Former Google employee and current neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published a chilling article at the New York Times on Google’s shift from giving links to search queries to offering AI summaries. You may not have thought much about this shift, but it’s radical and is changing how many people perceive the world. Google has 91% of the search market share. This is how people get their questions answered (although increasingly they will turn to AI—more on that in a minute). In the past, Google didn’t give you answers to your questions, they offered up links which may contain various possible answers. You may find several links to Reddit where people offer various answers. You may find a Wikipedia site. You may find scholarly sources. You may find government sources. You may find commercial sources. You may find all kinds of information. It was up to you to sift through the information, ascertain what was relevant, and apply it. This process was an exercise for your mind, gave you depth of context, and—most important to this article—sparked your curiosity. You discovered all kinds of related articles and information related to the topic that you were unaware of. You may have gone looking for when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and The Sea but you came away learning that some scholars believe that concussions he received from multiple planes crash contributed to his suicide. The world is stranger than you imagined. But what happens when AI summaries answer our questions directly, cutting out the path of exploration? Here’s what Le Cunff writes:

When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no obvious relationship.

I worry about this, deeply. I worry about a culture that is illiterate, distracted, and incurious. As Christians, we have an obligation to attend to the wondrous world that God has created. Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” God has concealed his glory in all of creation, in the works of humanity, in the faces of people, in the natural world. And it is our glory to search things out, to discover and to give him glory. This kind of curiosity should not be confused with curiositas, which I have written about before. I’m speaking about a healthy, God-honoring curiosity about what God has made and worked through humans.

When I was in graduate school and we were all relying on databases to find books and articles, I had a professor who urged us to go to the library and “dig through the stacks.” Their reasoning was that while the databases might be helpful for finding things we knew to look for (direct answers), our curiosity would allow us to discover interesting related sources if we dug around through physical books. They were right. And the same is true for online searches today. When Google chooses to spit out AI generated summaries, we aren’t getting to “dig through the stacks.” We are losing touch with information. We are one more step removed from information itself.

Le Cunff points out why this is a serious problem:

The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own.

I fear that the result will be people who think they are curious (“What was the name of that actor?”) but who are only curious in the most shallow, factual sense. Their curiosity is only for the immediate question, not for the world of wonder surrounding their question that has led scientists, artists, poets, philosophers, and theologians to great works.

I also fear that this, combined with an illiterate culture, will make society incredibly susceptible to propaganda. Whoever controls the filters that produce the AI summaries controls the answers that people accept. We already see this happening with “Grok” on Twitter all the time. Someone will post something and a user will swoop in and ask Grok to fact check it live. And often Grok is wrong, but the user will believe the AI over reality. Why? Because AI seems objective and mathematical. As people grow more comfortable with AI, people will turn to Claude and ChatGPT with their search questions instead of Google, and we will have the same problem: answers instead of exploration. The implications for democracy are unsettling.

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Even more unsettling is the implications for our spiritual life. Serendipity is a gift from God. And we lose it when we try to efficiently answer all our questions rather than wrestling with words and meaning. In T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, he writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But AI’s goal is to help us cease from our exploring. To allow the machine to explore for us. And the end of our exploring is not, in this case, to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time—a deeper awareness of our human dependence on God—but a deeper dependence upon the machine.

When David sat under the stars and marveled at all God had made and the psalms poured out of him, he was curious. He wondered about who this Creator might be who could make the mighty mountains and rain and provide for all creation. Do we have that kind of attention anymore? Do we have the space for those questions? And if we did ask those questions today, would we expect an AI summary and move on, or would our hearts be filled with God’s grandeur and break out in poetry?

These questions are not hypothetical. They have direct implications on how we treat one another. If we do not cultivate a healthy curiosity, a loving-wonder about other people then when we meet them we will treat them selfishly, instrumentally. We will look for what we can get out of them, how we can use them, and then move on. We will treat them as machines. If we attend to them with curiosity, acknowledging the wonder that they were created by God, then we will never cease in our exploring. We’ll always have interesting questions to ask them because they matter before God.

