts to weave an elusive murder mystery along. Even in her less critically acclaimed books, there are nuggets that serve as rebuke to Wilson’s low opinion of Christie. 

Dalrymple does argue that his experience regarding murder has revealed it to be a far cry from the extravagant and sometimes farfetched world of Christie. More often than not, it is “merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture.” Such criticism of Christie’s world as outlandish and unrealistic is accurate, yet we cannot forget that her novels are fictional works of entertainment. Dalrymple argues that the whole point of murder for Christie is to be committed in a “milieu where they are least expected.” This is perhaps our most poignant look at the metaphysics of murder in the book. Christie wants to give better than what reality offers. 

Many of Christie’s novels take place in small environments, rarely entering anything larger than a small village. While such settings produce a cozy quality to British whodunits, it is purposeful. Dalrymple points to Miss Marple’s quote, “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” Dalrymple’s randomized pick of They Do It with Mirrors happens to work perfectly. The novel revolves around a juvenile delinquent center, just the sort of environment that Dalrymple knows well through his experience as a psychiatrist working with the small populations of prisoners. And so, Dalrymple devotes considerable space in his book to the delinquent center, particularly the staff in charge of it and the methodology of the staff regarding crime and rehabilitation. 

Dalrymple is particularly interested in the character of Lewis Serrocold and Christie’s description of his sparkling eyes and enthusiasm for his charges at the delinquency center. In his estimation of Serrocold, Dalrymple notes: “He has Christian charity untethered to an awareness of original sin that might make his charity more realistic.” The enthusiastic head of the delinquent ward is one that believes in and lives out a strong charity but does not believe in good and evil. For Dalrymple, Serrocold is a highly realistic character from Christie.

Chesterton described someone like him as the humanitarian that cares only for pity, therefore making his own pity untruthful. Serrocold displays this pitiful pity during his interview with Miss Marple. When she inquires whether one of his charges might be dangerous, Serrocold responds that the young man had never shown a proclivity toward suicide. So much for charity. Serrocold lacks the awareness to consider that Miss Marple might have had people other than the lone delinquent in mind. The virtue of charity removed and isolated from other virtues only ruins the one virtue on display. By his excessive charity for one case, Serrocold fails to provide charity at all.

Dalrymple’s treatment of Serrocold’s beliefs about the motives of his charges at the center is wonderful. Serrocold believes that the crimes of these juveniles are from “exhibitionism” and “thwarted unhappy home life,” and these outbursts and crimes make them feel heroic. Dalrymple argues that this is highly common in his experience and in the culture at large, as some criminals appear to the general public in admirable and romantic ways. Such is the cult of personality, even for criminals. Human nature desires to be known—"to be is to be perceived; not to be perceived is not to be.” The greater evil for some is to not be perceived. The crime it takes to be perceived seems a lesser evil, by contrast. 

Considering the random selection of a Christie book to refute Edmund Wilson’s attack on the master of crime, Dalrymple’s book is a resounding success. And while he didn’t treat the metaphysics of murder much in this book after all, perhaps he will take it up another time. Despite the misleading title, Dalrymple offers a unique and short evaluation and defense of Agatha Christie. Christie wrote intelligent and insightful novels that, as she knew it, are middlebrow. While not all Christie books are of the same quality, her famous novels rightfully earned their place as classics of the genre, and she is worth a closer reading. She is the “Queen of Mystery” or as Dalrymple remarks, “books about murder are legion, but there is only one Agatha Christie.”

So much seems to be going wrong in our society. There is so much dissent, there are so many acts of violence, and there is so much division about the acts of violence. So much worry, anxiety, depression.

Many of us in economically prosperous nations feel that “society is broken” and declining. So much seems outside our control. The crises seem political, economic, and technological in nature; no doubt, such forces are changing our world and presenting new challenges. Yet the deepest roots of our problems are more basic. They involve personal and social order, direction, and purpose. The deepest roots of our problems are spiritual. 

Take just one unspeakably horrific example that has become a recurring and all-too-familiar feature of our news cycles: school shootings. Americans have had access to guns for decades and centuries. In the early twentieth century students even regularly shot, hunted, and participated in school-based gun clubs. Only in the last few decades have school shootings become a major social concern. 

My point with this example is not to debate gun policy or the Second Amendment but to suggest that something more fundamental has shifted under our feet beyond merely law, politics, or technology. Something is different in our very culture and way of life. We could give other examples to make this same point. Earlier generations of Americans faced more difficult economic, geopolitical, and legal circumstances, yet they suffered from fewer mental health maladies, built strong families, and experienced greater contentment in life. 

Neither the left nor the right in our politics seem able to adequately confront the underlying disorder driving the symptoms all around us. In my new book Community, Character, and the Governance of the Social Commons: Sanctuaries of Order, I offer an account of that shift. I argue that we have been losing the ability to govern ourselves and establish a tolerably ordered, decent, livable society. This ability involves, first and foremost, informal mechanisms for inculcating habits of restraint, courtesy, commitment, discipline, and respect, and reinforcing these habits through social sanctions and rewards. As our capacity for self-government has declined, we have become overly reliant on formal, legal methods of social control and order-maintenance. 

Borrowing from the great political scientist Elinor Ostrom and her analysis of commons governance, the sustainable management of shared resource systems like lakes and fisheries, I employ the idea of the “social commons” to express the notion that we are building a social world together. We don’t live and die only to ourselves; we are helping to form, shape, and color the social environments we inhabit—often in subtle ways we are tempted to deny or downplay. 

There is probably at least one area in which each of us would like to retain freedom to behave in a way that contributes to deterioration of the social environment, even as we decry that deterioration. Maybe it’s a choice to view pornography. Maybe it’s a choice to pursue divorce without biblical justification—or ignore it in our church when we should not. Maybe it’s to cuss. Maybe it’s something as simple as checking a phone during a conversation or in a shared space. 

Each of these actions in the abstract, while more or less selfish and sinful, may not appreciably damage the social world. If we consider only a single, discrete, isolated action, we could make a case that our choice isn’t harming anyone. But when such actions, as we repeat them, solidify into behavioral regularities, we slowly and almost imperceptibly allow the behavioral patterns we adopt and accept to degrade the social commons. Women in contemporary society largely have to expect, even if they do not condone, that men they want to date struggle with porn; divorce is not as common as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but neither is it at all uncommon; cursing and phone distraction are all around us. 

There is a sense of sternness that has existed at other times and places, including in the American experience. It has involved an ability to set high expectations and standards of behavior and largely see them met. We have been losing it in the last several decades, to our detriment. We see the loss of that sternness in parenting, in public comportment, in policy, in church governance or lack thereof. To be sure, not everything about ages and places of greater sternness is good. But the ability to set and uphold behavioral expectations, norms of courtesy, commitment, and decency, is an ability we can and should recover. Expectations of decency are essential for the construction of a livable social world, a social milieu in which we can live with a measure of liberty, justice, and dignity. 

Where did it come from? The short answer is social bonds and participation in relational networks that promoted accountability and shared norms. Membership in particular relational networks with a sense of intergenerational partnership, with agreed-upon rules, opportunities for monitoring behavior, and instillment of shared norms allow us to govern ourselves, to discourage narrow egoism. Through enmeshing our lives in ongoing relational connections, we tie our fortunes and wellbeing to the lives of others; we expose ourselves to potential reputation costs and establish mutual accountability. At a deeper level, the social bonds of family, neighborhood, and other associations offer personal connection and even love. These are the kinds of relational networks that have lost their place in our society, leading to the degradation of the social commons. 

The deterioration of the social commons and attendant wreckage in the lives of persons are a problem of wide scope, but it is most acute for those with the least education and means. Scholars and commentators like Robert Putnam, Charles Murray, Rob Henderson, and W. Bradley Wilcox note that elites may embrace radical individualism and antinomianism in theory, but they tend to embrace bourgeois moral and cultural norms in practice. The breakdown of traditional social institutions like the family has especially affected the least well-off and educated members of our society. 

The paradox of our time is that our greatest social need is to establish and renew the kinds of bonds and mores that generations before us managed to secure almost by instinct. We are wired for the kinds of self-governing community we seem to lack the most. Yet such bonds are hard to renew or generate when they break down and dissolve. We are shaped by the social commons we inhabit and help to shape it in turn. The irony of personal and social order is that we need good communities to form good persons, but we need good persons to build good communities. Thus, as I noted above, the deepest problems we face are not technical, political, or economic, they are spiritual. 

We might prefer to talk about legal, technical, or medical fixes for problems like school shootings, crime, drug overdose, suicide. Reckoning with the spiritual roots of personal and social disorder can be daunting, because it means reckoning with the fact of human wickedness and sinfulness. Yet we must reckon with the real root causes of such evils. 

The church is and remains a unique sanctuary of order. The church—the social witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ—forms and transforms her members through participation in practices of confession, repentance, and restoration. God’s grace transforms us in the church. While church hurt and abuse of church authority are real and they merit concern, the much greater, if less easily perceived, damage to the social commons has come from de-churching and loss of ecclesial authority and discipline. 

We have more power than we think. In each of our actions and words, we are helping shape the social commons and form the persons in our orbit, helping strengthen and beautify or degrade the social environment we inhabit. My book is an invitation to join, build, and revive the sanctuaries of order so desperately needed to renew the social commons and offer hope to generations starving for meaning, purpose, and life.

It is apt that one of the deadliest computer viruses was named after the Trojan Horse. The original Trojan Horse, made of wood, was a giant automaton-like statue that, in Greek myth, provided the only way for the Greeks to finally defeat the Trojans after a ten-year stalemate of a brutal war. The Horse was a trick—its wooden body hollow by design, so warriors filled it to the brim. When the Trojans brought the statue into their city, choosing to believe it was a sacred gift to the gods, the warriors poured out at night, taking over the city unawares. 

Then the slaughter began in earnest. None of the men survived. Women and children who survived were captured, brutalized in the most horrific ways imaginable—and some that we thankfully cannot even fully imagine—then sold into slavery. In other words, the simple technological advancement that the Trojan Horse represents made possible the destruction of an entire civilization overnight. 

The presumed sacred nature of the Horse is apt as well—as is its deceitful presentation as a gift. So often do we coo now over technological innovations as gifts sent to liberate us from the drudgery of work and everyday life—the sort of laborious existence that takes getting up in the morning, and pursuing day in and day out the same mundane tasks that have been part and parcel of human existence ever since, perhaps, Eden itself. The work that we do, especially in taking care of each other, is exhausting. Creative work is challenging too for many, who understandably grow eager to outsource it now. But could such simple daily acts be good for us—an integral part of what makes us human and also what affirms daily the Imago Dei within each of us? 

The importance of the affirmative answer to this question undergirds Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, issued on May 25^th, and titled Magnifica Humanitas—the sort of Latin that probably requires no translation to understand even for those who have never set foot in Latin class (although it’s not too late even for you, by the way, but I digress). The wording in the document’s title is highly significant for reasons to which Leo returns in concluding it. But at its core, this encyclical is a response to AI. At the same time, it is also a powerful theological manifesto on the value of human work, human thought, human creativity, and (most important of all) human worship of God. Leo opens the document as follows:

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world.”

So how should the Church respond to this challenge? It is important to note that while Leo’s concern is specifically with the Catholic Church’s response—thence his decision to begin with an overview of Catholic social teachings—ultimately, his recommendations are simply good theology that, for the most part, any conservative evangelical should be able to affirm as well. Consider, for instance, this powerful reminder of the importance of the Imago Dei for any conversations about humanity, including the acknowledgement of the value of motherhood:  

At the heart of the Christian understanding of the human person lies the great biblical affirmation that men and women are created in the image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26-27) of the Triune God. Created for relationship, every human person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion with him, with others and with creation. Human dignity does not depend on a person’s abilities, wealth or position in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; instead, it is a gift that precedes and transcends each person, endowed by God as an expression of his unfailing love.

