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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Makes More Than Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moses as the Greatgrandfather of Media Ecology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Are Chatbots For?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Created to Chat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Formed into the Image of the Medium

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Senses of Scripture

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

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

The Four Senses

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

The four senses have been expressed in this little jingle.

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

A Linguistic Aside

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

Word (Signum)  Things (Res)

Rock  solid mineral material

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

Word (Signum )  Thing (Res) Other Things

Rock  solid mineral material stability, Christ

Here it is in Aquinas’s own words: 

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

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

The Exodus as an Example 

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

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

What the Four Senses Are Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depth not Difference

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathryn Paige Harden. Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Random House, 2026. $30.00. 320 pp.

Somewhere deep inside each of us is a germ. Well, not a germ exactly. It’s more like a piece of code that entwines itself into every cell of our bodies. This piece of code determines how we live in the world. It determines how we make choices, whether we harm others, and whether we feel guilt or remorse when we do. Though it does not specify exactly how we may harm others, it most definitely predicts whether we will. 

This code is genetic, not chosen. If you have it, your ability to freely choose to do good is severely limited—maybe rendered impossible. You cannot be called “free” if you have it, because what you choose is already determined by this tendency. Your will, you might say, is bound.

This account is not science fiction or religious. Instead, it is the main question that spurred Kathyrn Paige Harden to write her book Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. Harden is a psychologist and behavioral geneticist who studies vice. She also studies twins. She is especially interested in those cases where twins, either one or both members of the sibling set, seem prone to vice. 

Harden is comfortable to define vice as simple “badness,” and it ranges in her work from addiction to more serious issues, like murder and violence. Her work has arisen from a gap in the psychological literature surrounding why it is that some people do bad things. Religious reasons for this question have long predominated. The concept of sin was the pat answer to this question for a long time. But Harden is part of a school of behavioral geneticists who noticed patterns in family trees that seemed to connect certain people within families to certain negative behaviors. Upon genetic screening, behavioral geneticists have been able to identify differences both in people’s genomes, as well as chemical differences in their DNA that affect how their genomes work (their epigenomes). “We are interested,” Harden writes, “in how people’s genes connect with their environments to affect their thoughts, feelings, and actions in the world”.

All of this genetic research helps Harden to answer an important theological question: “Does what we inherit physically from our ancestors undermine our agency, and limit our freedom to choose right from wrong, as Augustine argued?” Bad behavior, it turns out, can be genetically influenced. 

The questions that Harden has identified are some of the thorniest in Christian theology. When you add a layer of genetics, they get even juicer. If there is a “biological mechanism for badness,” is sin portioned out disproportionately? If some people have more of a predisposition toward vice, doesn’t “original sin” just reinforce inequity? Does confidence in someone’s moral responsibility shift if there is a biological determinant? And doesn’t the disproportionate parceling out of predisposition toward vice demand a lessening of blame toward those afflicted?

To our modern ears it seems that what is lucky cannot be moral and what is moral cannot be luck. But Harden’s thesis cuts against this assumption. Some of us, it seems, are damned even before birth.

Harden is correct that the question of inherited vice is a Christian one. But the doctrine of original sin does not map exactly onto the version of genetically inherited vice that she draws. For one, sin and vice are not identical concepts. Though this might seem pedantic, it matters quite a bit. Vice clearly refers to bad or immoral things that individuals do. Sin has a wider semantic range, referring to a knot in the will that makes a person unable to do the good they might desire. Instead of a simple choice (or predisposition) to do bad, a Christian doctrine of sin speaks about damage to the will. This damage precedes any possible action. 

There is a fine distinction I liked to teach my students when I talked about this; to cut it short, what the Christian doctrine of sin affirms is that the brokenness in the will means that humans after the fall are unable not to sin. Christian traditions differ on how exactly the will is healed through the work of grace. But fallen humanity, after the fall, is “bound to sin,” with the double meaning of that phrase intended.

For the Christian, the concept of sin also extends far beyond vice. It includes social systems and false beliefs like prejudice. The Fall even implicates our ability to know the good. Such an expansive view of sin does not affirm total badness, as you hear caricatured from time to time. Rather, it can be a way to affirm the way all of us are implicated in our proclivity towards evil. You can affirm such a view without affirming a mythic Fall, though that is probably a story for another day.

A Christian doctrine of sin affirms that are all in this together, with our knowledge and our wills bound and limited—and yet, together, also offered the possibility of grace. It is a beautiful vision that ought to prevent one sinner from looking down too much on another. The cure is shared, just as is the disease. I find the Christian doctrine of sin very conducive to forging a collective vision of humankind and our debt to each other.

Suffice it to say, Harden doesn’t share this vision. Harden often reflects on the teachings of the “Bible church” that she grew up in—teachings she has now left behind. This church taught her that “virtue” is transcending the animal nature and vice is giving into its demands. But what if the animal nature predicts virtue, and what if its demands cannot be resisted? She asks questions like “Christians teach that you need to modify the soul to avoid the vices of the body—but what if you can instead modify the body? Does this change our view of what sin is?”

She wants to reconstruct our views of sin so that guilt does not apply—because how can someone be guilty of what they did necessarily? She opens her book with a story of taking LSD and reflecting on how drugs themselves seem to impede or force certain actions. It’s clear that she is pressing hard against the tradition she has received.

Though she has stumbled exactly onto the Christian question, unfortunately, Harden hasn’t given enough credit to the Christian answer. We have long needed a book on the moral question of guilt and accountability, as genetics casts new light on human susceptibility to sin. To succeed, however, a book would need a much more nuanced understanding of the Christian doctrine of sin. The good news is that there is room, and a need, for such a book.

Ian Marcus Corbin. To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World. Yale University Press, 2026. $32.50. 200 pp.

There has been much public buzz of late about Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, a story that has homecoming clearly at its center. The title of Ian Marcus Corbin’s new book, To Arrive Where We Started, would make a fitting subtitle for The Odyssey. But while Odysseus’ mission is to return home to his wife and son, to his island of Ithaka, Corbin’s book suggests that we are on an even grander journey—the “human quest to be at home in the world.”

Drawing from his own life and wider culture, Corbin argues that we are afflicted with a type of homelessness. Odysseus could find peace after returning to Ithaka (and killing the suitors), but even when we are in our homes and have material abundance, it all feels somehow “like an exile.” Corbin describes this spiritual and material crisis and some possible solutions, working through the themes of belonging, loneliness, alienation, at-home-ness. He puts much of the blame on the modern conception of the self with its distorted ideals and expectations. We may be changing the climate and spending too much time indoors, but our problem is cultural, not natural—"It is precisely our interpreted world that feels like less than a home.” 

Uneasiness in the world is not a new topic, but To Arrive Where We Started has an interesting approach. Corbin emphasizes “life as cognition and metabolism,” an idea that “is indebted to a school of thought that sees life as an autonomous process of autopoiesis, or self-making.” From single-celled organisms to us, we all need external input, and we all interpret as part of existence. Corbin believes humans need collective cognitive energy to reckon with our complex environment. Unfortunately, loneliness has become “a way of life.”

Loneliness and inadequate friendships weaken our ability to practice good judgment. The problem is, though, that “the cognitive energy required to confidently, consistently span the distance between concept and reality does not seem to be the kind of thing that individuals can generate for themselves.” Our poor “cognitive metabolism” also leads to an inability to craft a well-formed understanding of the world. This is a significant problem because “world-tending… is the cardinal human task, the way we make our way here and make our way toward at-home-ness.”

If our cultural Greek chorus is telling us anything these days, it is that our culture is unwell. To Arrive Where We Started contributes to that chorus, but it brings its own distinct voice with its focus on homecoming and belonging. Like many others, Corbin blames the Enlightenment and “Newtonian cosmic nihilism” for many of our ills. Our alienation from each other and the world around us is closely connected to our obsession with the autonomous individual and our belief that we can best be at home in the world through owning parts of it.

But, like Odysseus, Corbin believes that homecoming is possible. He emphasizes relationships with others and tending a world together, drawing heavily on Socratic dialogues and Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and wisdom. Virtuous friendship helps us expand the self and blur our boundaries in healthy ways. Contemplation takes us further in our efforts to get away from an exclusively autonomous self. Through contemplation, we observe that the world around us—and our own inspiration—seems driven by “some mysterious subjectivity, some agent with awareness and intention.” For Corbin, this connects to Christian belief, but he gives examples to demonstrate that this conclusion can be drawn by others, too. Ultimately, we develop a sense of “at-home-ness” not from aligning our views well with other humans, but from aligning ourselves well with the wider universe (and its Creator). 

We need a “friendship with the whole.” Corbin writes:

It is here, in a world suffused with subjectivity, interaction, and reciprocity, where things are valued not only by humans, but in some sense by reality itself, that we can be called into creative participation in the world. We can be truly at home.”

This is not only possible, there are models we can use to develop practices for sustaining a home in this world. Corbin suggests that we can learn from “cultures of participation,” including the Lakota. We can also learn from the Romantics and works like Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 

In The Odyssey, Telemachus is as uncomfortable in his home as we often are in this world, if not more. Telemachus’s tale emphasizes filial piety and the importance of his father’s presence in his ability to inhabit his home and, ultimately, his own manhood. Christians have long emphasized the need for a kind of filial piety in our loyalty to God. Without negating that, To Arrive Where We Started looks at home from a different angle, directing our attention to developing a sense of fraternity both with each other and with the world God created and inhabits. After all, God is not absent like Odysseus.

Corbin’s diagnosis of our ills is expected, but his cure is distinctive. Though he sees a problem with ownership, he does not focus primarily on economic distribution or redistribution. Rather than contrast consumerism and the common good, Corbin emphasizes seeing ourselves as participants in the world, not just in society. He writes that, in contemplation, “I cease to hunger because I see myself as a co-participant, brother to everything that is, lacker of nothing.” The final chapters of the book almost quietly echo the words of Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life: “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.” In this case, we can have a sense of friendship with the world, fallen as it is. That can make us at home, however little land we own.