Google AI summaries are not the end of curiosity by themselves. But they are part of a larger trend in our society to circumvent our imaginative exploration and efficiently answer our questions so we can keep the world moving toward consumption and production. The question for us comes from Wendell Berry: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” God calls us to live human lives, lives of curiosity about his creation. Let’s imagine.

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What Christians need in a time of increasing artificiality (AI) is to lean into their humanity, into their distinctly human excellence. Human excellence, what I call magnanimity To Live Well, doesn’t mean perfectibility, but rather our innate capacity for greatness as God designed us, which shall be different based on each individual. But the remarkable thing is that every human being is created for their own kind of excellence, endowed by their Creator with gifts, skills, and talents to exercise for his glory and the good of their neighbor. We should strive to grow in these areas as well as in universal excellences like in kindness to others, in generosity, in grace, in peace, in the virtues, in the Fruits of the Spirit, all so that we can honor God and love our neighbor more. The goal is not to earn God’s favor or build an identity or become “good enough” for anything in particular, but to be faithful to God by living into what we were created to be: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). That’s all we are doing, walking in the good works which God created for us beforehand.

But this raises a number of challenges: How is this different from optimizing or hustle culture or lifehacking? How do we avoid works righteousness? And how does this account for our sin nature? In other words, can you have a distinctly Protestant Christian Humanism that acknowledges the role of sin and still calls us to pursue our human potential in Christ?

I believe the answer is yes. Here’s how.

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Now that birthright citizenship has been settled by the Supreme Court, a number of high profile voices in the conservative and conservative evangelical world have been announcing that this means the end of America, that we will have no way of protecting our identity, population, and elections. Despite the fact that this means just keeping the status quo, people are now arguing that since the courts didn’t decide against birthright citizenship, we must take actions like “sterilizing” foreign visitors to protect our national sovereignty. In other words, this ruling is an existential threat to our nation. We will lose our very way of life because children born here will receive citizenship, as they have for the last 158 years. If all of this seems hyperbolic, that’s because it is. Hyperbole is a traditional language of politics. But it’s also destructive to healthy political discourse because it prevents different groups from meeting and “working through” differences. But there is a reality beneath this hyperbole.

The reality beneath is that America lacks a strong sense of identity as a nation. Even some individual states seem to lack a strong identity and culture (although they may have great branding). Or the culture we do share is a vapid one: consumerism, radical individualism, and the shrinking remnants of Christianity. Mass immigration (in its various forms) contributes to this identity crisis by infusing the nation with various differing cultures and ideologies. I’m not saying it makes our country “impure,” but it does make it harder for us to have shared values. That’s just a reality of society. Rather than a country committed to what James Davison Hunter described as the “Hybrid-Enlightenment”—a combination of rationalism and Protestant Christianity—we largely have a country committed to whatever seems right in each person’s eyes. That value-vacuum creates a powerful sense of anxiety, dread, and nihilism (as Hunter argues) in people who naturally desire a positive identity for the country. The question becomes, What does it look like to move forward? How does a nihilistic country, a country of people caught up in existential crises manage to “work through” (Hunter’s language) their differences to develop a shared positive identity?

Pseudo-existential threats are a staple of American politics, and they are not politically partisan. While some on the right may see foreigners as an existential threats to the “purity” of our country, some on the left see Trump voters as fascist existential threats to the purity and safety of our country. I’m not arguing that there is exact parity here—there isn’t. But I believe both are examples of pseudo-existential threats. Despite my criticisms of unchecked illegal immigration and the Trump administration and my acknowledgements of the real harms both have caused, and despite warnings about a looming civil war from some people, America has continued to exist. That’s a testament to the dedication of many men and women who sacrificed their lives to build a lasting institution! Praise God for that.