So what does AI have to do with this? Leo explains: “The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom.” And one implication of this is: “we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral.” Leo is concerned over the abuses of power that those wielding technological tools can now exercise to disrespect the humanity of others, not to mention their own. In his discussion of transhumanism and posthumanism he shows awareness of such debates as those over the optimization of human embryos in IVF and the artificial enhancements that could optimize human bodies to become the stuff of Sci-fi novels—not fully human anymore, but possibly part machine. 

As Christians, we proclaim the Resurrection of the body, because Christ rose again. Because of this conviction that Christ died for all of us that we may rise again, we also affirm a commitment to the preciousness of every human life in God’s eyes. But to those who do not believe, the technology exists now to make themselves into their own gods. Why is this a problem? Because it ultimately threatens the weak and the vulnerable—especially those at the extremes of life (the very young and the very old), but also those who are sick. Leo’s concern is clear:

Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.

The section of the encyclical on the significance of embracing our limitations is, in my view, the most beautiful in the entire encyclical, combining theological, historical, and practical insights. Yes, we are all morally flawed beings—sinful and fallen. And yes, suffering is the lot of each and every human life. But God loves us in our flawed state, and God is working even these things for our good and for His glory. Such are the reminders we get from the study of history—yes, there have been many wars and abuses and violations of human dignity. And at the same time, history records many beautiful stories of goodness and mercy, some of them arising in response to the most horrific of abuses. 

In his conclusion, Leo connects the title he selected for this encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, to another document—Mary’s Magnificat, the song of praise to God that she sings early in her pregnancy with Jesus. The first name of the song in Jerome’s Vulgate translation is “Magnificat,” and it has become its title. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” the English translation holds, but the verb comes first in Latin—“magnifies,” the action each of our souls should be doing up front, no matter our task at hand.

As I finish typing this essay, my daughter is seated in the middle of the living floor nearby, drawing flowers in vibrant colors, her concentration uninterrupted by my typing or her brother’s traipsing around and at one point even stepping deliberately over her in an impressively large stride. Such is the nature of human lives lived together in ordinary wonder and gratitude. Not all technology is evil, as Leo notes and as many of us would agree. Some outsourcing of work to machines may enhance our human dignity rather than eroding it. I am grateful, for instance, that the dishwasher could clean the dishes after lunch, so I could sit down and read this encyclical and write about it. And I am grateful that a tiny robot lawnmower can cut my in-laws yard in Maine, now that they are no longer up to this task themselves. 

It is human community illumined by the gospel that we are after, the encyclical concludes—and community is a distinctly human delight. As beings who are bodies as well as souls, we rejoice in our families, churches, friendships, and neighborhoods—whereas no robot could feel delight or joy over the fellowship of fellow robots. Leo is right. Our humanity is indeed magnificent—but only because God who created us in His image deserves all the glory.

In Christian higher education, we practice something often called “faith integration.” The goal is for faculty to bring faith into their classes, connecting faith with their discipline. Some people prefer other terms, like “faith-infused,” or something else, but the idea is always about connecting faith with the classroom and education. It is part of what distinguishes Christian universities from other universities.

In my university’s honors program, faith integration is often relatively straightforward. After all, we assign faith-related reading every semester. We have a chronological Great Books sequence and we pride ourselves on our broad coverage of “The Great Conversation.” In their first semester, students read Plato and Aristotle and Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides alongside portions of the Old Testament. The core of our honors sequence extends across six semesters and by the time our students finish, they’ve been assigned more reading than most undergraduates. This includes authors like Augustine and Aquinas and Hildegard and Benedict, as well as Marx and Freud and Nietzsche.

The downside to the breadth of our reading list is that we have to move at a pretty fast clip to get through all the assigned reading in any given semester. In the “World of Humanism and Reform” class, which covers the Renaissance and Reformation, we read Utopia, The Praise of Folly, Hamlet, The Spiritual Exercises, Imitation of Christ, Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue, sermons by Luther, and Paradise Lost, as well as a few other texts. Students sometimes remark that they wish they had more time with some of the books, especially the books about religious devotion.

Even at a relatively quick pace, Humanism and Reform achieves many aspects of faith integration. We are assigning explicitly religious texts and trying to really understand them. Any student who does not reflect at all on their faith in that semester is practicing some resistance. We are an interdenominational school, so group discussions that cover the events of the Reformation and Counter Reformation are an opportunity to learn more about church history and to learn to have mature conversations about theological differences within the church. People in the room do not all agree on the correctness of Calvin or the Council of Trent, but we learn to have productive conversations together about them anyway.

Still, the faith integration we normally achieve in the class does not typically reflect the depth of spiritual formation we see in some of the books. Our reading of Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue does not compare to Petrarch’s self-examination, even if it prompts from self-examination from us. We read Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises in a couple of weeks, but we do not experience an Ignatian retreat. I’ve taught the class for several years now and I have long pondered the gap between what we are reading about and what we are doing. A couple years ago, I came up with an idea to give students an opportunity to close that gap a bit.

To give students the opportunity to truly engage and internalize a devotional book from the semester, I created an alternative assignment that allowed interested students to hand copy the entirety of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. This was optional. Students who chose the transcription option would be exempted from two of the three papers we did as a class and they would not have to take the final (they still had weekly assignments). If they completed the transcription, they would earn a minimum of 93% on the final. If they did not complete the transcription, they would earn grades for the papers and final exam corresponding to the percentage of the book they completed, not to exceed 85%. It was a high risk, high reward option.

Imitation of Christ was the perfect text for this alternative assignment. Historians believe that Thomas à Kempis transcribed the Bible by hand four times. Transcribing his work by hand is the best way to enter into his world. Hand copying the book honors his work. Imitation of Christ is also an ideal length. It is challenging to transcribe in a semester but not at all impossible. And students have nearly the whole semester. Of course, Imitation of Christ is also a devotional classic which has been read for centuries and remains relevant. St. Ignatius read from it every day.

Transcription gave students the chance to turn a reading assignment into a spiritual practice for a semester. Like Ignatius, they would be reading the book consistently, even if not daily. When you can only move at the speed of your handwriting, you go word by word, page by page, day by day. The speed and the focus let the words sink in. When you transcribe a book, you begin to internalize the author’s rhythm and ideas. This is why so many famous writers have developed their craft by retyping the works of other writers. And more of those rhythms and phrases will be remembered because people have a better memory of what they write by hand than what they type.

In the two years I have offered this assignment, I have observed students assimilating Imitation of Christ across a semester. Weeks after we all read the book together, people doing the transcription were much more likely to bring it up in later class discussions. In honors classes, we encourage students to connect books and authors, within a semester or from across the honors sequence. With this assignment, some students were always prepared with what Thomas à Kempis might have thought about a book or an idea and their comments reflected understanding and familiarity. Even a year later, I have observed students who transcribed Imitation of Christ bringing it up in class conversation. Ideally, they will be thinking about it for more years to come.

Transcription offered students the opportunity to go deep with a single text and to really internalize Imitation of Christ. But it was high stakes. It takes an entire semester and sometimes more than one notebook to transcribe Imitation of Christ by hand (and it hurts your hand). It cannot be done last minute. It requires discipline and time management skills. I advise students to “know thyself” when they decide whether or not to choose this option. The consequences for misjudgment can be extreme. By the time you skip the second and third papers, you are all in. If you don’t finish, you can end up with a low final grade in the class. I’ve offered this option twice and each time I have had at least one student take it and fail to complete the transcription.

Arguably, the high stakes were part of the lesson. Over half the authors we read in Humanism & Reform emphasize self-examination. The Spiritual Exercises asks people to reflect on their sin, Petrarch’s Secret Dialogue suggests you should imagine your own death, Luther’s life and work encourage self-examination, etc. Imitation of Christ emphasizes a realistic understanding of one’s own weaknesses and an awareness of one’s own sin. Meditating on the words of Imitation of Christ and doing the slow work of transcription should lead to a more accurate self-assessment. And the stakes make failing the assignment a meaningful opportunity for learning.

This is an imperfect assignment, but it brought something new and exciting into the class. This was faith integration that was more than talking or a single assignment. This was faith integration that was doing, and that doing was sustained across an entire semester. Students who chose this assignment could turn something we were otherwise treating as primarily academic into something much more personal. And it helped them make more sense of a book which was written for the purpose of religious devotion. Many students found the practice of transcription meaningful.

Pedagogically, the assignment has some additional advantages. This assignment is AI-proof. It’s not a substitute for the analysis done in writing a research paper, but there is also no short-term substitute for the work done in hand copying a book. This assignment also helps connect the mind and body in a way that very little academic work does. Even the opportunity to accept or decline the challenge added an element of self-direction that is often lacking in school. The existence of choice was a helpful addition to class. Obviously, this assignment is not possible or helpful in every class, but for our class it made a positive difference.

The best part of teaching in a Great Books program is when you can help students understand all of the new thoughts and experiences they can get from old books. This assignment did that. It was also an experiment with a new way of doing faith integration. For the students who did this assignment, faith wasn’t just referenced or integrated in class, a space in their weekly routines was created and made hospitable for faith formation. This assignment readied the ground for spiritual growth, hopefully helping students to better understand the links between learning and study and growing in their faith. Whatever else comes of it, students will go forward with their own, very personal, copy of Imitation of Christ.

Myles Werntz. Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century. Baker Academic, 2025. $24.99. 200 pp.

“I believe in the church.”

This article of the Christian faith seems unusual compared to others in the church’s creeds. Our faith, like everything else about us, is fallible and marked by sin. Still, this is a confession of God’s divine action and preservation of Christ’s body. There is a church, and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. But what does this pronouncement look like in practice? The early twentieth century’s ecumenical movement had promising energy, but it has largely faded. Now, after a century marked by fragmentation, schism, and deepening denominational stratification, discussions of the church and its oneness seem exhausting and exhausted.

Yet Myles Werntz’s Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century is a refreshing and welcome contribution. The twentieth century, the “century of the church,” witnessed the rise of the modern ecumenical movement and global missions, and the dramatic growth of Christianity around the world. It also saw Vatican II and its reforms, the explosion of Pentecostalism, and widespread theological self-examination. The result was a strange combination of division and vitality, the church growing rapidly even as it reassessed its identity.

While Werntz reflects on twentieth-century history, this is not a work of history or sociology. Rather than evaluating the arguments and probabilities for an institutional merger or waving away genuine differences, Werntz invites readers to reflect on the essence of the church. He notes various lists of marks of the church, such as Martin Luther’s, but declines to ground his analysis in them as tests to determine whether a particular body counts as a “true church.”

Instead, Werntz frames his work around the Nicene marks of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. These marks describe what the church is, not what it lacks. Because they point to the church’s being rather than its borders, they create space for sincere ecumenical conversation. They also frame the past century’s conflicts and debates not as divisive battles but as explorations of what it means to practically and communally live out these four marks.

Werntz never directly addresses the Reformed–Anglican dialogue that culminated in a 2020 report identifying koinonia as a communion all churches share as parts of the one body of Christ. Communion is never “impaired,” the report asserts, but “variously received.” Still, Werntz’s approach substantially overlaps with that insight, especially in his treatment of the church’s oneness. The church is one because it is the body of Christ animated by His Spirit. Its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not external additions; they arise from its very life. To be the church is to be these marks.

With this overall thesis in mind, Werntz traces the ways different twentieth-century Christian traditions “contested” or worked out what the church’s essence meant for their lives and practices. He frequently returns to the North American context, a geographical focus that reflects the availability of sources and the continuing influence of Western theology on global conversations. With far too many stories to list here, the book is worth reading if only for this panorama of Christ’s bride. This overview is especially relevant because the material issues that pressed the twentieth-century church (economics, race, the relationship between laity and clergy, the legacy of colonialism, etc.) have only intensified in the twenty-first.

The struggles, changes, sacrifices, sins, and reflections of the church are the working out of what it means to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. The marks of the church are gifts received, and therefore “will by their nature be contested, expanded, and reconfigured in different eras.” In other words, this contestation is how the church by the Spirit sorts out its marks as it comes into contact with the world and speaks to itself. So what does it mean to be one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in each particular place and time? Werntz devotes one section of the book to each mark.