In most books about loneliness, we receive recommendations for restoring institutions and communities. Yet Corbin looks beyond church membership and bowling leagues, to virtuous friendship and primordial experiences. He worries less about our associations than what he perceives as our ultimate goal—to “truly belong in our reality.” The sense of belonging that Corbin recommends seems like the “oceanic feeling” Freud dismisses at the start of Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud believed that feeling was a remnant of the infantile experience and an infant’s inability to distinguish itself from its mother and the world. Corbin identifies that feeling as a remnant of an earlier way of relating to the world, one which we should pursue again. 

Corbin’s biggest claims may be some of the most contested aspects of the book. Is our primary problem a lack of belonging in our world? Some Christians believe we ought not to see this world as our home. Is world-tending our cardinal human task? Is life best explained through cognition and metabolism? Some historically-minded readers may question how well humans felt we belonged in the world in earlier times—after all, our ancient and premodern forebears sometimes saw the world as a very hostile, antagonistic place. Some others may find the book too religious, or insufficiently religious. Corbin does not disguise his Christian position, but he also includes examples of non-Christians coming to a sense of understanding about the intention behind the universe and the subjectivity that has shaped it and he supports many of his arguments with classical thinkers. 

Despite some disputable claims, much of Corbin’s analysis is appealing and plausible. To Arrive Where We Started relies on a helpful blend of classical thinkers, literature, and other cultures. Corbin’s description of the role of interpretation in shaping our experience of the world is compelling and takes into consideration the human condition, not just human nature. He gets beyond headlines and troubling statistics. We are not just lacking generic connections with others, but are missing virtuous friendships. And despite opposing the autonomous self, Corbin is not recommending some form of collectivism. He encourages “a robust sense of self and world.” He also believes that “we can be called into creative participation with the world.” 

To Arrive Where We Started joins a long line of works about belonging and homecoming. The homecoming in The Odyssey fulfills the hope of reunion, but it also involves slaughtering the suitors. To Arrive Where We Started suggests a more peaceful homecoming is possible, built on the belief that there are ways of living with others that get beyond the idea that we are always and only autonomous individuals striving in a dark and empty universe, capable of securing things for ourselves best (and perhaps only) through money and ownership. It is possible to achieve friendship with the whole, and in the process, take our part in a world that extends beyond us—a world “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say.

The stories a culture chooses to tell — and how it chooses to tell them — are among the more reliable indexes of what a society actually believes about the world. Often the form of retelling says as much as the substance. To that end, this is not a review of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey so much as a review of the moment in which it arrives — an attempt to ask why this story, why this filmmaker, and why now.

In 2004, Petersen made a film that gave America exactly what it wanted. Troy featured Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom and grossed handsome profits — nearly $500m worldwide. Petersen delivered blood and beauty without even an echo of the transcendence which permeates the Iliad. Homer’s gods were reduced to stone figures cast down by men without consequence whilst Peter O’Toole grieved in the background. The Trojan War became devoid of myth and explicable in purely human terms: pride, lust, fortune, and fame. Divinity was an embarrassment the serious filmmaker had outgrown.

The irony is that Petersen was not a man ignorant of what myth requires. Two decades earlier, he had directed The NeverEnding Story, a film whose entire premise is the crisis of a world that stops believing in stories. “The Nothing” that threatens Fantasia is not a monster but an absence — the encroachment of a disenchanted world consuming its own imagination. Petersen understood this intimately. He made Troy anyway. That is not a contradiction so much as a confession: twenty years later, the disenchanted telling felt the more commercially responsible option, even philosophically sophisticated.

The gods in Homer’s Odyssey are present from the first lines — not as decoration or metaphor, but as actors in the drama, playing a direct role in whether a man will make it home. The human story is held, from the outset, inside a divine one. That is the story Christopher Nolan has chosen to tell now.

—

Nolan is a filmmaker who has most successfully held artistic seriousness and mass commercial appeal in tandem over the last quarter-century. His choices are not eccentric; they appeal to broad audiences while telling deep stories. When he turns to a foundational story of Western civilization and decides to make it strange rather than smooth, that decision is itself a cultural signal.

His own account of how he depicts the gap between worlds is insightful: “One of the things I needed to crack,” he told Empire, “was how to approach mythological elements in a sort of real-world way. The big breakthrough creatively in thinking about the gods was that everything that is now explained by science was once supernatural. Lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanoes… people are literally seeing gods everywhere.” Nolan is not explaining the gods away — he is asking what it felt like to inhabit a world in which they had not yet been explained away. He is saying that we have been so thoroughly conditioned to explanation that we have lost the capacity to feel what the ancients felt: a world in which the overwhelming is also the personal, in which nature does not merely cause but addresses. His method — the real ocean and a CGI-less set designed to achieve total immersion — is an attempt to return a modern audience to that felt experience. Whether it fully succeeds is a question the viewer will answer, but the plausibility of such a proposal is a key indicator to our societal appetites. 

Nolan has flirted with the transcendent in Inception and Tenet, coming to the edge with Interstellar, framing for his audiences a window to the cosmos only to ultimately reveal a mirror of human self-salvation. The immanent frame swallows the transcendence in the end. The Odyssey may be the furthest he has traveled in that direction — a story whose gods are not explained away, whose drama cannot be collapsed into mind-bending psychology. It is worth asking what might have changed in the twenty-two years between Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy and Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. 

—

Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007, three years after Troy premiered, and its central argument was not simply that the modern West had lost its belief in God. It was that the West had reconstructed itself so thoroughly around immanent explanations that transcendence had become a personal option rather than a shared horizon. The stories we told ourselves no longer required divine scaffolding. Taylor called this the “buffered self”: sealed from the possibility that anything outside it might make a genuine claim on it – or that there was even anything else to make a claim. The cosmos was now a system of causes and effects in which the experience of transcendence had to justify itself as subjective feeling rather than objective encounter. What Taylor raised, without quite resolving, was whether the frame could hold — whether the hunger it generated would eventually press against its own walls.

Marvel understood this appetite even if it couldn't fully satisfy it — growing bolder from a secular superhero like Iron Man to entire franchise voyages into Norse mythology. The gods are aliens. The magic is technology. But the hunger for something beyond the imminent kept pulling the stories further out.

The same pressure appears in quieter auditoriums. Mainline Protestant denominations — those that spent the latter half of the twentieth century making themselves culturally legible, trimming the strange and supernatural edges of Christian faith in pursuit of relevance — have been in freefall for decades. The Catholic story is different in its particulars but not in its logic. Adult baptisms and receptions into full communion rose sharply in recent years, and the converts themselves are consistent about what drew them: the unapologetic supernaturalism — the very liturgical strangeness that modern Catholics were once encouraged to grow past. Ross Douthat, whose recent Believe argues that religious experience is “much weirder and more destabilizing” than secular accounts predict and that the world is “much stranger than the secular imagination thinks,” would recognize the pattern: the societal hunger is not, apparently, for a faith that accommodates the buffered self. It is for one that presses against it — which is precisely what Kevin Vanhoozer’s Remythologizing Theology had argued theology itself needed to recover.

—

Vanhoozer’s theological project was to resist the long habit of modern theology — running from Feuerbach through Bultmann — of accepting the secular age’s terms for what religious language is and does. Bultmann’s celebrated demythologizing program made a generous offer to the modern reader: keep the existential kernel, discard the mythic shell. Vanhoozer’s counter is that the shell was the point.

It was, Vanhoozer argues, an error to say the strangeness of biblical discourse is the problem rather than the point. Remythologizing is not, in his phrase, a fall back into myth but a spring forward into metaphysics: a refusal to translate the irreducibly personal, dramatic texture of Scripture into something thinner and more philosophically manageable. The strangeness is not incidental. It is the form the truth takes.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2025 translation of the Odyssey made the same wager in classical scholarship that Vanhoozer made in theology — deliberately preserving what he called the poem’s archaic grandeur, refusing the smoothing impulse of mid-century translations like Robert Fitzgerald’s. The Washington Post had praised Fitzgerald’s 1961 edition for giving readers not “the sense of reading an ancient classic” but “a great and timeless narrative.” What passed for a compliment then now reads as an admission. Mendelsohn’s decision to maintain the distance — the Greek spellings, the heavy six-beat line, the refusal of the modernizing gesture — rests on the same conviction Vanhoozer brings to Scripture and Nolan brings to IMAX: the otherness is not an obstacle to the poem. It is the poem. 

That is not coincidence. It is pressure applied to the immanent frame.

—

It is too soon and too much to say we are witnessing a reversal or revolution in the repeal of secularism. The buffered self does not crack so easily. What can be said is that the pressure is visible, and that it is appearing at the center of culture rather than its margins. The hunger for a thicker world, a world in which the journey is more than miles and minutes and the homecoming is real. A century of demythologizing — in theology, in literature, in film — has not managed to replicate or remove the appeal of enchantment. 

What the secular age cannot supply, and what Nolan’s film will not provide, is the name of the one who speaks from the storm. The ancient world Homer inhabited was not simply a world of awe and immanent wonder. It was a world of address — where the storm had a name, where the journey was supervised by divine attention, where the drama was intelligible because it was held inside a greater story. 

God makes himself known largely through speech acts that seem strange and chiefly through the Word made flesh — Jesus Christ. The flat world built by a century of demythologizing is generating its own dissatisfaction — and the stories our culture is reaching for are changing in tone. Perhaps this signals a willingness to hear the foundational story not of Western civilization but of the world itself — the most enchanted story ever told, in which the winds obey, the sea yields, and death itself is undone. Nolan’s reintroduction of Odysseus’s world may help reawaken our inborn awareness of this enchanted cosmos.

The following excerpt from James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes, Why Postliberalism Failed, is published with permission from Acton Institute.

After taking conservatism by storm with his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick J. Deneen spent a November afternoon with what was then a surprising host and at a significant locale: Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest. There, Deneen spoke highly of Orbán’s postliberal family policies. As a press release has it, Deneen’s praise “underlin[ed] that the future belongs to local communities resting on national and family values, instead of liberalism which still continues to prevail in many places.” Four years later, upon the launch of his most recent book Regime Change, Deneen sat with then-Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Vance declared himself to be a “postliberal” like Deneen, and Deneen said of Vance, that he was a “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.” Postliberalism was not just mainstream but international in scope, forming a potential new basis for conservatism across America and Europe.