But being thankful that things haven’t entirely fallen apart isn’t enough. The center isn’t really holding. That much is evident to anyone paying attention. As I said earlier, we don’t have much of a shared national identity except for consumerism, radical individualism, and the shrinking remnants of Christianity. You can’t build a nation on those values. Reason, faith, and the liberty constrained by proper limits are necessary. And where are we to gain those values? Do we expect our AI overlords to build it into their systems? Do we expect our social media overlords to build it into their algorithms? Do we expect corporations to start advocating for limits against their own profits? Do we expect influencers and news personalities to rely on reason against their own interest in stirring division through irrationalism? Do we expect Christian political leaders to save us through political power even as our own homes sit divided and uncatechized? Where do we turn?

Central to James Davison Hunter’s latest book, Democracy and Solidarity is the argument that through our nation’s history we have “worked through” our differences in various ways, sometimes through violence (see: the Civil War and the response to the Civil Rights Movement), but we worked through our differences because we shared a basic belief in the “Hybrid-Enlightenment” values. Now, however, we have largely abandoned those beliefs and are nihilistic about “working through” anything with the “other side.” “They” are unworkable. They must be eliminated, not conversed with.

I don’t have a plan to return us to the “Hybrid-Enlightenment” values, however, I do think we can begin the process of “working through” and maybe move toward reason and faith by committing to mediating institutions and acting locally.

Currently, the modern State and its subsidiaries, the massive tech companies (which I call collectively the Worldly Powers), have atomized us down to radical individuals so that we all stand naked before these awesome powers with little between us and them. This is part of the reason we have no real meaningful shared values anymore, because the Worldly Powers dictate the values, and the only values they insist upon are consumerism and radical individualism—the very things that keep the powers running. What remains of Christianity exists as a vestigial value.

In other words, few of us belong to mediating institutions which shape our values in ways that align us nationally: families, churches, schools, clubs, or social organizations. But it is precisely these institutions that can stand between the individual and the Worldly Powers on a local level and remind us of what we were made for and how we ought to treat our neighbor and live together.

The great danger of mediating institutions in this regard is that they become silos for partisan thinking and action rather than collective thinking and action for the common good, a space for “working through” our problems together. You see this danger unfold all the time. In researching my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (tentative title), which is all about institutions, I came across a fascinating article from a national organization about how the State and tech companies are working together in disturbing ways. The problem was that because the institution was aligned with a particular political side, they only gave examples of biases against them. Any reasonable reader would know that other examples of State-tech collusion exist, but this article chose to be blind to them for their partisan purposes. Healthy institutions will avoid this pitfall by devoting themselves to truth and to desiring to work with their neighbors for the flourishing of the city in justice.

It is my claim that we all need to be more involved in mediating institutions that form us on a local level to cultivate our affections toward the good. Rather than being formed by algorithms and AI and influencers and talk radio, by conflict entrepreneurs who want us to panic about everything, we need to be committed and active where we are with the people around us. Will this “save America”? I don’t know. I don’t know how to do that. I do know is that here is where we are and here is where we are called to be faithful.

I’ve been reading ’s Against The Machine as research for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (working title), focusing on language of the “Machine” and how it compares to my understanding of “Worldly Powers.” One point that Kingsnorth rightly makes is that the Machine (whatever it is) operates on growth, and therefore depends on us consuming more and more. In other words, we could not have the conditions Kingsnorth describes in his book (or I describe in You Are Not Your Own) unless we had a culture of mass consumption, where nearly everyone had been trained from a very young age to say “Yes!” to their desires. The puritan ethics of simplicity and frugality just would not allow for the kind of endless consumption and disposal of goods and services that feeds endless, directionless growth. Our natural human bent is to give into our desires, and people have always sought to profit off of tempting us into our desires, but never before have people have so systematically, scientifically, and thoroughly tempted us into our desires as a culture. This creates a plausibility structure for us where it feels plausible to give in to what feels right deep in your heart: buy that special cup of coffee (“You deserve it!”), pursue that inappropriate relationship (“You deserve them!”), or get into that debt for something fun (“You deserve this!”). So how does practicing the virtue of temperance help reorient us in this disorienting culture? As I’ve argued in To Live Well, temperance is not the same as balance or moderation; instead, it reflects the inner order of our lives. As we reorient our lives and our loves toward God, we find freedom from intemperate desires sold to us by the world.