One

Werntz begins his longest chapter with a sharp line from Cyprian, the mid-third century AD bishop of Carthage: “He cannot possess the garment of Christ who parts and divides the Church of Christ.” Few themes have preoccupied modern Christians more than church division and the elusive hope of unity. This mark deserves the extended attention he affords it, from formal moves within Roman Catholicism, the World Council of Churches, and Eastern Orthodoxy, and turns to approaches that emphasized spiritual unity—most notably within Pentecostalism—along with unity through mission, whether defined by evangelism or by the Social Gospel, and unity through hermeneutics, which Werntz associates most closely with the rise of evangelicalism.

Expressions of oneness by Christians across these traditions have included formal mergers, theological accounts of unity that persisted despite visible fractures, internal reckonings with non-denominational divisions like racism, cooperation in evangelistic and social efforts, common openness to the Spirit, and shared ways of reading Scripture. Werntz’s reporting highlights just how varied the attempts were and how differently each tradition understood what “unity” required.

His treatment of evangelicalism and the contestation for unity built upon hermeneutics is surprising and enlightening. Readers from other traditions may question aspects of his taxonomy, but I found his angle on evangelicalism refreshing. Werntz describes the movement as one that found church unity not primarily in institutions, mission, or the Spirit’s work, but in a shared hermeneutic. This is not to say evangelicals ignored institutions, mission, or the Spirit, or that traditions emphasizing those facets of the church’s life neglected Scripture. But for evangelicals, the center of contestation lay in how the Bible is read in ways that crossed institutional boundaries. The unity of the church was worked out through hermeneutical battles—internal debates, engagements with other Christian bodies, and efforts to embrace and partner with emerging majority-world churches whose readings began to differ sharply from their Western counterparts.

Experientially, this rings true and was even a little exposing to me as an evangelical reader and pastor. I am a Presbyterian who practices connectional polity and sacramental worship, yet contestation within my larger church still takes place on hermeneutical terrain. Doctrinal agreement matters deeply, but there must be a better way to express the oneness of Christ’s body than “We are united to the degree to which we agree.”

Holy

Werntz is keen to show that holiness is not simply an extension of oneness, even though the two are closely connected. Holiness is more than moral purity, although never less than that. It concerns the church’s life “by virtue of God having sanctified the church in Jesus Christ: before [holiness] is a task, it is an indelible gift of God’s own presence.”

So how did holiness belong to the whole church, and how did the church contest its holiness during a century marked by populist movements, lay empowerment, and complicity with social sins? Holiness, Werntz argues, is fundamentally about wholeness. Pentecostals emphasized this through the gifts and baptism of the Spirit. Pentecostals, mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics wrestled through the implications of the laity being wholly part of the church, because holiness presses outward: If the church is holy, the whole church must be engaged.

This becomes even more complicated when we consider social sins like colonialism and racism. Werntz shows how different models of polity shaped the ways churches reckoned with collective responsibility. The structures of the United Church of Canada produced one kind of response to questions of culpability regarding historic treatment of First Nations People; Southern Baptists in the Jim Crow South produced another. Werntz’s point is not to rank traditions but to reveal how holiness, understood as wholeness, inevitably draws the church into questions of common life, past failures, and present accountability.

Catholic

Catholicity for Werntz is a distinct mark, not just oneness under a different name. Catholicity is not just about unity, but shared confession in continuity with the apostolic message. Catholicity is not only what unites, but what is ubiquitous, believed universally across the centuries and across the planet. In other words, catholicity is about the movement of what unites Christians in different times and places; it is about how the church contextualizes and shares its unified witness in its pluriform contexts.

To show the limits of contextualization, Werntz turns to the German church of the 1930s and 1940s—a stark reminder that catholicity cannot be stretched infinitely. When the church’s contextual articulation of the faith undermines presuppositions of God’s universalizing work and seeks to emphasize context at the expense of the universal nature of the gospel, it ceases to be catholic. Context may shape witness, but it cannot eclipse the catholic nature of the gospel itself.

Werntz contrasts this with Pentecostal and Restorationist movements, which sought to recover the faith and practice of the early church in order to experience a catholic fullness that transcends time. Werntz astutely notes the similarity to the Eastern Orthodox; both view catholicity as participation in the church’s ancient, original, living inheritance. Evangelicalism, meanwhile, offered a different reorientation. Whatever catholicity might mean in relation to confessional standards, figures like Billy Graham insisted that it must include a form of Christian faith and experience accessible to all people, regardless of theological background. The explosion of parachurch organizations in the twentieth century expressed this instinct. These groups embodied a kind of functional catholicity, unity across denominational lines grounded in a widely shared experience of the gospel and a sense that Christ’s work unfolds in the present moment in a spiritual new birth.

A perennial question arises, however: How can the faith be both catholic and local, universal yet particular, complete yet still unfolding in specific contexts? One enduring answer from both Protestant and Catholic traditions is mission. A truly catholic church is one that sends, so that the gospel moves into new places and takes root in new localities. Catholicity, Werntz observes, has a “missional inflection,” though its expression varies across traditions.

Apostolic

If catholicity concerns continuity through contextualization in the present, apostolicity concerns continuity with the church’s past. Werntz frames it as a question of how the earliest generations of the church continue to exert authority over the present.

Most examples in this section focus on how the church bears and receives the apostolic message. The church contested apostolicity in the rise of mass media (what is the medium of the message and who are its gatekeepers?). It debated apostolicity in light of the growing role of laypeople, especially women (who may bear the message?). Long-standing issues surrounding apostolic succession and episcopal orders, especially the papacy, continued to provoke disagreement. And cultures shaped by colonialism and church wrongdoing raised hard questions about whether certain apostolic institutions could still be trusted as faithful messengers (can apostolic institutions be disqualified as message bearers?).

A quiet thread humming along in Werntz’s analysis is the effect of the Pentecostal movement upon the global church. Emphasis on the experience and life of the Spirit has shaped the contestation of all traditions, and especially on the mark of apostolicity. It’s a Pentecostal world, and the church is asking how the Spirit might be calling forth different people who embody and bear God’s wholeness.

As he concludes, Werntz urges the church to cultivate four virtues corresponding to its marks—temperance, prudence, fortitude, and justice—to inform the contestation of its life in the twenty-first century. Where the twentieth-century church leaned into these virtues, regardless of tradition, material circumstances, or theological convictions, the contestations were profitable and addressed the church’s needs. These are the virtues the church has needed in every age and still needs today.

From Jake: It is a significant day in the life of Mere Orthodoxy. Today we launch our new website and member dashboard. But behind that launch is a much larger story about the work that media projects like our own have to do today. It is a truism at this point to lament the division, anger, and extremism that is now ubiquitous in American life. But hidden inside the many problems now afflicting us is an exciting opportunity. 

Mere Orthodoxy exists to form Christians in the church who participate in broader culture for the common good. Today’s essay is my attempt to reflect on that opportunity by talking about how we got here, what challenges we now face as both Christians and members of a pluralistic civic experiment, and what we at Mere O are doing to try and seize the opportunity before us to build up both the church and our civic life.

We built the website and member dashboard not simply because we need a website of some kind, but because we want the site and member dashboard themselves to serve our goal as a media project. Given that, I’ve written a larger essay below that seeks to position the site and dashboard within that larger endeavor.

If you want to understand what we are doing and why, read the whole thing. If you want to learn specifically about our new website and member dashboard, you can use the navigation links now embedded in our articles to navigate to the relevant section of the essay. 

As always, thank you for reading!

Sometimes when I am asked to talk about writing, I like to take people back to what the writing life once looked like for many professionals in the United States and elsewhere. I take them back to films like All the President’s Men or Spotlight or perhaps share some of my own much less interesting stories from my too-short time spent in old daily newspaper newsrooms.

Though the memory is fading now, there was a time when such papers could be found in any town of significant size in this country–and in larger cities you might have had several such papers.

I still remember as a kid snagging the Sunday copy of the Lincoln Journal Star on the way out the door to church so I could read the sports page in the car on the way and, if there was time, maybe some of the comics as well. And when I got to church, I could reliably count on meeting other people there who would have read the same news stories and comics that I had, who subscribed to the same paper our family did.

In those days before the internet, this was how media worked: The main problem when it came to getting information out into the world was that it cost a lot of money to do it. You needed large printing presses, a fleet of delivery trucks, a huge number of workers to man the presses, drive the trucks, and deliver the papers, and, of course, you needed the reporters and editors who made the product, to say nothing of the advertising people (often forgotten) who ran the classifieds sections, which brought in a significant amount of the paper’s revenue.

There were, obviously, many downsides to this model, not least the exorbitant ad rates that papers liked to charge local businesses to advertise. Yet the tradeoff here was that information distribution tended to concentrate around geographically constrained publishers, which meant that within a geographic area most readers were reading the same things, and the publishers were reporting on matters of interest to people in their city or region, and the publishers often had plenty of money to maintain their work.

Put another way, geography created social context for readers. Media then existed as part of that social context and commented on it, helping their readers to interpret it, improve it, challenge it, or simply to enjoy it.

The arrival of the internet turned all of this upside down. The cost of information distribution trended quickly toward zero for publishers, which meant that the barrier to entry for new publishers almost entirely disappeared. This meant that newspapers and magazines suddenly found themselves competing against a previously unimaginable number of new publishers, most of whom had dramatically lower costs than the legacy institutions.

The cost of advertising–a form of information distribution–also trended toward zero, which almost immediately destroyed the primary revenue stream for most daily papers, who always made far more from classifieds than they did subscriptions.

Finally, once we combined powerful search engines and social media platforms with the arrival of smartphones, the challenge of finding and accessing media became similarly trivial. The consequences of these various digital revolutions are hard to overstate.

First, legacy media began to collapse, which had immense economic ramifications for journalists. Specifically it meant that stable entry-level jobs disappeared. This meant both that finding work now became far more difficult and that the early career incubator period that allowed new journalists to learn their craft in a stable institution with respected, experienced peer journalists ceased to exist. In such an environment, one secured a livelihood in journalism through the force of one’s personality and the reach of one’s personal platform on social media. In short, media shifted from being centered on institutions to centered on personalities.

Second, as the volume of media content exploded, maintaining reader trust became an enormous problem.

Third, as people became more dependent on their phones and personalized online algorithms to access content, the thick social context once supplied by geography and the high cost of information began to dissolve. Over time, the very idea of consensus reality began to crumble.

The outcome of all of this is that media audiences shifted away from being groups of people who shared a thick common social context, typically centered around a place. Media audiences, instead, became universalized online masses that could live anywhere and whose only common context was the content they consumed online. Yet, because all of us still live in geographic places, we still exist within a place. But the experience of the place transformed as more and more of our mental, emotional, and social life was experienced online and mediated via our devices and various algorithms.

The outcome of all of this is that the way we define the audience for a media project has changed. We are losing the idea of our audience being “readers.” That older model is being replaced by the idea of a “fan.”

As I noted in a recent essay, “readers” can be thought of as people who share a common context with the other consumers of a media project. The obvious applications here are magazine or newspaper readers. But you could even see people who listen to local radio or watch the local news as fitting in this category. The key idea, as I already said, is that readers exist in a given social context and the role media plays is to comment on that context in some way.

Fandom, by contrast, does not presuppose a given social context, but is built around chosen media brands. Because the geographic and social commons have dissolved, what we are left with is a paralyzing amount of choices for what media to consume, and our own personalized social contexts are then built atop those media we choose to consume.

So we relate to media producers in the way we relate to sports teams, associating ourselves with them not because they speak into something we already possess and share with others, but because we privately enjoy what they produce and identify with it rather than identifying with other producers. So media production becomes agonistic in some sense, a kind of Darwinian struggle between competing brands. This re-fashioning of media creates significant problems for both Christian media consumers and for American civic life.

Media Fandom and the Christian Reader

First, we need to talk about the challenges this creates for Christian media consumers. 

I take for granted the fact that Christian readers have certain moral restraints that dictate how they can relate to media if they wish to do so as Christians. 