Over the past few years, the subject of postliberalism has gone from a small corner of Catholic conservative academics and journalists to a major force in the West. When we began our efforts to critique it, many of our colleagues warned us not to waste our time on a marginal, largely online debate. As it turns out, postliberalism is an important and rapidly growing area of scholarship and one with major implications for the future of conservatism at home and abroad. 

What is postliberalism? We answer in more details in a later chapter, but for now a brief definition is that postliberalism is the name for an authoritarian ideology dedicated to using state power to impose a reactionary Catholic vision of the Church, family, and labor. In this respect, we focus on one among three strains of postliberalism described by Julian Waller. The first comes primarily from conservative Protestants primarily from the United Kingdom like Adrian Pabst and John Milbank. According to Waller, their approach “engaged broader ideas about the needs of a healthy, re-enchanted society with thick community bonds and reduced social and cultural alienation” along with “general critiques of so-called neoliberal economic and social orders.” In sum, they are “Blue Labour” or “Red Tories.” 

Another “postliberalism” is a rebranding of what American conservatives have historically called, “the Old Right” or “Paleoconservatism” pioneered by Paul Gottfried and Patrick J. Buchanan. These postliberals argue, “that the classical tradition of liberalism, properly understood, died long ago with the advent of mass politics, universal suffrage, mass immigration, the welfare state, centralized managerial governance, internationalism, and the dissolution of the public-private distinction in law and custom.” Whereas the first group of postliberals focus on localism and communitarianism, these “paleoconservative” postliberals are decidedly nationalist in scope. They work to define the American people by ethnic terms to disqualify most immigrants and seek to use political power to insulate American business from foreign competition (such as with tariffs or domestic industrial subsidies). Today, those carrying the torch for this kind of postliberalism are Christopher Caldwell and Daniel J. McCarthy.

However, the focus of our book is on a third group of postliberals. Their postliberalism has its roots in “Catholic integralism” or “political Catholicism.” Waller defines it well when saying:

This new Catholic postliberal approach to political action asserts the necessary and inevitable connection between religion and politics, largely grounded in the Catholic tradition, and asserts a counter-framework that moves away from a strict secular reading of the idea of church-state separation in favor of greater integration and alignment between the two. It is characterized most importantly by an emphasis on the use of assertive government activity to pursue ideological goals, interest in economic protectionism to support community cohesion, reasserting the role of the natural law in jurisprudence and governance, and broad-based moral-cultural reaction against 21st-century progressive assumptions about the family, gender, sexual relations, procreation, secularism, in alignment with other social-conservative issue sets.

This version of Catholic postliberalism is something of a combination of the other two with a Catholic twist. On the one hand, Catholic postliberals offer a Christian critique of liberalism for what ideological alternative should come next; on the other hand, that successor ideology is not so much about localism or communitarian as it is about a powerful, centralized government imposing from the top down a theologically informed vision of the public good on all national subjects regardless of their faith. 

Postliberals portray themselves as “traditionalists,” in that they want to reverse a civilizational decline they see beginning at the Reformation. For postliberals, the Reformation was an exogenous shock, something that happened from the outside in, because the “sacral kingships” of the period were themselves the best regime. The Reformation spoiled this by introducing a division in the Church, and the division in the Church prompted the Wars of Religion that gave rise to secular states deciding religious matters on their own. These states discarded religion as anything other than a political tool; otherwise, religion was a private matter. Instead of prioritizing spiritual salvation, secular states focused on expanding material wealth, giving rise to capitalism in the economic sphere and liberalism in the political sphere. Because there can be no going back to the Middle Ages, postliberals aim to use existing “liberal” state institutions against liberal purposes, annihilating individual liberty, economic opportunity, and freedom of conscience to establish a postliberal order that is even better than the sacral kingship of yore.

Initial reactions to postliberalism were dismissive. After all, there is no way that Americans or anyone in Western Europe would vote for such an ideology, and yet here we are with postliberal politics achieving political success without the support of public majorities. The reason is that postliberals have engaged in a kind of an elite coup of political conservatism in America and abroad for the past decade, one enabled by the surprising inability of more established conservatives to meet new political realities with any sense of urgency or originality as well as the patronage of figures like Orbán. 

This book aims to explain three things: first, how postliberalism became an important ideology with international implications; second, how contemporary postliberalism has its roots in similar reactionary and clerical fascist movements of previous centuries; and third, that the ideology of postliberalism is entirely wrong in what its proponents argue in terms of politics, economics, and theology.

This is not the first book-length treatment of postliberalism, or its stricter iteration, Catholic integralism. Jerome Copulsky groups American Catholic postliberals with a minor American religious tradition opposing the American Constitution and the development of a mainstream liberalism into the twentieth century. He details how contemporary postliberals stand on the shoulders of earlier critics like L. Brent Bozell Jr. and those who wrote for a small but influential magazine, Triumph. Kevin Vallier offers a comprehensive critique of Catholic integralism, illustrating how the effort to impose a postliberal order would violate Catholic social teaching and undermine the very ends postliberals believe they are serving. Laura K. Field has examined postliberals as part of the emerging political coalition hoping to control the Republican Party during and after the presidency of Donald J. Trump.

While these are excellent contributions to the field, we hope to add some more philosophical, historical, and theological contexts for postliberalism that they are missing. Copulsky is certainly right to group postliberals as part of the American anti-Constitutional tradition rooted in a concern that the republican Constitutional frame lacks an overt service to the Christian religion. What is missing is how postliberals had to import their critiques from reactionary and clerical fascist theorists from Europe and Latin America to make their arguments. 

Vallier argues from an analytical philosophical frame, positing that the imposition of integralism requires political injustice to transition, govern, and resist opposition. What we show is that Vallier’s arguments are not just grounded in reason but in fact. Integralist and postliberal regimes have over a century-long history of political injustice of the highest order. These regimes run the gamut of right-wing authoritarianism from António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal to the Nazi collaboration and genocide of Ante Pavelić’s Independent State of Croatia. Field is right to include the postliberals as part of the new Trump coalition, but to do so she spends less time with the errors postliberals make in nearly every position they take on policy, governance, and even religion. 

Our book is divided into three units. The first covers the history of contemporary postliberalism in America and the intellectual sources from which postliberals draw. There are two major traditions, the papalist and the reactionary. The papalist tradition is one that treats the Catholic Church as the spiritual authority over Christendom and, subsequently, an institution that possesses extensive political or “temporal” authority over governments. The reactionary tradition is the European and Latin American conservative opposition to the French Revolution and its effects. At its heart, the reactionary tradition depends on the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory to explain how liberalism became a powerful ideology and how its ultimate purpose is to annihilate Christian monarchies and ultimately the Catholic Church Herself. 

The second unit covers historical postliberal regimes that adopted the same two traditions as the basis for their rule. The two political inspirations for these regimes are Charles Maurras and Benito Mussolini. Maurras and his party Action Française illustrated to historical postliberals how to organize a monarchist party with the aim of overthrowing parliamentary government. Mussolini provided the template for how postliberals can govern by way of a dictatorship directing bureaucratic administration, the police, and the military to impose a postliberal order. These postliberal regimes surfaced during the “Interwar Years” between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second World War.

We group them into two categories. The first are right-wing authoritarian governments in which postliberals attempted to join a coalition of support but failed. These include Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, and Belgium. The second are clerical fascist governments explicitly grounded in postliberal politics. These include Vichy France, Austria, Spain, Slovakia, and Croatia. 

The third unit illustrates how contemporary postliberals draw from these same papalist and reactionary traditions and favorably refer to historical postliberal regimes from the Interwar Years. Contemporary postliberals make repeated reference to key papalist texts like Unam sanctam, Singulari Nos, and The Syllabus of Errors. They also draw inspiration and directly rely on reactionary political thinkers like the aforementioned Maurras, but also Joseph de Maistre, Louis Bonald, Louis Veuillot, ex-Cardinal Louis Billot, Carl Schmitt, and many others. Some contemporary postliberals, like Deneen, try to “structuralize” liberalism into a blind historical force rather than as an avatar of the “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy, but they too often lapse in these efforts and refer sometimes even directly to notable advocates of this conspiracy theory, such as Bonald and Veuillot. We then explain how their account of politics is essentially no different from those of the historical postliberal regimes, all of which failed in their efforts to create anything except human misery.

Next, we explore the subject of Catholic integralism in theological terms by engaging the work of Thomas Pink and his efforts to read integralism into Dignitatis humanae. Specifically, Pink offers the interpretation that Dignitatis humanae is a change of policy for the Church to discard integralism but still regards the arrangement as ideal. We should note that the Church has progressed beyond a backward-looking ideal for restoring Christendom in favor of a better understanding of the place of the Church in a pluralistic, democratic world. Finally, we review the history of Catholic corporatism, the political economy both historical and contemporary postliberalism favor. The legacy of corporatism is that of grim failure to produce even basic necessities, let alone the well-managed economic order for the common good. The problem was not that corporatists economies were badly managed but that there is no way to manage them well at all.

Here is the bad news: postliberalism is nothing less than authoritarianism dressed up in Catholic vestments. Its history is one of religious scandal, poverty, starvation, religious persecution, genocide, and Nazi collaboration. The good news is that postliberalism has always failed. Unfortunately that failure has historically come at a tremendous human and spiritual cost. Not only have hundreds of thousands died under postliberal regimes, but in their aftermath were left empty churches, dwindling numbers of priests and religious, and the very spiritual ennui that postliberals dare to blame on liberalism. Indeed, the Deceiver himself could not have developed a weapon more onerous to the faith than postliberalism.

As a final note, this book is not a defense of liberalism. One of us is comfortable calling himself a Catholic liberal and the other prefers to think of himself as a Catholic republican (“Republican” here refers to an advocate of constitutional, representative government, not the American political party). Our purpose here is not to serve liberalism but the Catholic Church and Her mission to provide material relief to the suffering and spiritual salvation to all who choose it. We do not wish to see postliberal regimes come into being because we wish to see people live full lives both materially and spiritually, something we show that postliberalism cannot offer.