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Our world is filled with people struggling with despair or presumption instead of walking in hope. The church fairs little better. Every day our feeds are filled with stories of doom: AI doom, environmental doom, bureaucratic incompetence, wars, waste, present crises and looming crises. Stories of pastoral failures, of politician scandals, of people we know who are suffering loss. Targeted news stories tell us how we are inadequate and in danger, how we are threatened and can only find safety in the products and services offered by the Worldly Powers. All of this puts many people into a kind of perpetual despair—a sense that there is no hope for redemption, no hope for healing, no hope for reconciliation, no hope for justice, only more and more crawling through the wilderness, waiting for the end to come. And so we cling to our pleasures and our numbness and distraction in despair.

For others, the Worldly Powers offer another narrative, one of arrival and consummation. You have already achieved peace, success, safety, and prosperity. And the notable thing is, the Worldly Powers are again the judges of this standard. If you trust in them and their standards of living, their conception of personal fulfillment, their hope in endless self-development (even if it means through AI and transhumanism), then you will arrive. You won’t need to hope. Because there will be nothing to hope for. We will conquer cancer, death, aging, memory, intelligence, unemployment, and poverty. And so we cling to our pleasures and our numbness and distraction in presumption.

But what does faithful hope look like? What does hope in Christ look like in a world dominated by despair and presumption? When wars and rumors of wars tempt us to despair and technological advances tempt us to the sin of presumption, what does it look like to walk in the virtue of hope?

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A common experience as an elder millennial who grew up surrounded by fundamentalist Christian culture is watching your friends and family and people you grew up with or worked with slowly drift from orthodox views of sexuality toward progressive, more “inclusive” views. In a word, “deconstructing”; sometimes they stop at issues of sexuality and politics, sometimes they go all the way and abandon the faith altogether. But the trajectory roughly looks the same: moving from what they viewed as a strict, narrow-minded faith of their parents to a “liberating,” more expansive and loving faith (or non-faith) of themselves and the larger world. It always breaks my heart a little to see an old friend who has abandoned the Bible’s teaching on sexuality, posting on social media during Pride Month. But I think I understand the logic for some of them, as I’ve heard them speak and change over the past decade. And I share some of their concerns. You see, growing up in fundamentalist or strict evangelical cultures of the 80s and 90s, we were taught a very severe morality. We were raised on legalism. Purity culture (which was not entirely bad, in my opinion, but was excessive and often lacked grace), the Satanic Panic (I remember this), the demonization of “secular music,” the SBC Disney Boycott, and the impeachment of Bill Clinton (which I think was appropriate!) because of his sexual behavior in office all taught us that personal morality mattered, a lot. The World was a frightening place and we had to keep ourselves pure from immorality by holding to a higher standard. With the nomination of Donald Trump in July 2016, something radical started to shift for people I knew. Maybe this isn’t a statistically significant number of people. But there is a group of people I’ve witnessed who seem to have questioned, abandoned, or altered their faith because of the apparent hypocrisy of supporting Donald Trump for the highest office of the land.

This isn’t an article about all the ways Donald Trump is unfit for office or immoral. I’m not interested in making that case. Do your own research. All I’m observing is that for many people I know, something cracked over time as Trump cemented himself as leader not only of our country but also the political and cultural leader of choice for evangelicals. And it’s a simple story, really. When you’ve been told your whole life that character matters and all of a sudden your trusted leaders are promoting someone who lacks character, you lose trust in your leaders. And then you start to wonder if you have been hoodwinked. You start to question everything. You start to wonder if maybe what’s really important for them is actually power and not the love of Christ. Which is a fine question to ask, but who gets to define “love”?