Our Lord, for example, commands us to let our yes be yes and our no be no, which means something for how we speak as Christians. It means that we can’t become so lost in irony and sarcastic humor that our actual beliefs become lost or obscured. This command alone will bar us from producing anything resembling most dissident media, whether that comes from the “dirtbag left” of an older internet age or the various successors to the “alt-right.” Christian speech needn’t shun all irony–Paul himself sometimes seems to speak in ironic terms–but it does seem to exclude the sort of endless irony and mockery that defines a great deal of podcast media especially.

Additionally, the Ninth Commandment says that we are not allowed to bear false witness against our neighbor. The church has traditionally interpreted this command in quite expansive terms because Jesus himself interprets simple moral commands in such ways, as when he says that anyone who has hated his brother has “committed murder in his heart.” Taken in this expansive way, the Ninth Commandment does not simply mean that we cannot lie. Rather, this is what the Heidelberg Catechism says is required of us by the Ninth Commandment:

I must not give false testimony against anyone, twist no one's words, not gossip or slander, nor condemn or join in condemning anyone rashly and unheard. Rather, I must avoid all lying and deceit as the devil's own works, under penalty of God's heavy wrath. In court and everywhere else, I must love the truth, speak and confess it honestly, and do what I can to defend and promote my neighbour's honour and reputation.

Needless to say, simply taking these two basic Christian moral norms seriously would require many contemporary media producers to retract huge swathes of what they have published or to cease operations altogether. It is likely no overstatement to say that taking the Ninth Word seriously would require many Christian social media users to delete most of their social media posts.

But the problem actually goes deeper than this. Fandom models of media are basically amoral; we do not typically think of our sports fandoms as having moral significance. As much as I am sometimes tempted, I do not view support for Arsenal Football Club or the Iowa Hawkeyes as evidence of moral deficiency. But when we apply the fandom model to media, we reduce our relationship to media down to personal taste. This is a problem, of course, because media is speech and, as noted above, Scripture actually says a great deal about speech! So Christian media producers and consumers must participate in the media world in morally restricted ways while the bulk of the media world is not bound by such moral norms—which means that Christian media producers will feel a strong temptation toward the same sort of amoral style.

For media consumers, this can make it difficult to find trustworthy media and even more difficult to resist the deformative effects of consuming fandom-based media products that are unconcerned with basic moral norms. For media producers, there is a constant pull toward half-truth, mockery, or fabrication in order to expand one’s audience and to attract the attention of donors who care more about influence or victory than they do truth.

The outcome of this is that Christian media can easily over time become captive to unhealthy, sub-Christian audiences who demand something other than truth. This is disastrous for both Christian media producers and Christian media consumers.

Media Fandom and American Civic Life

We turn now to the problems this creates for civic life in America and, really, across the liberal democratic world.

It is significant that there are two types of institutions whose existence is assumed in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. One such institution is the church. The other is the press. The First Amendment protects both churches and the press from government interference. Why?

Because the framers of the First Amendment seem to believe that healthy democratic life requires independent churches and independent media. Recall, for example, that when Hamilton and Madison wanted to make the case for the Constitution they turned to the press, which published the many essays we now have collected as The Federalist Papers.

The particular importance of an independent press is illustrated powerfully in the movie Spotlight when the Boston Globe editor Marty Baron meets the Catholic Cardinal and archbishop of Boston, Bernard Law. Law invites Baron into a kind of informal alliance with the church, saying that the city thrives when its great institutions stand together. Baron demurs, saying that for newspapers to do their job they need to stand alone.

It is this tension which captures the brilliance of American democracy. The health of our civic experiment depends not on the church, state, and press all standing together, reinforcing each other's power and influence, but rather on each operating with a fair degree of independence from each other, serving as checks against each other so that no one body or individual gains too much power, thereby allowing them to undermine, subvert, or destroy our democratic system.

We might think about it like this: In his book An Anxious Age the Catholic writer and editor Joseph Bottum argued that American civic society is built atop a three-legged stool. One leg is the government, which through laws define what our common civic context will be and through police and military secure the ongoing peace of that shared context. Another leg is the marketplace, which exists within that civic space and provides work and wealth to the American people, which they can use to preserve our common life and enrich it. The third leg is the church, by which he meant the Protestant Mainline, which provides moral direction and oversight to both the government and the market, helping the government to know what kind of space it should preserve and the market to know what the purpose of all its work and wealth actually is. Obviously the church’s ultimate purpose is not to provide moral direction to society. Its final and ultimate purpose is to be the people of God, united under the preaching of the Word of God and the practice of the church’s sacramental life. I am not saying the church is a utilitarian body of do-gooders whose purpose is to moralize at everyone else. 

That being said, it is legitimate to speak of the church having multiple purposes or functions, some greater than others, but all real. In its relationship to broader society, the church can and often has provided unique moral guidance throughout history, whether that is in its rebuke of Roman cruelty toward slaves and women in the church’s early days to the church’s 20th century rebuke of segregation and racial cruelty in the United States. Another example of this sort of moral witness can be seen in the film On the Waterfront when a Catholic priest rebukes corruption in the markets.

I would like to add a fourth institution to Bottum’s list, however–the aforementioned “press.” You might think of the press this way: If government, market, and church are the legs of the stool, the press stands to the side and insures that the legs are all sturdy and, if not, that they are repaired in the way they need to be so that they can continue to function.

One might say that because they are each legs of the stool holding up society, the government, markets, and churches all have certain incentives (in their social roles) to protect their own standing at the expense of long-term health. The press, by contrast, is meant to be indifferent to its own reputation or status, but simply to be aimed at speaking what is true, without institutional factors constraining its witness. A good example of this, in practice, can be seen in Spotlight: Because the Catholic church existed as a human institution with assets and liabilities, it was all too easy for church officials to conceal and minimize the horrifying abuses taking place in their diocese. The cost of acknowledging the scale of the abuse was simply too high in material terms. It was the external witness provided by the Boston Globe that was able to expose the rot and call  church leadership to account.

The difficulty we now face is that because the common social context of our common life has largely dissolved, the press struggles to place itself in relationship to what remains of that context. As a result, we have a press that often either does its job badly or has lost all interest in doing its job as envisioned by the founders. Indeed, the largest financial rewards for the press–whose business model was destroyed quite recently, you might recall–tend to flow not to those who seek to repair the common context, but to those who participate in its collapse.

This is another way of getting at the problem of “fandoms.” Because fandom is detached from any unchosen common context, the press’s ability to fulfill its social role as understood by the First Amendment is excluded from the start: If you’re a media producer working under the fandom model, you simply don’t see yourself as having any sort of altruistic social function. You are simply a business trying to win fans to the cause so you can generate the revenue and attention you want and need. What drives decision making, then, is not whether or not you as a media outlet are fulfilling your role within a shared civic project, but whether you are winning fans and, thereby, winning revenue.

Taken together, then, it is a fairly perilous time for Christians and for media producers. We are all participating in a media environment that is largely indifferent to truth, addicted to cheap attention, and incentivized to radicalism and extremism. And due to context collapse, the issue is not that we have some healthy and viable alternative model, if only we would reach back and participate in it. The media environment has been destroyed. The common culture has been liquidated.

The Need for Context-Creating Media: Introducing Mere O’s New Online Platform

This brings us to the work we are doing at Mere Orthodoxy. I understand I’ve spent an enormous amount of time getting to this point, but it’s all important to understand in order to really get what we are trying to do at Mere O, which is far more than simply building a successful magazine or media nonprofit.

We no longer live in a world of shared context where media simply speaks into pre-existing spaces. The sort of business model that sustained all those magazines is dead. What’s more, because we now live in a world mediated via the internet and dominated by platforms, we no longer even have a shared idea of consensus reality. The commons have been liquidated.

When I say that I do not simply mean that the idea of my neighbor and I sharing a common place has been eroded, though it has. I mean that the very idea of the “fact” has been largely dissolved. And we are all now left living in our own worlds of “truthyness” and “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The consequences of all this for both the church and our civic life are basically impossible to overstate.

One option we could take—and many media companies have taken this option—is to simply spend our time wringing our hands and lamenting the world we have lost, while suggesting to our readers that if only the right person obtained power or the right decisions were made in our churches or the right tech companies were rewarded or punished, then things would be fine.

But that is not true.

The problems we have stumbled into are far too large and too complex for such simplistic thinking. Not only that, but that sort of simplistic analysis will actually make things worse because media organizations pushing that habit of thought will form in themselves and in their audiences a spirit of hatred and rage aimed at whoever their great enemy and destroyer of all that is good happens to be. Simplistic solutions not only fail to address the problems before us, but actually form us in ways that make the problems far worse.

And it will not accomplish anything to simply wish it were not so. All we can do, as Tolkien reminds us, is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.

So this is the task we have set for ourselves at Mere O: If fandom is the default model for media audiences today, we want to know if we can create a fandom of Christians engaging in culture for the common good and seeking to enrich the life of the church and of our shared commonwealth. 

Put another way: If we must have fans, can we seek to cultivate fans not of Mere Orthodoxy but “fans” of principled Christian piety and civic engagement within an inextricably pluralist society?

And while we’re at it, since we can’t create media that simply partakes of an already created, already shared context, can we create media that remakes that context for our readers, supplying common context for them?

And, let us be practical, can we find enough paying members, donors, and sponsors to support such an endeavor so that we can do it in a sustainable, enduring way so that, one day, we might pass this work on to a second generation of stewards who might carry it forward into the future?

Those are the questions that Mark, Ian, and I are asking, and that we are also thinking about with our board of directors and our editorial board.

How can we accomplish all this? There are two answers to that question.

First, we need to talk about the values we presuppose as an organization that constrain what we do and that we seek to commend to our audience. To answer the question, you might ask “what are the things that we simply take for granted at Mere Orthodoxy and try to teach our readers to take for granted in the same way?”

Some of these answers are explicitly theological: We take for granted that the things proclaimed in the Apostle’s Creed are actually true. We take for granted that God invites us to pray. We take for granted that God calls and equips us to follow the Ten Commandments.

Other things we presuppose are entailments of those prior theological commitments: We take for granted that there really is a common reality we all share and that we can reason about together. Because of that, we take for granted the ideas that persuasion is good (and actually possible!), that making arguments is good, and that having spirited disagreements about matters of great significance is good and fruitful.

If you have followed our work for some time, hopefully none of this is a surprise. These commitments are why we have a very uneven and tentative relationship to social media platforms. They are why we have loudly condemned revolutionary ideologies of all sorts. They are why we sometimes publish essays and reviews and interviews that exceed 10,000 words. They are why we still publish a print journal. These twin commitments to basic Christian orthodoxy and a kind of civically engaged Christian liberalism are foundational to everything we do.

But you can answer the question in another way as well, and this is where the new site is most exciting to me. One way of thinking about the internet today is that it consists of a series of walled gardens, all disconnected from one another. And these walled gardens are best understood as "platforms." Thankfully, Mere Orthodoxy is itself a platform because about 75% of our traffic comes to us either directly or via our own email list. So we access our audience without the need of social media algorithms or search algorithms. And so that makes us wonder what sort of things might be possible, given that fact. For example: Can we create a platform that through its design helps call people to love of God and love of neighbor?

In one sense, the answer is "no, we can’t." That work is something God does and he accomplishes it most simply and directly through other persons. You should not look to any online platform to do the work of the local church or of Christian fellowship with other believers.

That said, because media does play such a foundational role in shaping how people experience the world and because media has to be aimed at something in its design, we have designed something that we hope is aimed at encouraging people toward piety and neighborliness.

For our current paying members, you’ve likely had the experience at some point of realizing that if you need to change anything with your membership–shipping address, payment information, etc.–that you couldn’t do that. Our old website was built on Hubspot and Hubspot simply lacked the tools to allow us to create a dashboard for our members. So if you wanted to change any information with your membership, the only way was to email us and ask us to take care of it for you.

That, thankfully, is no longer true. All paid members of Mere Orthodoxy now have access to our member dashboard. And our hope for the member dashboard is that it would be a place that helps you grow intellectually and also grow in your awareness of the connections between our media diets and our Christian discipleship. So we have created a dashboard that allows you to change your payment or shipping information, but also does quite a bit more.