Glen Scrivener, a pastor and evangelist who serves in the UK, says "yes":

Scrivener's argument, which is worth hearing in full in his video, is that the defining aspect of the post-World War II settlement that has defined western life for 80 years is a certain universalizing impulse that tended to establish common cause by relativizing and minimizing differences between groups. Within the Christian church, the work of C. S. Lewis offered a relatively easy way to justify that intellectually through invoking the idea of "mere Christianity" as a kind of trans-ecclesial unifying concept.

So we had an era of "mere Christianity," Scrivener argues, in which the distinctive beliefs of specific church traditions were minimized or relativized. During that era, a great deal of the work done by Christians of all types was aimed at solving the problem of how to create an intellectual and cultural system that could ground our political life while credibly minimizing our theological differences. So for Rome we saw documents like Dignitatis Humanae promulgated by the Vatican. Amongst evangelicals, we saw the ascent of figures like Billy Graham. The hard edges that divide separate Christian churches were sanded away in the name of preserving a system founded on universalism.

Scrivener says that system is now dying. Younger people who have grown up without tradition or custom and often strapped to a screen for hours every day desire belonging, desire to enter into something that offers moral direction, identity, and a fixed way of life they don't have to generate for themselves. But the only way to have something like that is through particularity and even some hard edges. So, Scrivener argues, Mere Christianity is out. Orthodoxy is back. Rome is back. Distinct Protestant traditions are back. In short, denominationalism is back.

In one sense, I think he is obviously correct. Certainly, the number of people interested in Orthodox and Catholic apologetics online is quite high, although there is not a lot of broader sociological data (yet?) to suggest that this movement has translated into broader society. Likewise, as Scrivener himself notes, the fact that Gavin Ortlund set out to create YouTube videos defending Christianity now finds himself regularly drawn into Protestant apologetic work is notable.

That being said, I have two quibbles with Scrivener's argument, or perhaps an extension of his argument and a quibble. One point is actually quite adjacent to the direction Scrivener eventually goes and I imagine he would agree. The other is a point that he doesn't develop in the video but on which I'd be keen to hear his thoughts.

To Speak of "Mere Christianity" at all is to Speak as a Protestant.

First, the adjacent point: One of the ironies of the way C. S. Lewis has been received by American evangelicals is that Lewis himself was never really a "mere Christian" in the way Scrivener describes it in the video. Rather, Lewis was a rather ordinary lay person in the Church of England, as I argued in these pages 12 years ago. Indeed, if you read his work more closely or read a bit about him, you'll be struck by how deeply Anglican he really was. (Scrivener is fully aware of this, of course.)

The point of "mere Christianity" for Lewis was not to minimize ecclesial distinctives, but rather to help people make useful distinctions as they think about their relationship to faith. Yet, and Scrivener himself develops this point in his own way in the video, to even conceive of such a project as being legitimate is itself to be committed in some limited way to Protestantism. It is not really possible for a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian to separate belief in "mere Christianity" from membership in and submission to the ecclesial life of Rome or Constantinople. To imagine that there is a set of cardinal doctrines that transcends ecclesial divisions and unites all people as "Christian" is inherently to speak and think as a Protestant.

So in that sense the best way to read what Scrivener calls the era of "mere christianity" is probably to regard it as a period of deficient Protestantism in which people presupposed Protestant conceptions of the church without understanding that they were doing that. They mistook their implicitly Protestant commitments for a kind of broadly Christian and ecclesially indifferent set of commitments. That is never what Lewis was trying to do in his own work, but it is how his work was received by highly democratic and anti-institutional American readers.

Again, I think Scrivener and I agree here and I found his discussion of this point in the latter part of his video quite beautiful. But whereas Scrivener is making this point in an evangelistic register, I am trying to draw out the same idea from a more analytical perspective with an eye on movement dynamics.

The Danger of Factionalism

The second point is more challenging. On the one hand, Scrivener is obviously correct that interest in distinct ecclesial traditions and the differences that divide Orthodox from Catholic or Reformed from Lutheran are of greater interest to many today than they were 20 years ago. However, that does not mean it is correct to say, as he does several times, that "denominationalism" is back. Denominations are essentially administrative containers for groups of Christian congregations that are bound by the distinct practices of a particular ecclesial tradition. But they remain distinct from the tradition itself and, to my eyes, show little evidence of being "back." Rather, what we seem to have is growing theological factionalism existing alongside denominational decline.

Given recent trends, it is probable that we will continue to see a broad decline in associational life, including denominational life in churches. Virtually all the numerical growth in American Christianity over the past several decades is in non-denominational contexts. It is hard for me to see how that trend would be reversed. Protestant denominations aren't doing great either and Rome is in a pretty bad spot too, while American Orthodoxy is too small to be cultural or statistically significant in American public life. In other words, all the actual institutional vehicles that exist to help someone actually live as a thick Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Reformed or Lutheran or Baptist Christian are struggling significantly.

Yet Scrivener is correct to note the increased interest in the theological distinctives that separate one ecclesial tradition from another. The problem, at least so far, seems to be that even though many seem to feel an impulse to study theological traditions and distinctives more deeply in order to place themselves in a particular tradition, these people are still mostly relating to those traditions in consumeristic and highly online ways, which is why the interest in theological distinctives doesn't seem to be translating into actual growth in denominational membership so far. (The other possibility, of course, is that the interest in these theological debates is still a highly online problem and one that doesn't have much real world import yet.)

Given that, the likeliest outcome seems to be that our non-denominational churches will continue to grow, but their membership may shift. The de facto system we had is that our non-denominational churches tended to be full of people who were implicitly Protestant but didn't really know it. As a result, they were actually able to get on well with most people since they did not think they have strong and highly specific theological commitments.

If theological factionalism is back but denominationalism isn't, then what we are heading for is a church world that swaps out those types of members for new non-denominational members who are more exercised about theological distinctives and more inclined to fight about theological topics that divide, say, Baptists from Catholics or Calvinists from Orthodox.

If you are the media you consume or the information ecosystem you live in, then we may be headed for a scenario where pastors in non-denominational settings are being confronted by congregants who are, in terms of information intake, basically Catholic or Orthodox or Calvinist, and yet they remain as members in churches that are none of those things.

What should happen is that people with a sharper interest in these more defined and narrow theological traditions should move into denominations governed by those traditions. So far, however, that doesn't seem to be happening very much. And that likely means one of two things:

One possibility is that Scrivener and I are overstating the point about resurgent interest in theology and really the thing we're seeing is a largely online-only phenomenon and the non-terminally online are much more like the boomers in their relationship to Christian distinctives. There is some evidence to suggest this is true. It may be that the factionalism danger is a predominantly online thing that doesn't translate much into local churches. If Burge is correct and the majority of young churchgoers today don't know what "Protestantism" is, then that suggests the factionalism angle that so interests Scrivener and I is not as widespread as we think.

The second option is that there is an actually significant resurgent interest in narrower, more particular theological traditions. But so far that resurgent interest is not translating into growing denominationalism, but merely in more sectarian Christians who are still attending non-denominational churches. If that is correct, then it raises many questions about the future of non-denominationalism in the American church: Is it possible for independent churches to essentially place themselves within a theological tradition but not within a denominational vehicle that typically protests and promotes that tradition? And if it is, how do they do that in healthy and sustainable ways?

That being said, my fear is that the task of non-denominational pastors is about to get harder as they face more and more congregants with wildly different information diets and, therefore, wildly different relationships to the Bible and theology.

If my analysis is right, then it may well turn out that the best case scenario for us is that Scrivener and I are wrong and the borderless "mere Christianity" of Graham persists while the trends pointing toward greater factionalism remain confined to the internet. I do not think that is what will happen. But as outcomes go, it is probably preferable to the scenario I have described.

Cassandra Nelson. A Theology of Fiction. Wiseblood Books, 2024. $10.00. 116 pp. 

In the March/April 2015 issue of Books & Culture, Catholic essayist and poet Joseph Bottum proposed that the modern novel is a Protestant art form, particularly in how the form developed in the post-Reformation Anglophone world. The novel, as Bottum saw it, is “the device by which, more than any other, modernity tried to understand itself.” It is no accident that the history of the novel runs parallel to the development of the modern idea of the self.

It’s a fascinating proposition. Bottum contrasted the “clean, moral” nature of the quintessential Protestant novel to Catholic literature. The latter, as Dana Gioia’s essay on “The Catholic Writer Today” puts it, “is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent.”

But then what makes Catholic fiction Catholic? And do these terms have merit? Is there a small-c catholic vision of fiction that encompasses Jane Austen and J. C. Scharl, Kenneth Grahame and Graham Greene?

Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction, a little-book version of her essay of the same name published in the April 2022 First Things, adds to the faith-and-fiction conversation by presenting the ideas of Sr. Mariella Gable, English teacher, editor, and critic, who also promoted the work of Flannery O’Connor. (Side note: More presses should follow Wiseblood’s example of publishing meaty little books; not every book needs to be 200-300 pages!)

It is significant that her book is published by Wiseblood Books, the indefatigable little press helmed by novelist Joshua Hren, who penned Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto, which could be read as an apologia for recovering a robust literature rescued from the blinkered metaphysics of the B.F. Skinners, and of those who have a paper-thin metaphysics that denies spiritual and sacramental reality. The manifesto’s signatures include those of poets and novelists who have been published by Wiseblood: Sally Thomas, Katy Carl, Glenn Arbery, and James Matthew Wilson. Wiseblood is a publishing house of recovered and translated classics (e.g., Dana Gioia’s translation of Seneca: Madness of Hercules and the double feature of novella and libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Woman Without a Shadow) as well as of contemporary fiction and poetry. It also sponsors a writer-in-residence as well as, through editor Joshua Hren’s leadership, cultivates promising new writers through the MFA program at the University of St. Thomas–Houston. All of this makes the publication of Nelson’s book appropriate. Both the Wiseblood team and Sr. Mariella have set themselves the task of not only cultivating but also advocating for great literature informed by a sacramental view of the world.