Once you start questioning everything, then the World’s definition of “love” sounds awfully appealing: love is a deep desire in my innermost self which only I can judge unless I am causing some clear, non-consensual harm. The problem with this definition is that “harm” gets immediately defined as “measurable harm,” so anything immeasurable, like spiritual harm, is discounted right out of the gate. We live in a mechanical world where the only thing that counts is if you can measure it. So love is complete acceptance of everyone’s actions so long as science says it doesn’t hurt anyone. And the world becomes flattened down to a materialist, scientific world. Even then, what counts as material evidence of “harm” often gets filtered and judged according to our deepest emotions. But here’s the thing, that sounds comforting when the alternative seems to be an evangelicalism whose understanding of “love” allows them to support a leader who ruthlessly rounds up immigrants, who brazenly lies, and who mocks handicap people. The list could go on.

Hear me: I’m not saying this is a good reason to abandon a biblical view of sexuality. Nor am I saying that this is a good reason to vote Democrat. I have made my stance clear on this and I haven’t changed. I am saying that this logic is compelling to many people. They look at how love is practiced by Christians and they want to make sense of it. So they look for an alternative that appears to be more expansive, kinder, and more compassionate. They desire something that fits the Christian love they were raised with, and that looks more like progressive Christianity or even agnosticism than traditional Christianity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m not advocating for a squishy “Thirdwayism” that is soft on biblical morality for the sake of appeasing the World. But I am going to argue that our witness matters. Our love matters. Love has direct implications on our politics and our lives. And when our witness does not display God’s love for our neighbors, we should not be surprised when people wonder about the truths of Scripture. The answer is not to abandon Scriptural teachings on sexuality or other core doctrines, nor should it be that we abandon important political and cultural issues like abortion or immigration. But there are ways of advocating for these issues that are compassionate and persuasive and firm, and there are ways that are destructive and focused on power and domination.

In Josef Pieper’s account of love, the definition is, “How wonderful that you exist! How good that you are!” Here we affirm the existence of each person, made in the image of God, without affirming their lifestyle. In fact, we desire that they repent of their sin! That is true love. It requires that we say that some forms of desire—what the World calls “love”—are sinful. The presence of desire, even strong desire which we do not call up but comes from within us does not make it moral or licit. God’s will, manifested in his Word and creational design, makes something moral. So while we affirm the being of every person, we also, in love, invite every person to the joy of redemption in Jesus Christ which involves turning from their sins. Understood this way, Christian love is expansive, kind, and compassionate, “not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Notice that in this verse in Peter that the desire is for repentance.

That should be our desire, not just for those outside the visible church, but for those inside the visible church—especially for those inside. Because some who walk as Christians lack love, some revel in the cruelty toward others (as modeled by the current administration). And in defence of this cruelty, they accuse men who show compassion of being “feminine.” Again, when such language is thrown about by professing Christians, is it any wonder that some evangelicals feel an attraction toward a belief system that will embrace them and support them for being compassionate?

So what are we do to? How are we to minister to those who abandon an orthodox view of biblical sexual ethics or Christianity in general? I think we begin not by compromising our faith, but by making a better case for biblical fidelity than many of us heard in the 80s and 90s. And that means not rabidly joining the culture wars, but focusing on those in spiritual need. I also think that regardless of how you vote for prudential reasons, it is important to judge the language and actions of the current administration rightly, opposing what is unjust and unloving and praising what is praiseworthy. In our hyper-partisan world, that will still be seen as supporting what is evil, but I think it is the best we can do. Probably the best thing you can do to help those who are considering leaving the faith or abandoning orthodox views on sexuality is living the truth out in simple, humble, kind, open lives, without condoning or approving the cruelty and evil of this World. It is in embodied relationships where people know you and can see you and love you that they will be witnesses to the love of Christ in your life and the goodness of God’s will. Ultimately, it is up to the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives to convict and bring them back to Christ. But we should be eager to live lives that invite them to seek Christ by walking in a manner worthy of the gospel.