First, when you login to the dashboard, you’ll see a welcome message and a prayer for whatever season of the church year we are in which is pulled from the Book of Common Prayer. 

This is our simple way of acknowledging the point made so beautifully by John Ahern last week: The choice given to each of us is not to choose between ten hours in prayer or ten hours in our books; you can (and should!) choose to spend ten hours in prayer over your books.

Our hope is that this simple inclusion in the dashboard will prompt our members toward prayer even as they are browsing the internet. It is hard to hate someone when you are praying for them, after all. So we hope that this small encouragement to prayer might help all of us to approach our media consumption in the right spirit.

Second, if you scroll down you will find that all our different unique offerings to our members are now easily accessed: You can access our Members-only Discord, digital editions of all our print journals, and you can access bookmarks, which are a new feature we have on each article on the site, making it easier for you to access later. And if you click and drag over any quotes you want to remember from an article, you can click to “save” the quote and that quote (with a link to the article) will be added to your personalized Commonplace book:

The dashboard also includes a full reading history of everything you’ve read at Mere O, which we hope will make it easier to find any old pieces you might want to return to later.

If you scroll further down, you will see two more features in the right-side nav bar. 

First, we now have a link to the day’s morning or evening prayer readings from the Book of Common Prayer, which you can read within your member dashboard. Again, our hope here is that it would be a prompt to prayer and a reminder that even our reading and thinking is done before the face of God, that it is something for which we will one day give an account, and it is something which we can do in ways that please God. 

Lastly, you’ll notice an option to adjust the site’s color theme according to the season of the church year. It’s a relatively small feature, but another way in which we hope that the time you spend on our site will call you back toward an awareness of who you are as a human being—you are a beloved son or daughter of God who is made to know and love God forever. The work of growing to know and love God happens now in the world of space and time.

The thought process behind all of this is that if we no longer can assume a shared context between us and our readers and our neighbors, then the best thing we can do is try to create healthy contexts that call people back to the best of what has been lost and also forward into what good remains possible for us.

And now that I have thoroughly tested your patience with such a long introductory essay, I will simply leave it here with three closing thoughts aimed at anyone who wishes to be a properly Christian reader and a properly Christian member of a civil public square. 

First, if all this makes sense to you and it seems right to build media that values what we value and commends to our readers what we commend to our readers, would you consider joining us as a member? The reality today is that while we know now that reader-supported media can work as a monetization strategy, it is still an immensely challenging strategy simply because it is quite difficult to get enough paying readers to support the work.

Put another way: We can’t do this work without the support of our paid members. If our paid members left us, we’d be done. If you want media projects like this to exist, then we need your support.

Second, it is sometimes difficult to remember the things we know are true while we are online. Anger comes easily. So does mistrust and cynicism. If you want to be part of the solution to our ecclesial and civic malaise rather than a contributor to it, please engage online media from a posture of prayerfulness and quiet, patient devotion to God. And when you pray, please pray for us.

Third, remember that God loves the world and he made us to delight in it and steward it and form it. The work we do is an act of worship to God. He delights in the work of plumbers and electricians and teachers and nurses and lawyers and even politicians and journalists, at least when we do that work as an act of service to God and an expression of love to our neighbor. Never forget that the world is worth knowing and even worth loving because God made it, knows it well, and loves it best.

Thank you for reading and for being with us in this new chapter of Mere Orthodoxy.

This essay is adapted from The Augustinian Pastor: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Ministry (Baker Academic, 2026).

One Sunday morning in Hippo Regius, many years into his service as bishop, Augustine’s regular preaching duties coincided with the anniversary of the day he was ordained to the priesthood. Perhaps feeling a bit nostalgic, Augustine reflected in the sermon on the sense of the heavy responsibility that he had assumed when he became a pastor. In the homily that morning, Augustine singles out a specific and perhaps surprising aspect of the calling that he found especially challenging: the honor that accompanied the office. “From the moment this burden… was placed on my shoulders, anxiety about the honor shown me has always been haunting me.” In his preaching to the flock that morning, Augustine identifies one of the central temptations that can accompany the pastoral vocation: the possibility that his congregation might admire him, that they would esteem him. “What, though, is to be dreaded in this office, if not that I may take more pleasure… in the honor shown me, than in what bears fruit in your salvation?” Augustine is afraid that he’ll come to want to be praised more than he’ll want to be a person who is worthy of that praise.

The problem, of course, is not so much with the praise itself but in his own immoderate love of praise. Love of praise is a fruit of the pride that always threatens our integrity and our faithfulness. Vigilance about this danger, and the accompanying need to cultivate the virtue of humility, is for Augustine a moral necessity for all of us - those who are called into ministry, but really any of us who have ever been given some kind of authority and leadership.

Disordered love of praise and honor is one among a number of subtle and insidious forms of pride which accompany the Christian life, and the only way to prevent being mastered by this pride is to cultivate a humble spirit. Humility is, of course, for all. Augustine writes, “All Christians have to practice humility. Indeed, they even get the name of Christian from Christ, and no one can examine his Gospel attentively without discovering that he is the teacher of humility.” But pride does present particular challenges to some. “On the other hand, it is proper that those who stand out from the rest because of some great gift should be especially concerned to develop and preserve this virtue.”

We find some of Augustine’s most poignant counsel on this danger in a treatise called Holy Virginity, a work written to women who had taken a vow of chastity. But with a minimal amount of translation, it is a treatise which has wisdom for all of us, especially those with positions of authority. It’s in that treatise that Augustine gives us an important but counter-intuitive principle for thinking about the dynamics between pride and humility: pride is most dangerous for those who have progressed furthest in virtue and the moral demands of the Christian life.

Pride and the “Glittering Vices”

“A person must have humility in proportion to his or her greatness. The danger is pride, and the more exalted the person, the stronger will be its assault.” It is the very presence of virtue that creates the conditions for pride to grow. Augustine sees Jesus’ parable of the praying Pharisee and tax collector from Luke 18 as evidence for this. When he considers the person we know to be the antagonist of the passage, the Pharisee, he draws our attention to the real virtues that the Pharisee has and even his attempt at heartfelt thanksgiving to God. But all of this is spoiled by the pride that acts like a parasite upon his virtues.

Commenting on the passage, Augustine writes “It is possible, therefore, for someone both to avoid real evils and be aware of genuine goodness in himself or herself, and give thanks for this to the Father, from whom comes every good and excellent thing we receive from above (Jas 1:17), and at the same time be guilty of the sin of pride by being insulting to others who are sinners, especially those who confess their sins in prayer.” Here’s the terrifying insight Augustine suggests: there are both real goodness and also terrible pridefulness in the Pharisee, and it is precisely that goodness that both encourages his pride and also conceals it from him.

It is when a Christian demonstrates virtue and greatness become visible they are most susceptible to the danger of pride. Faithfulness, goodness, moral excellence, giftedness, and virtue are often met with honor and praise in the Church. But with that praise comes the possibility of a subtle change in motivation. The Christian can become more concerned with how he or she is seen by others than with their identity before God. Pride “makes them more afraid of displeasing other people than displeasing God.” Exterior appearances begin to replace interior realities. Now the Christian’s moral orientation is “directed more to show than to reform.”

This mis-orientation is in many ways a Christian version of an Augustinian concept called the “glittering vices.” In Book V of The City of God Augustine considers how Rome came to be such a great power with a panoply of heroes who appeared to possess moral excellence and virtue. He bemusedly observes that Rome’s greatness emerged from a willingness to restrain all of their other vices in the pursuit of one great vice: the love of glory. “This glory they loved with a passion. It was for its sake that they wanted to live and for its sake that they did not hesitate to die. Their boundless desire for this one thing kept all their other desires in check.”

Rome’s greatness had as its source one great, “glittering” vice – the vain love of glory – that it was willing to submit all of its other vices to. But this is where the parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee in Luke 18 comes in. Christians should not look down upon Rome, as if we are inoculated to this principle. In the same way that pagan Romans suppressed greed, sensuality, and other vices for the love of glory, it is all too possible that Christians can also restrain their own vices but do so only for the sake of the same vice—love of glory. Only now this love of glory would, just as with the Pharisee in Luke 18, be camouflaged by the virtues that are honored in the Christian community.

This concept helps Augustine give such a shrewd analysis of the subtle and manifold dangers of pride. In Holy Virginity Augustine speaks frankly to serious, devoted Christians, people whose lives are a model of sacrifice and devotion. He tells them that he is afraid for them and their souls precisely because of their great devotion: “I am frightened, I say, that you will become proud about following the Lord wherever he goes, and then you will not be able to follow him through the narrow places because you are swollen with pride.” Part of why this fear is warranted is because pride is so subtle it can disguise itself as false humility: “Now that men and women know that they are what they are by the grace of God, let them not fall into another trap by pride, by becoming proud even about God’s grace and looking down on others because of that.” The sobering truth is that a Christian’s most zealous acts of devotion can be “stolen and destroyed by pride.” Because of this, the Christian must be a student of pride and know both its nature and also its antidote.

Pride is of such great concern to Augustine because it is at the center of every departure from the good life that God intends for humanity. “Now pride is a great vice, and the first of vices, the beginning, origin and cause of all sins.” Pride is, for Augustine, a movement away from dependence upon God and toward the self in an effort to possess radical independence, self-security, and self-exalting achievement. To quote the Augustine scholar John Cavadini: “In essence, pride is the desire to replace God with oneself.”

But Augustine goes beyond simply defining pride and identifying its intrinsic and necessary role in every sin–he describes pride. Because pride is such an important concept and such a formidable opponent in the Christian life, he often lingers over specific examples where it is manifested in the world. Throughout his writings we find a textured and nuanced description of pride as it appears in its various forms. This is a vice that can be instantiated intellectually or spiritually, in an individual or or in a culture, perversely or under the guise of virtue. While a definition of pride is helpful, it is even more useful for us to be trained to see it in its manifold forms. In what follows, I’d like to draw your attention to some of the ways Augustine describes pride which have particular relevance to us as pastors.

There are a multitude of examples, but we will have to limit ourselves to one: education. Augustine identifies a kind of intellectual pride in the various educational institutions that are mentioned in the Confessions. When describing his early education in Latin while he was a rhetoric student in Thagaste, Augustine paints a picture of a culture that honors the skills of intellectual achievement rather than truth or virtue. His teachers praised a rhetorician's ability to wield precise and correct grammar and their ability to move an audience—to the exclusion of the truth of the subject matter being spoken of and the character of the speaker. “The models proposed to me for imitation were people who would have been caught out and covered with confusion if they had related any of their doings—deeds not wrong in themselves—in a barbaric accent or with grammatical blunders, whereas to relate licentious deeds in correct and well-turned phrases, in ample and elegant style, would have won them praise and honor.” This is a culture that is built upon the self-exalting character of pride, an environment where the singular measure of achievement is the extent to which individuals can exalt themselves over and against others.

Augustine has an eye for this. He sees pride enculturated all around him. He sees it in Platonic philosophy, a belief system that Augustine believes is in some way founded on pride. He sees it in Roman spirituality, which exalted individuals in their ability to access secret knowledge through rituals. And he sees it in Roman culture itself, which exalted itself as the greatest power the world had ever known.

Pride and the Christian Life

Augustine describes sin so carefully in order to learn to see it. But he does that not just so we can learn to see it over there, but so we can learn to see in ourselves. Augustine’s understanding of pride gives us a framework that we can translate and transfer to our own institutions, cultures, and practices of pastoral ministry. This diagnosis is all the more helpful to us because of pride’s subtlety and how it can clothe itself in the pursuit of “glittering vices”—and do so even in the Christian community. What might this look like? A few thought experiments will help us apply Augustine’s counsel.

We can easily imagine what this would look like in a local church. Pride can infect the culture of the church so that it becomes a place where pastors with certain gifts exalt themselves through using their gifts, through the growth of a congregation, or through the ability to build a platform. The “glittering vice” of institutional glory can create a culture where congregations turn a blind eye to issues of character and behavior because of a charismatic leader’s ability to draw people to worship.