I intentionally did not use the term “Catholic literature” or even “Christian literature” above, since the question of how to apply such terms is itself part of the question Sr. Mariella tackles. And her answer is paradoxical.

First, she says that a piece must be a work of art. Slapdash pieces do not qualify as art, and thus hardly as Catholic art. But what counts as a Catholic novel (fiction being Sr. Mariella’s focus)? Disagreements on this question stem from “overemphasis on one part of a complex truth. To bring into focus the whole of truth about Catholic fiction,” she writes, “it is necessary to keep in mind three facts”:

Each one of the following statements is true; without a grasp of their coexistence, no satisfactory definition of Catholic fiction can be formulated.

1. Strictly speaking, Catholic fiction does not exist.
2. All the great literature in the world is Catholic fiction.
3. Fiction which artistically communicates through the use of Catholic symbols something of the spiritual and moral mystery of the human condition may properly be designated Catholic fiction. 

Why the paradox?

If Christianity is true, then it seems two things follow. First, our reality is one huge story of redemption; second, any art that we create that has any truth in it will reflect the metaphysics of redemption. So a Christian story, in one sense, would be redundant: we might as well simply say that it is a good story. To say that a story is great is to say that it is true and beautiful, and therefore good stuff indeed. All truth is God’s truth; all good art is God’s art.

This doesn’t mean at all that art created by non-Christians has no value. It remains true that goodness and truth partake of Truth Himself. To get at the truth of things through art in the world God made is to align oneself with God’s truth. To make bad art and to do bad metaphysics will always be un-Christian.

At the same time, sinners do make good and great art—and thank God! Or else we would be exceedingly poorly off, living constantly like castaways. But this doesn’t let the Christian artist off the hook. One could put it this way: Just as aiming at heaven, we will get earth “thrown in,” as Lewis says, if we aim at holiness, maybe we’ll make some good art along the way.

Perhaps this is how a Catholic sense can redeem the more austere Protestant form of the modern novel, if we accept the analyses of Joseph Bottum and others, while also taking up the modern psychological form, knowing that every good story is the story of a soul’s journey to God—and all the metaphysical and mystical richness that entails. Here Pilgrim’s Progress meets the Way of a Pilgrim.

Nelson mentions Caroline Gordon telling her mentee Flannery O’Connor of the “first principles” for “Catholic fiction writers,” which she can “name outright” to O’Connor but which she has “to approach cautiously with my secular pupils.” It comes to this:

There is only one plot. The Scheme of Redemption. All other plots, if they are any good, are splinters off this basic plot. There is only one author: The Holy Ghost. If He condescends to speak at times through a well-constructed detective story, which I think he does, he certainly will condescend to speak often through Flannery O'Connor. 

So then, Christian writers (and readers) are simply in on the joke. “Stories will save the world,” says Angelina Stanford of the House of Humane Letters and the Literary Life Podcast, echoing Gordon’s words. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. Every story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.

*

But what about other religions? Isn’t there also, say, Islamic art, as Paul Pastor points out in “Can Christians Write?” Also, isn’t “the essential quality of personal fatalism that is the core of Classical narratives” exclude such narratives from the domain of great art? Can Sophocles be Catholic?

Let’s take a small-c catholic view of things now. Sophocles may not be Catholic according to Sr. Mariella’s third axiom (at least not simply speaking), but is if we begin with axiom 2. The theology of a culture will certainly affect the kind of stories told, just as, Pastor points out, Islamic art is recognizable in its calligraphy and geometric patterns and conspicuous lack representation of humans. But also, even as the artist drawing from the Islamic tradition may be making marvelous calligraphy, he remains in a world in which Christ is the Logos. He can’t get away from it.

But then, what about those artists who do not wish to get away from the Logos? What assumptions does Christian art have? Paul Pastor summarizes these features of Christian and Catholic art that were earlier articulated by Dana Gioia:

• human struggle in a fallen world
• the sacramental sacredness of nature
• the redemptive quality of suffering
• a sense of continuity between the living and the dead

Pastor himself adds “the profound value of the individual person as the locus of the image of God” to the list and notes that “with minor caveats, these are true of all Christian writing, far beyond the Roman Catholic”: “It has a great regard for overlooked things and people and considers no subject to be too high or too low for the attention of the artist. One can find God in a potato by Van Gogh…. In this artistic tradition, as in our faith, nothing and no one sits below our sacred attention, for they are held (like even the smallest seed or sparrow) in the gaze and love of God. Nothing and no one are beyond redemption, for ‘all things’ will, in the end, be caught up in Christ.”

In Nelson’s analysis, the novel perhaps uniquely focuses on the journey of individual souls toward God, but even here there is room for all manner of complexity, for each soul is unique, irreducible. No path of redemption will be quite the same as another. One of Sr. Mariella’s students, the novelist Betty Wahl, proffered that the way the “artist fit[s] into the Church” is as a prophet. An artist, said Wahl, must aim “to see and to make others see.” Sr. Mariella herself tried to do her own work in helping others see by writing about fiction as well as teaching it: Nelson writes of Gable’s anthologies as well as criticism, in which work she explained how different kinds of fiction—not only stories with, say, clergy or monastic characters and stories by Flannery O’Connor and J.F. Powers, but also the fiction of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell—can be enlisted “to the cause of the Catholic Church.” Both Huxley and Orwell’s famous satires are razor-sharp in their vision of what happens when humans lose their freedom to an omnipotent state. That they do not offer any solution to their terrifying allegories, “Sister Mariella suggests, is tied to their lack of faith.” But such “negative fiction” can inspire the search (as Walker Percy called it): the search for meaning, for being found in the cosmos and not forever lost. And one’s own search will not be quite the same as another soul’s.

But also, no encounter between text and reader will be quite the same. Nelson offers that “the meaningful unit of a novel or story is each time that a specific person sits down to read it, usually alone, or that a specific group of people comes together to discuss the work.” The story is instantiated when the reader becomes present to the story, and vice versa; what is eternal in the work meets with the eternal soul that is encountering it. Just as a play does not truly live till it is performed; a story read, chewed on, communed, we might say, is truly alive.

Let us remember what Emily Dickinson wrote? “A word is dead, / When it is said / Some say. / I say it just /Begins to live / That day.”

*

Arguably, what is perhaps most needed in contemporary fiction, however, is a vision of goodness. Nelson notes that David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good People” is “the closest thing I have yet found to Sister Mariella’s vision for contemporary fiction.” The story “gives insight into what she called the psychology of goodness and into the kind of heroism needed for family life today.” And Nelson’s perusal of this story is one great gift of this little book: How do we both read well, but also how do we write? Can we write contemporary fiction that avoids easy truths and sentimentality, and that retrieves the realm of reality and realism from the cramped metaphysics of mainstream novels?

What Sr. Mariella and the Contemplative Realists offer is a pathway of writing fiction that is contemplative—meaning, a way of writing and seeing that demands that the writer be constantly challenging himself with Rilke’s dictum that “you must change your life.” In other words, the writer should strive to be a saint.

Hren cites St. Bonaventure, who says no one “arrives at contemplation except through penetrating meditation, holy living, and devout prayer.” In addition to the practical work of developing artistic skills—facility with the materials and skills and tricks of the trade of storytelling—we artists need to develop our souls, and this means recognizing, with St. Teresa of Avila (the Contemplative Realist’s patron saint, says Hren), that “God moves amidst the pots and pans.” Further:

We commit to the daily hard work required to train our souls to ascertain the action of Grace in and around the contests of the human spirit. 

This side of the beatific vision, the contemplative realist is content to do lowly tasks, sweeping the floor of a decrepit cave to make room for some roofless travelers afoot. Fed by the majestic poverty of the Word he will write another novel of the nameless nobody who happens to be made in the imago Dei, numbering the hairs of her head very carefully, surprised to find in her insignificance some of the deepest drama in the cosmos. 

The educational philosopher (and Anglican) Charlotte Mason also noted this truth in School Education. She cites Michelangelo, who wrote that “good Christians always make good and beautiful figures,” but a higher standard was needed for those who would “represent the adored image of our Lord”: “it is not enough that a master should be great and able. I maintain that he must also be a man of good morals and conduct, if possible a saint, in order that the Holy Ghost may give him inspiration.”

If possible a saint. This language would not be intelligible to the evangelical world I grew up in. Then, being a saint was simply to be a Christian. Now that I’ve leaned more deeply into Christian tradition—that great tradition that includes the greatest works of art in the world, as Paul Pastor points out—I see this language of “being a saint” as pointing to the goal shared by both Catholic and catholic Christians: to be a saint is to be in communion with God, for our souls to be so a part of Him that our will and heart are as one with His. It means to become Christ-like in our very depth. Is this not what every Christian longs for? Is not this journey the fulfillment of “the search”?

So while there seems to be a clear distinction between sacred art (art proper for liturgical use) and secular (that is, not necessarily for liturgical use) art, both must be good to be worthy. And perhaps we could say that part of the goodness of good stories is that they help us on the way to God.

As Angelina Stanford of The Literary Life podcast reminds her listeners: “Stories will save the world”—stories understood as an art form that aligns with metaphysical, and hence also theological, reality. Stanford echoes Sr. Mariella: There is only one story, that of Redemption. Every other story is a version or a splinter of that one story. This is why Frederick Buechner could describe the gospel as “tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale.” Every good story is a version of the drama of the soul’s salvation.

Medical Assistance in Dying is opposed by people of sound conscience for many reasons. Matthew Loftus capably distinguishes between allowing people to die and killing them. Jonathan von Maren notes its especially perilous potential for those who suffer with mental illness. The conference of Canadian Roman Catholic bishops have declared “euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAiD) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law.”

An interesting, parallel development has been the searing criticism of Canadian MAiD laws in the pages of Jacobin, hardly a bastion of conservative theological ethics, denouncing on democratic socialist grounds the ways MAiD gives the vulnerable liquidation rather than care, and is being used to systematically euthanize the poor and disabled. 

But despite its diverse critics, MAiD now counts for 1 in 20 deaths in Canada, and since its legalization one decade ago, its toll surpasses the number of Canadian lives lost in World War II. 