On a totally different note!

Join me next Friday online at the Trinity Forum for a discussion of my book, To Live Well! For more information, see their website!

I recently took a van full of teenage boys on an 11-hour drive to a church camp in Colorado. On the way home I passed an old, broken down sign on the side of the road that read “ADULT” in large red letters. And tucked into a turnout behind some trees was a very sad, dilapidated building with a few cars in front of it. I tried to imagine what kind of person, in the age of ubiquitous and virtually free pornography, still visits a roadside pornography store. I couldn’t. And then I thought about those large red letters and the word ADULT. I had spent a week with young men on the cusp of entering adulthood, discussing with them a theology of sanctification and sharing with them practical advice on growing in maturity. And here was a sign that took the good thing they were working toward (becoming an adult) and used it to represent the very opposite of adulthood: being controlled by your passions, lusts, and sins. And it seems to me that there is something very perverse about calling pornography “adult content.” It implies that adults are people who give in to their passions and indulge in their sins, which is true on some level because of our sin nature, but should not positively define adulthood. And it also perverse because we need adults to be mature, safe, self-controlled, responsible and godly. The word “Adult” shouldn’t have connotations with pornography. It should call to mind those higher qualities. Yes, I understand that we use the category of “Adult” to note that those under 18 shouldn’t have access to the material. But I’m merely pointing out the natural consequence of this use of language. The result is that this essential word in the English language becomes adulterated by a perverse meaning, a meaning that represents the very opposite of its intended meaning. And I do wonder if that has consequences on the way we view adults and adulthood in our culture.

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To begin the process of healing and restoration, whatever that may look like for you, you must first come to terms with the struggle. And to some extent, that means being public about your struggle. The first time I truly tried to get help for my OCD, I made an appointment with my pastor to talk about my thoughts. A few days before the appointment, I canceled. I had to hit rock bottom before I sought help. And even then it took 8 or so more years before I got the help I needed. There remained a great deal of shame leading up to the phone call when I canceled that appointment. Shame that I couldn’t deal with my problems on my own. Shame that I needed help. Shame that I wasn’t “alright.” Shame that I was out of control of my life. That shame didn’t go away, even when I sought help from a counselor. Because then there was the shame of getting “professional help.” Was I broken? Was there something wrong with me? And what about medication? Were my body and mind not right? Didn’t I have it in me to fix my problems without the help of medication? And on top of all this was the harm I was causing, the people I was letting down by ruminating, the family members, friends, professors, and students. Shame upon shame upon shame.

There is no end to shame, if we allow it to build. It just echoes through our lives. And even after there has been some healing and restoration, there can be a sense of shame at having caused harm in the past, the weight of harm you can’t ever fully undo, which you can only repent of. And all this shame holds you back from the very thing you need, which is to heal. The more shame you feel, the more likely you are to fall into despair that you will never get better, and the less likely you are to advocate for yourself. So how do we move beyond shame over mental afflictions?

At its core, shame is the belief that we are not good enough, that we are not okay, that we are not affirmed. And when you are struggling with a mental affliction, those are the voices you are likely to hear from your mind, whispers that you are flawed, broken, hopeless, a failure, and so on. You may be hearing those whispers because of the affliction itself, for example depression, or you may think those thoughts as a consequence of your affliction (“because I’m so anxious, I can’t do anything right, which makes me a failure”). But either way, these thoughts are common to those who struggle and they prevent you from doing the thing you need to do to move forward, which is advocate for yourself. The less you believe you are loved, worthy, and cared for by God, the less you will believe that you deserve proper treatment and healing.

Which means that foundationally, you must ground yourself in the reality that God desires you to take care of yourself. It is honorable and good for you to pursue your mental health, just as it is good for you to pursue your physical health (and most often the two are intertwined!).