All sorts of other institutional disorders follow upon this one. Pastors might devote their time and energy to performance, to the curation of their brand to the exclusion of personal devotion and the shepherding of the flock between Sundays. This is the kind of ecclesial culture where pride is camouflaged by the seemingly great virtues displayed in the pastor’s skills and the worldly “glory” that follows. When we read about churches that implode – Mars Hill, Willow Creek, and others, this is often exactly what is happening. There is this unsaid agreement between the leader and the people. Get us to glory, and we’ll overlook the problems. And the glory of the success, the importance of “the mission,” justifies everything else. It’s “glittering vices” in Christian dress.

We can even imagine how pride can corrupt spirituality—Christian spirituality—in a way that mimics the theurgist religion Augustine critiques in The City of God. Under the banner of studiousness and devotion, Christians can pridefully exalt themselves through their practice, their piety, and their knowledge of doctrine. This could be a Christianity of practice: of fasting, or Sabbath, or of service. Or this could be a Christianity of knowledge: of the necessity of cultural engagement, of political theology, or even of the glories of the doctrines of grace. But whatever its form, it would be a spirituality that says with the Pharisee in Luke 18, “I thank you, God, that I am not like that [blank],” with each form of spirituality filling in its own version of the “other” that it looks down upon.

Unfortunately, these are not hypothetical examples of how pride can infect Christian institutions and practices. Pride is always attempting to infiltrate Christian communities, corrupting Christian theology and spirituality, and ultimately diverting us from faithfulness. And here is where Augustine’s diagnosis is helpful. His description of pride and the examples that he provides are there to arm us against its attempts to overcome us. We benefit from Augustine’s description of pride in at least two ways.

First, because Augustine gives pride a central place as the “beginning, origin, and cause of all sins,” he forms us to be observant of pride’s insidious nature. We can use Augustine’s definition to nip pride’s bud in our hearts before it spreads and overtakes us. When we sin—as we inevitably will—we can use Augustine’s diagnosis to identify pride’s pattern and the false promises we believe.

Secondly, Augustine’s description of pride helps us to understand the shape of pride and how it affects cultures and institutions. It does not operate merely within atomized individuals, enclosed within the human heart. Pride is both personal and systemic; like a parasite, it attempts to infect whatever host is available. Across his works, Augustine shows us how we are in danger of being “discipled” into pride through education, through philosophy, through religion—through any institutions or cultures we participate in. This is true even in Christian communities.

This second point possesses a great deal of explanatory power for what we too often see in the Church. Specifically, Augustine’s account of the “glittering vices” helps us to make sense of the paradox of apparently successful churches and ministries headed by leaders who eventually face one kind of reckoning or another because of their pride. Why is it so often the case that ministries with a reputation for creativity, excellence, and success are also led by pastors whose lives are characterized by the kind of pride that inevitably leads to a fall? Why is it that those who seem the most committed to Jesus’ Kingdom too often fail to resemble Jesus himself in their gentleness, kindness, and integrity? Augustine helps us to see why.

Just like Rome was able to restrain its “lesser” vices in the pursuit of the one great goal of glory, many Christian leaders and organizations also mobilize all of their resources around the same pursuit of glory. While that “glory” may explicitly be described as God’s glory, Kingdom expansion, or any other number of Christian ends, in reality those goals have some kind of disordered relationship to the institution or its leader. And that prideful glory can prove to be an uncannily effective motivator for getting things done. Incredible creativity is unleashed, innumerable people are served, costly sacrifices are made, non-disclosure agreements are signed—all to the end of this counterfeit “glory.”

The pursuit of that kind of prideful glory is sustainable only for so long. It may be that those within the institution who have been chewed up and spit out by the relentless pursuit of glory protest the disparity between the purported values of the organization and the realities of life within it. It may be that the leaders who spearhead the charge for this glory develop shadow lives in order to relieve the growing pressure that comes with being progressively enslaved to pride. It may be that the pastor increasingly feels entitled to indulge in certain habits and behaviors as compensation for their purported importance for the Kingdom. It may be that there is all kinds of dysfunctional behavior going on behind the scenes. But whatever the case, the “glittering vices” will at some point prove to be an unstable foundation for life and ministry. Augustine’s account of pride helps us to see this troubling reality for what it is.

In 1 BC, a man named Hilarion wrote a letter to his pregnant wife, Alis, while he was away on business in Alexandria. The letter survives on papyrus, preserved by two thousand years of dry Egyptian air. He asks about her health. He tells her to take care of herself. And then, almost in the same breath:

If you bear a child, if it is a boy, let it live. If it is a girl, expose it.

One sentence without anguish or apology. Just instruction.

What Hilarion wrote was not considered monstrous in his world, his legal system, or to his gods. Roman law gave the paterfamilias, the father and head of household, the power to accept or reject a newborn. Acceptance meant lifting the child from the floor where it had been placed after birth. Rejection meant leaving it there, to be carried outside the city and abandoned to the elements, to wild animals, or to whoever might find it first.

The practice had a name. It was called exposure. It was legal, widespread, and morally accepted.

What we would call murder, the ancient world called a household decision.

This is not an obscure corner of ancient history. It’s the mainstream. Aristotle, one of the most respected philosophers of the ancient world, argued in his Politics that exposure should be legally required for deformed children, and recommended as population policy for everyone else. Plato, in the Republic, proposed that children born to inferior unions should not be raised. Seneca, whose diagnosis of wasted time was otherwise so penetrating, wrote without particular emotion in De Ira: "We drown children who at birth are weakly and abnormal." He was not describing a tragedy. He was describing a reasonable practice.

Girls and the weak and the inconvenient were abandoned in large numbers, most died. Some were found by slave traders and raised for labor or prostitution. A father had no particular moral obligation to the child his wife was carrying. The child's right to exist was entirely contingent on his decision.

And then there was the matter of what the Greeks called paiderastia.

The word means, literally, love of boys. It described the formalized sexual relationship between an adult male and an adolescent, typically between twelve and seventeen years old. It was not hidden. It was not shameful. It was celebrated in poetry, codified in philosophical writing, and treated across significant parts of Greek culture as a form of mentorship and education. Plato wrote about it approvingly. The gymnasiums where boys trained were, in part, sites of adult male pursuit.

The ancient world did not have a word for child abuse. It had a word for a relationship.

The first Christians stepped into this world and named what they saw differently.

The Didache, one of the earliest Christian documents outside the New Testament, written sometime in the first or early second century, is essentially a manual for community life. One of its instructions condemns murder, adultery, theft, and then, in the same breath, as a matter in the same moral category: "you shall not be a paidophthoros."

The word is not paiderastes. Not a lover of boys. Not a mentor or admirer.

Paidophthoros means destroyer of children. Corruptor of children. The one who ruins what is young.

The vocabulary shift is not incidental. It is a complete moral reclassification. What Greek culture had named as love, the Didache names as destruction. The adult in the relationship is not an admirer or a teacher. He is someone who destroys. The child is not a junior partner in an educational arrangement. He is a victim.

This is not a minor theological shift. It is a revolution in moral language. And moral language shapes moral vision.

The early Christians did not simply write differently about children. They acted differently.

Justin Martyr, writing around AD 155, described the problem with exposure: abandoned children, he mentioned, were frequently found and raised as prostitutes. Christians could not participate in a practice that handed children to such a fate. The logic was not sentimental. It was theological. Their lives were not the fathers to dispose of.

Aristides, a second-century Christian apologist writing to the Emperor Hadrian, described Christian practice: "They do not expose their children." In the context of his time, that sentence was provocative. It marked Christians as different in a way that was socially costly and economically irrational. Families were pressured to limit the number of mouths they fed. Girls were a financial liability. Christians kept them anyway.

It went further. There is substantial historical evidence that early Christians actively rescued exposed infants, taking in children left to die and raising them as their own. The New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado, in his historical study of early Christian distinctiveness, documents the rejection of infanticide and exposure as one of the clearest markers by which the Roman world recognized Christians as genuinely, stubbornly different from everyone around them. This was not a peripheral practice. It was, Hurtado argues, a defining feature of what it meant to be a Christian community in the Roman world, noticed and remarked upon by pagan observers precisely because it made no sense by their moral framework.

By the fourth century, the first institutions specifically for abandoned children, called brephotrophia, were being built and maintained by the church. The emperor Valentinian I, a Christian, outlawed infanticide entirely in AD 374. What had been a household decision became a crime. The moral vocabulary of the Didache had, over three centuries, reshaped the legal vocabulary of the empire.

None of this was accidental. It happened because the early Christians had a theological account of why children mattered that the ancient world simply did not possess.

The scriptures of Israel planted a radical idea that eventually stripped the Roman father’s power over life and death. While Roman tradition viewed a newborn as a mere object awaiting a paterfamilias’s verdict, Jewish and Christian theology saw a sacred life created by God, born with a royal vocation and divine purpose that no earthly authority could revoke. Armed with this conviction found in the scriptures, first-century Jewish and Christian writers like Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus, and Aristides boldly condemned child exposure as outright murder and a violation of nature.

And then there was the specific belief of the incarnation.

The God whom Christians worshiped had entered the world as an infant. He had been placed in a feeding trough. He had been carried as a refugee into Egypt. He had grown slowly, as children do, learning to walk and speak in a particular language in a particular house. He had been, for years, entirely dependent on the care of human parents.

The gods of the ancient world did not become children. They appeared in power and glory. The God of the Christians chose to begin where every human being begins. And in doing so, he made it permanently impossible to treat the vulnerability of childhood as a defect to be eliminated.

Jesus made this explicit. When the disciples tried to turn children away from him as a distraction, he stopped them. "Let the little children come to me," he said. "Do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God." And then he said something with no real parallel in ancient moral philosophy: anyone who causes one of these children to stumble would be better off drowned in the depths of the sea. The ancient world assumed children were managed by adults for adult purposes. Jesus made the child's welfare the measure of adult moral standing.

The historian O.M. Bakke, in a carefully researched secular study of childhood in early Christianity, concluded that the church introduced something genuinely new into the ancient world: a framework in which children were not property, not burdens, not tools, but persons with full dignity before God, deserving protection and love for their own sake.

This is now, in much of the world, simply assumed. We call it civilization. We enforce it with law. We feel an outrage at its violation so deep and instinctive that we rarely stop to ask where that outrage came from.

It came from somewhere specific.

It came from a document written in the first century that gave child abuse a different name: not love, but destruction. It came from communities that kept their daughters and pulled abandoned infants from the refuse heaps at the edge of Roman cities. It came from a theology that said every child matters, including the weak and the unwanted, and that their dignity is not ours to grant or revoke.

It came from a God who, when he chose to enter the world, chose to enter it as a child: held in the arms of a young mother, in the middle of the night, in a place no one with power would have chosen.

The world he was born into left children at the city's edge to die.

He came to that world anyway. And he has been gathering the ones it discards ever since.

As students met this spring to launch our first Coverdale House reading group, we followed a standard format for the evening: we ate, we prayed, and we got down to the business of carefully reading and discussing. It’s the second step of that process that I would like to talk about here. Prayer is an important part of the intellectual life. The great Presbyterian theologian B. B. Warfield, in his famous address “The Religious Life of Theological Students,” critiqued an overly pietistic contrast between the spiritual life and the intellectual life thus: “Sometimes we hear it said that ten minutes on your knees will give a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books. ‘What!’ is the appropriate response, ‘than ten hours over your books on your knees?’” Evidently Warfield wished his seminarians to study their books, yes, for ten hours, but be praying all the while. Hans Urs von Balthasar put it even more succinctly: the Christian thinker is engaged in a kind of “kneeling theology.”

But at Coverdale House events, our prayers together are structured and even scripted: the Lord’s Prayer, the Psalms, and other readings of Scripture. This is, of course, what some would call “liturgy”—a tricky word, since, to some, it implies certain church traditions as opposed to others, or a particular vibe or aesthetic (vestments, thuribles, Ember days, and so forth). This is not the sense in which I’m speaking when I say that we prayed liturgically. All I mean is that we prayed with words which were normed and governed by Scripture, and particularly by the Psalms.