Recently, the Anglican Church of Canada approved trial liturgies to be used before and during euthanasia. The introductory pages acknowledge that a variety of support and opposition is held about euthanasia in the denomination, and attempt to describe how heartbreaking and nuanced the circumstances often are surrounding it. 

The animating principle driving its authors is that the church must provide some kind of pastoral support to its people, including those who opt for medical assistance in dying. Because I am an Anglican priest who actively serves every week in pastoral care, I am far from indifferent to or unaware of the complexities of moral reasoning in times of unimaginable pain and dire circumstances. But precisely due to that awareness and experience, it is manifestly obvious to me that these liturgies are not only a catastrophic failure to provide pastoral care that is normed and enlivened by the word of God, but are also a grievous evil. They take the Lord’s name in vain, putting to diabolical use something holy and sacred.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpiece The Idiot, Prince Myshkin recounts having nightmares after seeing a public execution by guillotine in nineteenth century Lyons. The valet he spoke with replied “it’s a good thing there’s not so much suffering… when the head flies off.” The prince then hotly responded with a harrowing and insightful reply:

Everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it’s even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination, even a thought like that can pop into your head. Think: if there’s torture, for instance, then there’s suffering, wounds, bodily pain, and it means that all that distracts you from inner torment, so that you only suffer from the wounds until you die. And yet the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds, but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, then now, this second—your soul will fly out of your body and you’ll no longer be a man, and it’s for certain—the main thing is that it’s for certain. When you put your head under that knife and hear it come screeching down on you, that one quarter of a second is the most horrible of all.

In these trial liturgies, the certainty that horrified Prince Myshkin is adorned with the blessing of Christ in the liturgical commendation of an Anglican church. It is not terribly surprising that the church’s vocation in this instance has become so determined by meeting the felt-needs of its constituents, of supplying religious goods and services that the customers demand, that the church’s worship and witness has become theologically compromised. 

This is only one of many things downstream of mainline and progressive denominations becoming untethered from, and drifting away from, the authority of Holy Scripture and secondary confessional and historic liturgical norms for ecclesial life. As such, these trial liturgies in Canada are not so much a bellwether portending future problems to come, as a symptom downstream of the prior commitments that J. Gresham Machen so powerfully contrasted with orthodoxy in his powerful and prescient Christianity and Liberalism. The publication of these ghastly trial liturgies forces us to ask: is Christianity in general — and the Anglican pastoral and liturgical expression in particular — an authoritative account of truth and goodness to which we must assimilate ourselves, or a technique that people can use to establish their own sense of meaning derived from other sources?

Today, 103 years after Machen’s book, a range of criticisms have been offered of GAFCON’s call to reset the Global Anglican Communion. I can hardly respond to these wide-ranging criticisms here. But one especially misguided criticism has been aimed at the confidence placed in Scripture where the Abuja Affirmation claims that “The Bible is God’s Word written (Article XX). It was breathed out by him and written for us by faithful messengers. It carries God’s own authority and is its own interpreter – it is clear, sufficient and true for all times. God’s Word is the final authority in the church and in the life of discipleship.” These critics not only neglect how obviously integral Sola scriptura is to the history of the English Reformation and the theology of the historic Anglican formularies, but have also failed to recognize, as Kevin Vanhoozer puts it, that “Sola scriptura is not the answer to the question ‘How many sources should one use in doing theology?’ but instead is about the supremacy of Scripture over doctrinal norms,” namely, that Scripture alone is the norma normans non normata (‘the norming norm that is itself not normed’).

Similarly, one writer critiques the Abuja Affirmation for its confessionalism, for allegedly reducing the basis of the church’s unity to mere assent to propositional truths. Certainly there is more theologically and scripturally to the basis of the church’s unity than that, but arguably there is not less, evident in the authoritative role the Articles have played throughout Anglican history, even American Anglican history, contrary to popular myths. The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration is hardly an innovation; confessional clarity is charity, and guardrails make the highway a better place to drive. The church has long believed there are things worth clearly articulating in order to commend truth and safeguard against error, from the time of the ecumenical councils to the primary author of the classic Anglican Prayer Book and Articles of Religion putting his hand in the flames. 

We need a continuing witness to faithful, historic Anglican worship and witness whose liturgy and pastoral care is answerable ultimately to the word of God as its final judge and animating power. Paul’s epistle to of 1 Corinthians is particularly significant in this regard, that to tolerate or give approval to those who refuse clear calls to repent is to become “arrogant” (1 Cor 5:2), particularly because the church is expressly tasked not with judging the conduct of outsiders but indeed of summoning its own members to repent (1 Cor 5:12–13). If the animating power in the church’s sails is less the living voice of the word of God, but the shifting winds of human whims, especially in an institution committed to little more than institutional continuity detached from meaningful doctrinal guardrails, we will soon drift into the chaotic currents Yeats’ wrote about: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

As Carl Trueman notes in the closing chapters of his incisive The Desecration of Man, there is an extremely rich and deeply scriptural approach to theological anthropology in the historic burial rites of the classic edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, not least the 1662 edition. Those hallowed words solemnly and helpfully acknowledge that life is fragile, death is devastating, God is holy, we are sinners, but Christ is a merciful and comforting Redeemer who gives us hope of sharing in his death and resurrection. That theological anthropology has not only been eclipsed in the modern world’s turn away from traditional Christian funerals to secular ‘celebrations of life,’ but is now perverted in these trial liturgies for MAiD. 

One of the most beautiful liturgical moments I have had the privilege of participating in is at life’s end. In the ACNA’s 2019 Book of Common Prayer, immediately after anointing the dying with holy oil and praying a blessing upon them, a canticle is offered: the Nunc Dimittis, the song of Simeon from Luke 2:29–32. That setting is astonishing in its beauty and power; it has moved me to tears and nearly stunned silence every time I have had the privilege as a priest of leading that rite in those most holy of moments with a dying saint and their gathered loved ones, especially at the lines: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace: according to thy word.”  I often think about those moments every night during Evensong when the Nunc follows the last reading of Holy Scripture and I ask for God’s blessing to depart in peace to rest for the night, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace. 

It is a distortion of this liturgical heritage to superimpose it upon medical assistance in dying; the pastoral care that is needed instead is something altogether different, something that resists a throwaway culture, something that defies rather than deifies the culture of death.

Daunting as it is to imagine, pastoral care in such circumstances might require calling profoundly troubled people at an existential brink to turn back, to change their minds — the root meaning of ‘repentance.’ Raising such a weighty and solemn word, ‘repentance,’ in this context could be horribly misunderstood, as though it were tone-deaf and detached or confrontational towards people who are profoundly suffering in already devastating circumstances.

But if the church’s shepherds are to love precisely such people, we need to be wary that what we conceive of as loving them is actually love and shepherding as it is determined by God through his saving action in Jesus Christ. Left to our own devices and whims as to what love demands or entails, pastoral care in this instance can become distorted into becoming a supportive and reassuring accomplice in a permanent mistake. 

If we are to invite someone in utterly dire straits to ‘choose life’ (Deut 30:19), to decide to continue living, and we help them somehow begin to imagine continuing their life in fellowship with Christ’s sufferings in hope of sharing in his resurrection—even amidst the deepest possible pain—perhaps such mind-changing pastoral care simply consists of being present. Maybe pastoral care could look like persisting in regularly sitting with people who are deeply suffering in a ministry of presence, active listening, prayer, the private ministry of the Word of God, and faithful administration of the sacraments for an unknown length of time—rather than giving not merely a passive approval but an officially pronounced, sacrament-like, holy oil-anointed blessing of the church upon an irreversible decision.

The day this essay was composed, June 24^th, notably is a red-letter feast day for Anglicans: the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. As St. Augustine noted, John declared about Christ that “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and accordingly the daylight lessens from this point onward in the year, while the light increases after the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ at Christmas. The collect for today in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer reminds the church of its Advent-like vocation to testify to the coming of the Lord, particularly by summoning others to repent, even if that incurs suffering like that of John in his martyrdom. St. John did not serve as Herod’s personal chaplain for having Herodias, pastorally supporting Herod in his moral deliberation and invoking God’s blessing upon it. 

Instead, St. John called the monarch to repent, and he suffered martyrdom for it. All who personally appropriate this collect would do well to contemplate our similar vocation today, even as it might prove costly:

Almighty God, by whose providence thy servant John Baptist was wonderfully born, and sent to prepare the way of thy Son our Saviour, by preaching of repentance: Make us so to follow his doctrine and holy life, that we may truly repent according to his preaching; and after his example constantly speak the truth, boldly rebuke vice, and patiently suffer for the truth's sake; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Spencer Sunshine, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The
Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, New York,
2024), 453pp.

Spencer Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The
Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege (Routledge, 2024)
describes how America's early Cold War neo-Nazi movement reacted and
adapted to the late 1960s American youth counterculture. The story is
told through the person of James Mason, a Boomer neo-Nazi heavily
influenced by Satanism, who, in 1966, at 14 years old, affiliated with
the youth wing of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP).
Sunshine describes how Mason brought the 1960s counterculture into the
movement's strategy, tactics, and its branding. The book is also a
production and reception history of Mason's magnum opus, Siege, which
is a compilation of his 1970s-1980s neo-Nazi writings. Solicited and
edited by alternative publishers and musicians operating in neo-Nazi,
ethnoseparatist, and Satanist circles, Siege was initially released in
1993 and later retrieved and popularized in the mid-2010s through the
now-defunct online forum Iron March and by the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen
Division.

Let's get some preliminaries out the way. Sunshine is an unabashed
leftist. His 2013 Ph.D. from City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate
Center was on the history of post-1960s anarchism in the United States,
and featured anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan and Bullshit Jobs's David
Graeber.^[1] Since 2014, Sunshine has written about facets of the
American right-wing for publications like The New Republic, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, and The Daily Beast --- the kind of
outlets that make many conservative Christian believers auto-roll their
eyes, say "Nope!," and slam their laptops shut. Even so, I'd caution the
skeptical and the wary to keep their tabs open a little longer. Years
ago, I assigned one of Sunshine's longer reports on Oregon's Patriot
movement to my Patrick Henry College undergraduates because Sunshine is
what I call a "digger" and he knows his subject matter in ways many do
not.^[2] And if you desire insights about the origins of the alternative
and dissident American right that existed before the "alt-right" and
dissident right we've all heard about over the last ten years,
Sunshine's book will be a key text for many years to come.

You likely didn't hear much about the American Nazi Party (ANP) in your
US history classes, but for almost five years in the 1960s, George
Rockwell and his party knew how to draw headlines. Established in the
late 1950s, the party didn't garner much public attention until 1962. It
was the ANP's Roy James who, that September, charged to the front of a
church in Birmingham, Alabama and repeatedly punched Martin Luther King,
Jr. at a Southern Christian Leadership Conference event.^[3]

Rockwell's ANP saw local battles over integration and fair housing as a
way to build its brand. For instance, throughout 1962 and 1963, as the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held "Freedom Dweller" pickets,
sit-ins, and "dwell-ins" at newly-built, racially segregated housing
developments in the southern California cities of Torrance and
Carson/Dominguez Hills, the ANP's "Western Division" organized and led
counterprotests.^{[4], [5]} In 1966, Rockwell and his Chicago Division
had appropriated Stokely Carmichael's call for "black power," and had
rallied local "white power" to fight off housing integration in
Southwest Chicago. On August 5, the group attacked a march during which
King himself was struck by a rock. King commented afterwards that he
"[had never seen in Mississippi or Alabama] mobs as hostile and as
hate-filled as [he'd] seen in Chicago."^[6]

Sunshine's story really takes off with the assassination of Rockwell in
August 1967, just eight months after re-christening his own organization
as the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). The name change
reflected Rockwell's desire to tone down the group's explicit Nazi
features, transforming it into a wider, "white power" umbrella
coalition. Indeed, Rockwell had already made efforts to construct a more
"Americanized" Nazism, one in which "Aryan" was replaced with "white,"
where adherents of the Christian Identity movement were made more
comfortable, and where Holocaust denialism had a more "central" role.
Rockwell had even tried to start a "front" --- the Fighting American
Nationalists (FAN) --- he hoped could attract more whites by minimizing
the ANP's "Nazi trappings."^[7]

Despite his best efforts at building some form of unified party system,
however, local chapter priorities, strategic and tactical disagreements,
and commonly held frustrations over the leadership style of Rockwell's
successor, Matthias Koehl, split the

the post-Rockwell party along geographic lines by the mid-seventies.
Koehl desperately tried to maintain authority over a rump NSWPP, but
Sunshine relates --- in startling detail --- how that remnant and other
NSWPP splinter groups in northern California, southern California,
Chicago, Virginia, New York/Buffalo, and parts of Ohio evolved,
competed, further divided, changed names, and tried to outbid one
another for personnel, recruits, funding, and market share through the
rest of the 1970s into the 1980s.

Enter the Ohio boy, James Mason, and his assessment of how the 1960s
counterculture impacted the neo-Nazi movement's recruiting, strategy and
tactics, and how, going forward, that counterculture could be
beneficially appropriated.

Mason well understood his era's "vibe shift": the youthful energy; a
new, outside-of-the-home political/advocacy role for women; "free love,"
sexual laxity, and public acceptance of pornography; an anti-law
enforcement bias ("anti-pigism"); and a replacement of the tired, mass
politics-as-usual with militant vanguardism, direct action, and
guerrilla warfare. Mason's writing highlighted the structures and
actions of violent leftist groups such as the Weather Underground,
Symbionese Liberation Army, May 19th Communist Organization, and the
Black Liberation Army. He argued how a "few" could accelerate a collapse
of the "Jew Capitalist system" through bombings, "expropriations,"
street battles, and murder/assassinations. And, like these leftist
groups, Mason believed the "few" included women in more operational
roles, which was very distinct from Rockwell's older, more "stag"
approach.

Unsurprisingly, Mason found his closest allies among the California
splinter groups; that is, from the post-Rockwell factions that were
operating well within the counterculture's ground zero. In the mid
1970s, Mason tried to construct his own above-ground, combined Klan-Nazi
umbrella organization using southern California's National Socialist
Liberation Front (NSLF) as a tandem, underground "armed wing" or
"liberation army." In fact, until the early 1980s, Mason would regularly
look to the NSLF as a seed group, even with that group's various
leadership changes and despite Mason having a short stint of cooperation
with the National Socialist White Workers' Party (NSWWP) in northern
California.

Keeping with the zeitgeist, Mason's own religious beliefs and personal
spirituality were also in flux. In the 1970s, he adhered to Christian
Identity, which Rockwell himself had believed compatible with Nazism. As
time went on, however, Mason transitioned away from his heterodox
Christianity into Nietzscheanism and atheism, decrying any forms of
Christianity as "weak" and "alien." By the 1980s, Mason thought one
could support Christian Identity, but at best, only as a utilitarian
"conveyor belt" into non-Christian racialism.

Mason's spiritual moves and his continued fascination with late 1960s
counterculture also led him to his most controversial stance --- the
assertion that Charles Manson and his followers ("The Family")
represented a tactical and spiritual model for the post-Rockwell
Neo-Nazi movement. In some of Mason's earlier musings on the use of
assassination as a tactic, he lauded Manson Family member Squeaky
Fromme's unsuccessful attempt on President Ford's life). Mason's
personal interactions with Manson Family members and his direct
communication with Manson himself only served to enhance his praise of
the jailed murderer.

The Family, to Mason, was akin to the Weather Underground. It was a
non-monogamous, sexually promiscuous, drug-friendly, countercultural
community of "free love" in which women had an active role in violent,
anti-system plans and operations. The 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, he
argued, were a solid example of direct action and "redemptive violence,"
aimed at accelerating an American race war. The Family's rural outpost
was a place where, if needed, an intentional, white racial community
could sit out the coming societal apocalypse, engage in "mutual aid,"
and establish a new, white racialist, antisemitic polis as the
existing "system" was toppled. Moreover, Manson's "gnosticism," says
Sunshine, guided Mason's eventual move into what he [Mason] described
as "universal order," a "new kind of revolutionary National Socialist
consciousness," that transcended all boundaries between Christianity and
Satanism and identified world-historical "Christ figures" in Jesus,
Hitler, Rockwell, and Manson.

While his promotion of Manson and The Family severed many of Mason's
relationships to older neo-Nazis, it made him very attractive in the
mid-to-late 1980s to the Abraxas Circle, a coterie of
alternative/dissident book publishers and editors, Holocaust deniers,
industrial and deathrock musicians, Nazi skinheads, and, lastly, various
friends, relatives and associates of Anton LaVey, the head of the Church
of Satan.

Over five dense chapters, Sunshine recounts Mason's personal and
professional relationships with the Abraxas Circle, and, in particular,
how Mason's longevity in the American neo-Nazi movement and the access
he had to Charles Manson endeared him to four men within the Circle's
innermost ring (what Sunshine deems the 'Abraxas Clique'): Boyd Rice,
Adam Parfrey, Nikolas Schreck, and Michael Moynihan. Describing itself
as "a sort of Thule Society for the 90s," The Abraxas crowd and Mason
hit it off well, particularly in light of the group's focus on the
occult, fascism, natural inequality, dysgenics, and Social Darwinism.
Schreck, LaVey's son-in-law and one of the founders of the
goth/deathrock band Radio Werewolf, at one time described the group's
aim as introducing young men and women to "the western European
tradition" in order to provide them with a "firm alternative" to the
"dysgenic ocean of mud that has swept the [western] world."

Parfey, who was Schreck's publisher and was Abraxas' conduit to
numerous Holocaust deniers associated with the Institute for Historical
Review (IHR), told James Mason in early communications that they
believed Charles Manson was an "important figure [to save] the white
race from a dysgenic condition."^[8] Schreck, Rice, and Parfrey would
use Mason's stories, recollections, and arcana for The Manson File
(1988) and the related documentary,"Charles Manson Superstar." (1989).
Released by Parfrey's Amok Press (now known as Feral House), The Manson
File is one part of a book catalog that includes Joseph Goebbels' novel
Michael: Pages from a German Destiny, assorted LaVey volumes, and two
of Parfrey's own neo-Nazi anthologies (Apocalypse Culture I and
II).^[9]

Like many even today, Schreck and Parfrey played the "ironic aesthetics"
card when it comes to their brandishing of neo-Nazism. Sunshine
dismisses their attempts. Regardless of whether Schreck's Radio Werewolf
viewed the use of Nazi and Satanic symbols or references in ironic
terms, Sunshine argues the band had attracted real neo-Nazis by 1988
– the year the mainstream media declared as "the year of the Nazi
skinhead." Schreck's overt relationships and associations had also by
that time moved him well away from mere aesthetics. And Parfrey's Feral
House continued to publish works on Nazi occultism and insider
recollections of the Nazi skinhead music scene. In fact, Sunshine says,
Parfrey was much less reticent about his white racialism near the end of
his life. Parfrey died in 2018, and Feral House is releasing a
posthumous "Apocalypse Omnibus" later this summer.^[10]

It was, however, the fourth member of the Abraxas Clique, Michael
Moynihan, who would take on the greatest importance for James Mason's
continued popularity. Moynihan is the one who first pitched Mason with
the idea of compiling a "best of" anthology to get all of his neo-Nazi
materials from the 1970s and 1980s into a single volume. It took longer
than expected, but the Moynihan-edited, first edition of Siege came
out in April 1993. The volume was dedicated to Charles Manson, who Mason
called "the Son of Man." Throughout 1993 and into 1994 --- which was the
year Moynihan was made a Church of Satan high priest --- Mason's Siege
generated serious buzz across the neo-Nazi and black metal worlds. It
was advertised in music fanzines, in Black Flame, the Church of
Satan's regular newsletter, and was the subject of evangelical "shock
jock" Bob Larson's radio talk show. It also had a rare media breakout
moment when mentioned on an episode of the McLaughlin Group.

And then, suddenly, Mason and Siege all but disappeared.