This liturgical prayer is a part of the long-term vision of the Coverdale House, because we think it is especially important for academics tasked with keeping their focus on Christ in their scholarly endeavors. There are many wonderful things about such prayer. For instance, as we prayed together, we heard whatever Scripture and prayed whichever Psalms were appointed for that day by a pre-determined lectionary. I think there’s particular benefit in this for academics, since there can come to be certain passages of Scripture we wouldn’t choose on purpose, certain passages after which we would rather not say “Thanks be to God.” Keeping that habit of gratitude alive and well, regardless of the appointed reading, is likely salubrious for the spiritual hygiene of the average Christian academic.

But there is an even deeper reason why I think liturgical prayer is crucial to the formation of Christian scholars. Insofar as we shirk this kind of liturgical prayer—by which, again, I mean prayer normed and governed by Scripture, and particularly by the Psalms—we stunt the growth of Christian scholars. I’m not here arguing for the superiority of one particular church tradition over another, since (as I hope to show below) this has been, at times, a common desire of many traditions (even Presbyterians and, yes, even Baptists!); rather, I’m insisting that liturgical prayer is particularly useful for the life of the Christian scholar. This is because liturgical prayer uniquely forms Christian imaginations. I hope to explain how in what follows.

How have different eras evaluated intellectual genius? What characterizes the great mind in the Middle Ages as opposed to the modern period? Mary Carruthers answers just that question in the introduction to her 1990 The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture.

Her introduction begins by contrasting two biographical descriptions, one of Albert Einstein and the other of Thomas Aquinas. The contrast is instructive: two contemporaries describing the greatest minds of their respective generations. The question is, how do the two different eras understand genius and intellectual greatness?

Here’s a bit of how Einstein was described by his Princeton colleague, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld:

The greatness of Einstein lies in his tremendous imagination…. Originality is the most essential factor in important scientific work. It is intuition which leads to unexplored regions, intuition as difficult to explain rationally as that by which the oil diviner locates the wealth hidden in the earth. …The clue to the understanding of Einstein’s role in science lies in his loneliness and aloofness. In this respect he differs from all other scientists. …This aloofness, this independent thought on problems which Einstein formulated for himself, not marching with the crowd but looking for his own lonely pathways, is the most essential feature of his creation. It is not only originality, is not only imagination, it is something more.

And here is what the Dominican friar Bernardo Gui recounts about Thomas Aquinas, based on contemporary accounts of Thomas’s life directly from his friends:

His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whatever he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book. Consider, for example, that admirable compilation of Patristic texts on the four Gospels, which he made for Pope Urban and which, for the most part, he seems to have put together from texts that he had read and committed to memory from time to time while staying in various religious houses. …Nor did he seem to be searching for things as yet unknown to him; he seemed simply to let his memory pour out its treasures…. He never set himself to study or argue a point, or lecture or write or dictate without first having recourse inwardly—but with tears—to prayer for the understanding and the words required by the subject.

Carruthers first notes how much the two descriptions are alike, particularly in the emphasis on solitude and extreme concentration on problems to be solved. Yet, she notes, the central contrast lies in the source of genius: for Einstein, Infeld emphasizes his creative imagination, whereas for Gui, Thomas’s genius lies in his retentive memory. Here we sense the gulf between our own era and the Middle Ages: it isn’t hard for us to accept that someone is a genius based on his or her creativity and imagination. Less intuitive to us is the idea that someone is an intellectual giant merely because of their memory. Retentive memory may make a person a savant or a geek, but it isn’t immediately clear what the good of that retentive memory is unless it’s harnessed toward some further end. We are inclined to think of an education that emphasizes memorizing bits of information as useless on its own and even a dangerous substitute for actual thought, the sort of education John Dewey rejected as the mere “accumulation of information in the form of symbols.”

But there’s a strong case to be made that both kinds of intellectual genius are crucial, and that moderns, if they don’t overvalue the creative imagination, at least tend to undervalue the retentive memory. Our typical metaphors for scholarship (e.g. “knowledge production” or “pioneering research”) betray a certain bias in how we think knowledge goes all of the time: it’s about innovation, thinking the previously unthought. Less often do we acknowledge the fact that this innovation is often reconfiguration or re-imagination of an existing body of knowledge. From this perspective, knowledge is full of pre-existing building blocks, and the main task is their holistic and integrated arrangement, their ready and new application to a changed world. If the building blocks are already there, awaiting the perfect configuration, then the retentive memory quickly becomes the prized commodity. Lest my readers think I’m only talking about the humanities, I should clarify—there is good reason to think this is how science is conducted at its best, no less than the humanities. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was not wrong when he defined scientific process as “the organization of all thinkable errors in order that, as a later result, error may be overcome.” Here he was describing the affordances of Faraday’s laboratory, but he could well have been describing Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea—if not an organization of thinkable errors, then at least an organization of thoughts and authorities with which one might or might not agree.

There shouldn’t be any binary between retentive memory and creative imagination. In fact, Carruthers argues, for the Medieval period, the two were a unity: the imaginatio or phantasia was, in fact, a repository and factory of images (whether literally images or more abstract thoughts). Take, for example, the Unikitty lego, undoubtedly a product of the imagination. From a Medieval perspective, it’s merely several images (rainbows, unicorns, kittens), stored in the memory, then reconfigured. Thus the productivity and quality of your imagination is directly dependent on the fruitfulness and quality of the images you choose to put in your imaginatio. Your imagination is what it eats, so to speak, and it will be creative only according to the materials it is fed upon. Those materials are the images stored in your memory.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that there’s some truth to this perspective. For a scholar hoping to form a Christian imagination in that more Medieval sense, how is it done? How does one think about one’s field or discipline or methodology as a Christian? The answer is clear: your scholarly imagination must be provided with good images. And that is precisely what liturgical prayer does well. With your own lips, in company with other Christians, you are making Scripture your imaginative stock. You allow Christ’s words to dwell in you richly. You offer back to God his own words, since, after all, what do you have that you did not receive? George Herbert, in his wonderful poem “Prayer (I),” describes prayer precisely this way, as “God’s breath in man returning to his birth…reversed thunder.” By praying Scripture aloud (or even singing it), regularly and systematically, you are capturing these words in your memory—and that will, in the end, be the wellspring of creativity and scholarly energy. This approach to Scripture, I’d argue, is more likely to accomplish this than the exclusively private study of Scripture (the “quiet time”).

Take a literary example: in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ilyusha’s father is unable to prepare himself for the likely death of his young son. His son consoles him, urging him to adopt another boy like himself, to which his father replies, “I don’t want another boy! If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave….” Later, Kolya, the irreligious and precocious teenage boy, asks Alyosha Karamazov what the father meant by this. Alyosha explains, of course, that this is from Scripture, but Kolya is unlikely to get the full resonance that Alyosha does: the grief-filled imprecations of Psalm 137 and its context are immediately available to the father as a way of expressing his sorrow.

How? Well, Ilyusha’s father is a decently churched Orthodox Russian, and the Psalms are repeated so often as to become parts of one’s very vocabulary. The same thing happens in James Agee’s Death in the Family, also about grief and death: here Mary, the wife grieving her husband, reaches a depth of sorrow so low she has no words left, and in this very moment a voice from within Mary prays, “Out of the depths have I cried unto you, O Lord.” She too, a good Catholic who knows her Psalms, has the words of Christ in her, interceding on her behalf when she has no words of her own. This is the great power of regular liturgical prayer: the words of Scripture spring to one’s lips unbidden. Spontaneity is only ever conditioned on the possibility of a replete memory, well-trained upon its materials.

This liturgical encounter with Scripture is different from (but not a replacement for) the “quiet time” of private study, for several reasons: it is in community with other Christians, it is spoken back to God in prayer, and it is spoken aloud repeatedly and systematically for our own inward retention. Theologians have often pointed out that this is the basis for theology, not just Scripture studied in the ivory tower, but Scripture read in community and in prayer. “Dogmatics,” says the Catholic theologian David Fagerberg, “bobs in a liturgical stream.”

Although we may think of this scripted and less spontaneous form of prayer as an exclusively Catholic phenomenon, it is not. Martin Luther insists that praying to God in public worship is directed toward an inward retention of God’s word. “Know, therefore,” speaking of worship specifically, “that you must be concerned not only about hearing, but about learning and retaining God’s word by memory. Do not think that this is optional for you or of no great importance. Think that it is God’s commandment, who will require an account from you about how you have heard, learned, and honored his Word.” John Calvin, for his part, also advocated for a more scripted approach to prayer, especially in catechetical contexts. Even the Puritans, often thought to be the godfathers of spontaneous prayer, are more complicated. Lori Branch, in Rituals of Spontaneity, brilliantly analyzes the Westminster Directory of Public Worship, an attempt to chart a middle path between advocates of spontaneous prayer and the English Book of Common Prayer. The Directory included liturgical rubrics and pre-scripted prayers in order to guide worshipers, but always worded them in such a way that it could not quite be read word-for-word, in hopes that the affective power of the worship would not be lost in dull or rote repetition. Princeton’s own Charles Hodge, for whom Presbyterianism was Christianity come into its own, also praised the practice of Morning and Evening Prayer, begrudgingly admitting that the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer nailed it in that limited respect. He praised these liturgies for their “evangelical sentiment, fervor of devotion, and majestic simplicity of language.” But Hodge notes that, ultimately, these services are “derived from forms already drawn up by the Reformers on the continent,” and, indeed, one could add, they derive from forms going back farther into the Middle Ages—a truly ecumenical form of prayer.

There is one particular subset of Scripture which lends itself to prayer more than others and holds a special place in the catechizing of the Christian mind. “The choice and flower of all things profitable in other books,” says Richard Hooker, “the Psalms do more briefly contain, and more movingly also express by reason of that poetical form wherewith they are written. …This is the very cause why we iterate the Psalms oftener than any other part of the Scripture.” Myles Coverdale, in his “Preface” to the Bible, says that “In the Psalms we learn how to resort only unto God in all our troubles, to seek help at him, to call upon him to settle our minds by patience….” Even Baptists, as I mentioned, have emphasized this sort of pre-scripted prayer as powerful. Charles Spurgeon, in his Treasury of David, says,

Time was when the Psalms were not only rehearsed in all the churches from day to day, but they were so universally sung that the common people knew them, even if they did not know the letters in which they were written. Time was when bishops would ordain no man to the ministry unless he knew "David" from end to end, and could repeat each psalm correctly; even Councils of the Church have decreed that none should hold ecclesiastical office unless they knew the whole psalter by heart. Other practices of those ages had better be forgotten, but to this memory accords an honorable record.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his The Prayerbook of the Bible, points to a yet more profound reason for the Psalms’ place in Christian worship: Psalms are the prayers of Christ to the Father, and when we pray them, we pray Christ’s words after him, and thus participate in the life of the Trinity itself. “It is the Son of God made man who has borne all our human weakness in his own flesh, who here pours out the heart of all mankind before God, who stands in our place and prays…it is the prayer of that humanity which he has assumed that comes before God in the psalms.” Even in our prayer, we do not offer what is only ours to him; he initiates even this, does it on our behalf: “Of thine own have we given thee.”

A disturbing corollary follows, if we assume that the Christian imagination is fed on images (or words or thoughts). Christian scholarly imaginations are getting formed, one way or another. If it is not the words of Scripture, imbued in liturgical prayer, it will be the other sorts of things we do in community repetitively.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” the boy Kay finds his sled tethered to the back of the Snow Queen’s sleigh, and he is unable to unhook himself. He is terrified, and he tries to pray, “but he could remember nothing but the multiplication table.” Nothing against multiplication tables, of course; the point is, when the pressure is on, we reactively fall back on what resources we have within ourselves. This is why it’s urgent that we build institutions that take on the role of consciously forming Christian minds according to the pattern of Scripture. If we don’t do it, it will be done anyways, but not in ways we want.

originally published at Coverdale House

Our lives are full of trouble. That much is clear.