In May 1995, Mason went to prison. While Siege had been making the
rounds, Mason, who was then living in Colorado, had taken up with the
15-year old daughter of a fellow neo-Nazi. Sunshine relates how Mason
had long been into pornography (including an interest in CSAM, or child
sexual abuse material), and it wasn't long before he was arrested,
released, and then re-arrested for CSAM-related crimes, contributing to
the delinquency of a minor, and for menacing the 15-year old's
subsequent boyfriend. Mason would be in and out of prison for the next
four years.

Once released, Mason continued to produce content and worked in retail
security. He had rediscovered a heterodox Christianity in prison. His
prison and post-prison writings are a cafeteria-style bonanza of
(ostensible) Christianity, antisemitism, white racialism, "ancient
aliens" (a la Chariot of the Gods), "alien DNA," and a divine
elevation of Hitler. Between 2001 and 2003, Mason worked with a
different set of alternative, white racialist publishers --- Greg
Johnson and Ryan Schuster --- to release the second edition of Siege
under the imprint Black Sun (now Counter Currents Publishing).^[11],
[12] Mason's initial publisher, Moynihan, on the other hand, moved to
editing new English language translations of Italian occultist
philosopher Julius Evola, French New Right thinker Alain de Benoist,
and, most recently with Arcana Europa Media, works by "Germanic
Revival," pagan, Odinist, and Asatru writers.^[13]

It was fairly quiet for Mason until Iron March and Atomwaffen Division
(AWD) retrieved and popularized Mason's counterculture-inflected
neo-Nazism for online-savvy Millennials and early Zoomers in the mid
2010s. Those interested in Siege's second reception period will want
to pay very close attention to Sunshine's opening chapter, the
concluding parts of his chapter on Nazi Satanism, and portions of
Chapter 17 ("From Prison to Revival"). Iron March released a third
edition of Siege in 2015, which caught the eye of the Atomwaffen
Division. According to Sunshine, Atomwaffen Division was enchanted by
the entire Mason package: the long-standing white racialism and
antisemitism, the turning-away from Rockwellian-era party building, his
loathing of run-of-the-mill conservative culture-warring, the
comfortability with California "drop-out" drug culture, the love for
Charles Manson and the Family, his connections to Satanism, and, most
importantly, his anti-system accelerationism and the call for direct
action and "cleansing" violence. It took very little time for Mason's
Siege to become Atomwaffen's "Bible" and for Mason to become the
group's guru. And it didn't take long for others to catch on. Sunshine
reports that by July 2017, Siege had approximately 16,000 downloads from
the Iron March forum.

And even more young men and women have "Siege-pilled." Mason's
anthology has been updated and re-released multiple times since its
third edition. As Sunshine attests, one can easily research Mason's
influence on Atomwaffen Division's domestic and international affiliates
or splinters --- groups like Feuerkrieg Division, Sonnenkrieg Division,
and AWD Russland. Or --- and I solemnly warn you, this part gets even
darker --- you can read through available news stories and legal
documents involving the Siege-inspired Order of the Nine Angles (O9A),
the National Socialist Order of the Nine Angles (NSO9A), Satanic Front,
MKY/No Lives Matter (NLM), and 764, the child predator online occult
network.^[14] None of this is Sunshine's leftist fever dream.

This book isn't a comfortable read. It isn't an easy read. But it is to
be respected. Sunshine is refreshingly unafraid to show his work. He
offers nine pages of dramatis personae, charts/graphics, a rundown of
the archives he used, a full periodical list of Mason's writings,
granular footnotes, and, for his final hundred pages, eleven full
appendices covering various individuals, groups, and concepts associated
with Mason. I heartily recommend it. Not only that, I strongly recommend
the Routledge series of which Sunshine's book is a part --- the
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right series. I own a number
of the now over 100-volume series.^[15] Together with Brill's free
online Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies^[16] (which was
discontinued in 2025, but involves many of the same American and
European scholars), the Routledge series offers some of the best,
up-to-date work on interwar fascism, the interwar, Cold War, and
post-Cold War transnational right, and more granular assessments of far
right phenomena.

Sunshine's Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism clearly
establishes that the counterculture of the "long 1960s" is not merely
a left-wing or so-called "cultural Marxist" story, but that its
appropriation and its impact is also discerned on the political right.
Moreover, at a time in which neo-Nazi, white identitarian, and/or
European New Right outlets are finding their way into vendor tables at
conservative Christian conferences, it is high time for conservative
Christian believers to have a clear, historical perspective on this
entire ecosystem.

David Goodwin. Forging the American Mind: A Year-by-Year Guide for Classical Christian Education (Broadside Books, 2026). 

In 1996, as a new immigrant to America, I started my study of Latin at a North Carolina public school. Fifteen years later, as an adult with a PhD in Classics, I came to Christ, and my academic study of the ancient languages played an instrumental role in that conversion. Reading the Gospels in Greek moved me in ways for which I do not quite have words—this was reading that truly touched the soul. 

I have spent the years since then homeschooling my children, and the study of Latin and Greek has been an important part of the program I have adopted. But also, we have generally followed the precepts of what many now refer to as classical Christian education. The term is admittedly nebulous and overused—sort of like every grocery store of late jumping on board with the protein craze to cram protein into the most unlikely things—protein bread, protein cookies, protein pasta, or protein iced coffee. So it is that every private school now claims to be “classical,” simply because that is the buzz word for good education, and if you’re a good parent, obviously you want the best education you can get for your children, right? But what actually is classical Christian education, at its core? And what makes it so good?

These are questions that David Goodwin has thought much about of late, and his new book, Forging the American Mind provides answers, moving from the elementary grades through the end of high school. Goodwin’s own education, he admits, was spotty: “I was about thirty years old before I heard of classical education, and forty before I started my own trek to get one. The payoff is great. I went to state college and got all the way through without even reading a real classic work. I believe anyone can get a classical education if they want one.”

The book is heavy on the prescriptive—for each grouping of grades, Goodwin offers the essential learning outcomes and ideas that classical Christian education would offer for that age, including an essential reading list. In grades K-1, for instance, the key is “cultivating order and memory.” Kids learn how to behave in a particular setting, and they memorize vast quantities of information, because their young brains are naturally wired for this kind of learning. For example, my two older sons were enrolled in Classical Conversations, a classical Christian co-op, for many years. For each child, the early grades were a time of memorizing an astonishing amount of history facts, math facts, and much more. My oldest son skipped a grade in elementary school, because his memorization of math made multiplication and division “click” right away, so we ran out of one grade’s material in the middle of the year and figured we’d go on to another one. The same child later did have to repeat eighth grade, reminding us that children’s learning progression is not steadily linear, but there are developmental leaps and bounds involved.

For grades 2-4, Goodwin emphasizes “introducing history as God’s story” as well as perfecting literacy skills. Then in grades 5-6, students are beginning dialectic training while continuing to cultivate the imagination through the reading of good books. “We should read our children the stories that motivate them to love what God loves and hate what God hates,” he reflects. “This is as true of chemistry as it is of history. It’s as true of math as it’s true of the Bible. Everything has a story, and so everything must be told in a way that leads our kids to love what Christ loves, so they will desire what He desires, so they will live like He lived. Without stories, facts are meaningless.” This is a beautiful and holistic vision, harkening back to the integration of all fields of learning in the Medieval university under the reign of theology, the chief of all disciplines. 

While the early grades are the “grammar” stage of education—the building of key foundations—grades 7-12 are where serious learning can happen precisely because students have the building blocks in mind and can retrieve all of these facts they’ve been memorizing all along to put together a more sophisticated picture of the world. It really is fascinating to watch, for instance, a child who has read a novel set during a particular period make connections to the period in question and go on to discuss and analyze the text more deeply. Reading the Chronicles of Narnia, my eleven-year-old can talk about Britain during WWII, and C.S. Lewis’s public evangelism on the radio. His understanding of the historical place and time when Lewis wrote enhances his understanding of the novels, as does his knowledge of Lewis’s broader apologetic writing.

At all stages, Goodwin emphasizes surrounding students with things that are good, true, and beautiful—especially in the literature that they consume. Classical Christian education is rooted in the virtues, he reflects early in the book—“the look and feel of school” has to be built on the cardinal virtues, the faith virtues (also known as the heavenly virtues). These overlap with the fruits of the Holy Spirit, and the code of chivalry could also be useful to discuss with young children. Such foundation of the virtues and discipline is the essential sine-qua-non for learning is what sets the attitude towards learning in classical Christian school apart from public schools, whose students may never hear mention of the virtues, for instance. And that’s a pity. As writers from antiquity to a fairly recent period of modernity openly recognized, virtuous citizens are better for any state than ones who are not. Prioritizing an education in the virtues, therefore, is a political exercise of supreme importance for the wellbeing of any state. Classical Christian education today certainly aims to recover this mission—thus the emphasis in the book’s title on “the American Mind.” This education, in other words, is a key civilizational enterprise for our country’s future.

In making these arguments, Goodwin’s book is not innovative or earth-shattering. Rather, it is a thoughtful, straightforward, and readily usable reference tool for a parent who is new to classical Christian education and is looking for a clear philosophical explanation of what to do with students, when to do it (level-wise), and (most important) why. 

And yet, I opened the book with a feeling of unease. Yes, this is a book on classical Christian education—what it is, and why it is good for America. I found myself nodding along a lot as I read. But why does this book boast a foreword from Pete Hegseth, a man whose own life both before and after his entering the political sphere exemplifies none of the virtues that we hope our children will acquire from classical Christian education? Are there no better role models to invoke in this important task? 

Indeed, the present book is a sequel to Goodwin’s earlier collaboration with Hegseth—The Battle for the American Mind, which thoroughly criticized the present state of American public education. That criticism was well deserved, yet any talk of discipline and virtues and wisdom from Hegseth, a man utterly lacking in all of these areas, rings hollow and disingenuous. I understand that publishing is a business, and publishers need to sell books. But I also find it alarming that this seems to be the way to sell classical Christian education in America right now—by connecting it to individuals like Doug Wilson or Pete Hegseth, whose public witness is less than savory. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

America does need classical Christian education, but I hope that those who choose this educational method for their children do not overlook the importance of truly following the virtues that this education promises to instill in us no less than in our children.