Marriages fracture. Families feud. Churches split. For those serious about faith, the complications compound — unanswered questions about God, revelation, salvation that no one can fully resolve and everyone argues about anyway. The menu of ancient and modern wisdom promising to help is longer than anyone could absorb in several lifetimes.

What if most of it traces back to one thing?

C. S. Lewis didn't set out to write a book about pride. The Great Divorce is a fantasy about souls who refuse Heaven's invitation — some pious, some pitiful, all fatal. Look closer, and the reasons for their refusal collapse into one. Every shade in Lewis's gallery is a variation on the same theme: the deadly sin of pride, the self turned inward, the will that insists on its own way even at the cost of everything else.

Pride hides in plain sight, usually wearing the face of a virtue. Inwardly, it inflates — overconfidence in one's intelligence, moral standing, ability, or control. Outwardly, it pushes — into self-promotion, narcissism, envy, and the relentless ranking of people. Worst of all, it blinds us to itself. We don't want to see our own pride precisely because we are proud. And once pride curdles into envy, it stops merely inflating the self and begins resenting the good it sees in others.

The book is nearly eighty years old. Their modern equivalents surround us — and indict us.

The Big Man: Self-Righteousness

Here, pride takes the form of an inflated sense of personal virtue and a refusal of grace that cannot be earned. A blustery, working-class ghost convinced of his own decency, the Big Man insists he deserves Heaven on the strength of his good behavior. His pride rests in moral self-sufficiency, and grace offends him precisely because it treats all as equally undeserving.

The Big Man insists on being admitted to Heaven because he has “done his best”:

“But I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that’s the sort of chap I was.”

His Spirit-guide corrects him gently, shifting the ground from merit to grace:

“Oh no. It’s not so bad as that. I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better. Never fear.”

When the Big Man resists, the guide confronts him directly:

“You weren’t a decent man and you didn’t do your best. We none of us were and we none of us did. Lord bless you, it doesn’t matter. There is no need to go into it all now.”

Pride here is, above all, self-righteous — the delusion that one could merit eternal life on one’s own merits. This echoes the mindset of the rich young ruler who approached Jesus in the gospel accounts. The Big Man’s pride is compounded by envy: his grievance is not only that he lacks Heaven, but that a convicted murderer like Len already enjoys it. Envy, as explained by Aristotle, is the experience of pain and disappointment over another’s good fortune. We see it reflected in today’s culture, where the societal goal (in the eye’s of some) has shifted from the elimination of poverty to the elimination of inequality – as if it were morally objectionable that some might succeed more than others.

The Bishop: Intellectual Pride

The Bishop embodies intellectual (or epistemic) pride, an unwarranted certainty in one’s own opinions and beliefs. An urbane clergyman who prefers theological speculation to the presence of God, the Bishop hides from truth behind endless “honest” questions. Though he seems to avoid any expressions of personal dogma, he’s quite confident in his dismissal of orthodox Christian dogma. His intellectual hubris is on full display – flaunting his imagined wisdom, assuming he alone is immune to bias, and insisting that God ought to respect to his opinions, rather than submitting to Him in humility.

The Bishop relishes the idea of returning to Grey Town to continue his lectures and debates, avoiding paradise for the pleasure of attention. He asserts that honest opinions, “fearlessly followed,” are never sins. His Spirit-guide spots the flaw in reasoning:

“It all turns on what are honest opinions.”

And then more directly:

“Our opinions were not honestly come by.”

The guide lists the “sins of intellect” — hide-bound prejudice, intellectual dishonesty, timidity, and stagnation — and invites the Bishop to “the land not of questions but of answers” where he shall “see the face of God.”

Contemporary psychology affirms the guide’s claim: our beliefs are rarely the product of pure, bias-free reasoning; they are shaped by self-interest, emotional commitments, and social pressures. The Bishop’s pride lies in assuming he is immune to these distortions. It’s a universal affliction that pervades every nook and cranny of our politics, churches, and public discourse. Yet, there is a simple remedy: intellectual humility, the humble admission that we could be sometimes wrong.

The Hard-Bitten Ghost: Superiority

In this ghost, pride expresses itself as the conviction that seeing through everything is a mark of superiority. A tough-minded cynic, the Hard-Bitten Ghost prides himself on never being fooled. He “sees through” everything, but his skepticism has eaten away his capacity to see anything at all.

“It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it? It’s their job… they won’t catch me that way.”

C. S. Lewis elsewhere warns of the danger of “seeing through” everything until nothing is left to see. In a time of mass disinformation, our default posture ought to be one of skepticism. But sometimes, healthy skepticism grows into an unhealthy cynicism that acts as a firewall against truth itself.

Cynicism functions like armor: it prevents the sting of disappointment but also prevents the embrace of joy. Such a mentality is pervasive in modern society, with widespread public skepticism of the government, public institutions, and the scientific and medical communities. Yet the skepticism is rarely consistent – those who reject the authority of more mainstream sources are often too eager to believe anything from a FaceBook meme or YouTube video.

The Well-Dressed Woman: Narcissicism

The Well-Dressed Woman reveals a form of pride rooted in obsessive self-promotion, where dignity and appearance are idolized. Terrified of embarrassment (real or imagined), the Well-Dressed Woman clings to her image and dignity as though they were her life. Pride leads her to a self-consciousness so complete that it eclipses all other loves.

When asked to let go of her self-image, she protests:

“You’ve no right to ask me to do a thing like that.”

Her Spirit-guide urges:

“Could you, only for a moment, fix your mind on something not yourself?”

Her pride is expressed in her self-serving insistence upon admiration and recognition, along with the idolatrous presumption that outward appearance is the truest measure of a person’s worth. In an era of self-branding and image curation, her fixation on her personal appearance feels disturbingly commonplace — and therefore more dangerous.

The Grieving Mother: Control Over God

Here, pride masquerades as devotion, while asserting moral superiority over God in the name of love. The mother is eternally grieving over a lost son. She is assured he awaits her on the other side. But Pam demands her son back on her terms, even if it means rejecting Heaven. Her “love” is really possession, an unwillingness to love God unless she controls the relationship.

“I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one has a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.”

Her guide offers the humility lesson all must learn:

“That’s what we all find when we reach this country. We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right!”

Here again we see the essence of intellectual humility, and how essential the virtue is to every other aspect of life. Pam’s “devotion” is not an excess of love, but of selfishness — an unwillingness to love God unless she first possesses her son. Pride further puts her in the role of judge over God — and leads to envy, her resentment that anyone else (even God) should enjoy what she cannot possess. It is the nature of possessive love in any age, but in ours it mirrors the parent whose identity is wholly bound to a child’s loyalty or achievement, unable to bless any relationship not under their control.

The Tragedian: Control Over Others

Frank’s pride takes the form of sanctified suffering, using misery as leverage to control the emotional lives of others. Augustine wrote of the libido dominandi – the lust for power. The power he attempts to wield is not political but emotional. Frank appears as a small, shrunken figure leading a tall, melodramatic puppet — the Tragedian. He weaponizes self-pity, demanding that others be held hostage to his misery.

Sarah Smith names his demand for what it is:

“Did you think joy was created to live always under that threat… that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”

Lewis then expands:

“The passion of pity… was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.”

Frank’s pride leads to envy, and envy to domination — a demand that others be as joyless as himself. His misery cannot bear the sight of anyone else’s happiness; joy in others is an offense that must be vetoed. Through this lens we can understand the impulse driving grievance culture, where other people’s joy is treated as a personal insult unless it conforms to one’s own terms.

Ikey: Self-Promotion

Ikey’s pride appears as opportunism and radical self-sufficiency, transforming gift into resource and abundance into advantage. Ikey appears on the outskirts of Heaven carrying a black bag, intent on gathering golden apples. But his aim is not to enjoy them here; it is to carry them back to Grey Town, where others have none. The apples’ value lies not in their beauty or nourishment, but in their scarcity — they become a means to set himself above others and profit from their lack.

Aquinas describes one form of pride as the pursuit of goods “in order that others may be exceeded.” Greed seeks to possess; pride-linked greed seeks to surpass. Ikey’s plan is a textbook example: it’s not that he really wants the apples for their intrinsic worth, but for what personal advantage they confer against others. And yet the absurdity is plain: from selling the apples in Grey Town, what could he possibly gain that would be superior to the bounties of Heaven? Pride will cling to its own little advantage even when surrounded by infinite abundance, measuring worth not by joy received, but by how it exalts the self over others.

The Ghost with the Lizard: Sensual Pride

In this ghost, pride binds self-serving desire so tightly to identity that transformation feels like annihilation. This ghost carries on his shoulder a sly, whispering lizard — the embodiment of lust. At first glance, lust might seem less obviously connected to pride than self-righteousness or intellectual arrogance. But Lewis presents it here in its truest form: a passion oriented entirely toward the self. Lust is not ordered toward the good of another, but toward personal pleasure and gratification. In that sense, it is pride turned inward — with self enthroned as the final end.

The ghost’s resistance is revealing. He does not argue that the lizard is good, only that killing it would be unbearable. Pride speaks here through fear: fear that surrender would mean loss, diminishment, or annihilation. To admit the lizard must die is to admit that something in him is disordered and in need of repair. Pride recoils at that admission. Better to remain damaged than to concede dependence on grace.

Only when the ghost consents — haltingly, painfully, perhaps humbly? — does transformation occur. The lizard is destroyed, and in its place emerges a great stallion, strong and free. What pride insisted would be the end of the self becomes the beginning of something larger and more real. Lewis’s point is precise: repentance does not erase desire; it redeems it. But pride cannot imagine this, because pride equates change with a loss of self rather than its restoration.

This logic manifests in many ways; for instance, wrapping one’s identity around unbiblical sexual conduct and rendering that identify sacrosanct. However, all of us are broken. All of us are in need of radical transformation. But we do not often welcome it. What truly threatens the self is not transformation, but the proud refusal to be transformed.

Lewis's Theological Frame

The narrator’s guide through Heaven’s foothills, George MacDonald, is a towering, solid Spirit patterned after the real-life Scottish author and preacher whom Lewis revered. He serves as both interpreter and theologian, explaining the deeper meaning behind each ghost’s refusal. MacDonald frames the encounters in terms of freedom, self-will, and the unyielding choice between “Thy will be done” and “my will be done.”

““One will say he has always served his country right or wrong; and another that he has sacrificed everything to his Art; and some that they’ve never been taken in, and some that, thank God, they’ve always looked after Number One, and nearly all, that, at least they’ve been true to themselves.” [emphasis added]

“Every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself.”

MacDonald observes:

“There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.”

And gives Lewis’s most famous summary:

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in Hell, choose it… Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

(Lewis’s depiction of Hell here is, in his own words, a “fantasy, not even a guess or a speculation at what may actually await us.”)

Hell, he says, is small and shrinking:

“All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.”

And pride is the stubborn rejection of grace:

“Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see.”

Grace is offered to any who open their hands, their mouths, or their eyes. They don’t want it and refuse to admit they need it.

Conclusion

Lewis’s ghosts are not caricatures of evil, much less an allegorical catalog of vices to overcome. Each lost soul clings to something once recognizable as a virtue — intellect, love, justice, caution, artistic calling — but held in a disordered way. Pride’s danger is that the deification of self leads to the corruption of whatever virtue is present, even when doing so makes us smaller, colder, and less free.

What Lewis exposes is not merely moral failure but moral intransigence. Pride does not simply lead us into sin; it steels us against grace. It tightens the fist, hardens the will, and convinces us that surrender would mean ruin, not restoration. Hell, in Lewis’s telling, is not imposed from without so much as chosen from within — the final consequence of insisting on “my will” over reality itself.

The antidote is not self-loathing or moral heroics. It is humility: the willingness, at minimum, to admit we are in need of repair.

Pride promises satisfaction. It delivers a shrinking world. Lewis said as much in Mere Christianity, written a few years before The Great Divorce: pride "leads to every other vice" and "has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." The gallery of ghosts in The Great Divorce is that claim given form — each figure a case study in what pride costs when the bill finally comes due.

Are you holding something you'd rather keep than surrender? The phantoms know that feeling well.