Shame tries to convince us that at our core we are condemned. But the reality is that at our core we are redeemed and beloved by God because of Christ’s finished work on the cross! Now, sometimes shame travels in place of guilt. Guilt tells us when we have done something wrong. And it is valuable for us to acknowledge when we have done something wrong, even when it is related to our mental affliction. For example, just because you are anxious, doesn’t give you permission to be unloving or abusive to other people. You are still responsible for your actions. When our mental afflictions incline us to sin against our neighbor, we may feel shame as a result, thinking, “See, this is who I am, I am hopelessly broken. I can’t do things right.” At that moment, we need to correct our thinking with the gospel, reminding ourselves that we are a new creation, set free from the bondage to sin by Christ. We don’t need to feel that sense of shame, although it is appropriate to feel guilt and repent for our sins!

That said, most of the shame I’ve witnessed in others who struggle with mental affliction and have experienced myself does not center around actual issues of sin. It has centered around fears of being fundamentally broken as a person or being a drain on family or friends. So let me address those points.

First, you are and you are not broken. Because of the Fall, we are all broken in one way or another. All of us suffer in this life. All of us face struggles and setbacks and difficulties. You are not alone in that. You should not feel ashamed or unique or different. And yet, before God, you are not broken. You are redeemed.

Also, behind the fear that you are broken, I think, is the fear that you must be “fixed” in order to be accepted. God accepts you and loves you. He desires you to be well. But he loves you right now.

Second, to be a human is to depend on other people. There is no escaping this fact. You are born dependent. You will die dependent. This is not a failure on your part. This is not a flaw. This is a glorious design by God! Do not feel ashamed for depending on your family and friends while you walk through mental affliction. Let them sacrifice for you. And as you can, sacrifice and serve them in turn. This is just how life is done. When you feel creeping shame for their sacrifices for you, say a prayer of thanksgiving to God for them instead of entertaining those thoughts. Practically this means we need to open up to people about our suffering. We need to reach out and rely on others, professionals and clergy and friends, to support us. We need to take that initiative, to have the courage to open up.

In the end, if we allow it, shame will hold us back from pursuing the thing God desires for us. As we assume agency over our lives, we glorify him. Shame surrenders agency by folding into despair. When we have the courage to struggle with our afflictions, we give hope to others, the shame decreases, and we move toward healing. But all of that is dependent upon recognizing that God loves us because of the righteousness of his Son.

I have what I would call the Charlie Brown Problem. Very often, and I mean very often, when I’m supposed to feel some way for some special occasion, I feel the opposite.

If I visit an amusement park, I struggle to be present and enjoy myself. If it’s a birthday party or event in my honor, I feel anxious. And if I’m on a family vacation, I regularly have a hard time letting go, relaxing and just enjoying myself. I’m not a good vacation-taker. Is this pessimism? Negativity? A bad attitude? A problem with resting? Or is it the natural result of being a father who is one of the two main adults in charge of making sure everyone is safe, happy, fed, and not fighting during a vacation? Who knows?

But here’s what I do know: my duty on a family vacation is not primarily to have a good time or to relax or to have grand adventures. My duty is to be present with my family as best I can, to expose my children to God’s creation and the wider world, and to fellowship with others. If I can get some measure of joy or happiness out of that experience in the short term, all the better! But I know that when everything is unpacked and settled down, I will have the satisfaction of having fulfilled my duty as a father regardless of how I felt. And this is particularly important for me because sometimes my mental health throws an extra wrench in me enjoying time with my family. In these moments, it feels like I’m just going through the motions, just doing what I’m supposed to. And I guess what I want to say is, there’s something to be said for going through the motions. Because what you’ll find in retrospect is that the memories you create are the rest you were looking for.

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I recently heard from someone who is reading To Live Well who expressed a concern that I don’t think I adequately addressed in the book: What if your problem is not so much that you struggle to pursue virtue, but that you think about being a virtuous person all the time? You are striving to be a virtuous person all the …

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Standard conceptions of totalitarianism define it as control by an absolute State. That’s a very basic definition. And it’s a fine definition. But I want to consider moving beyond State totalitarianism to something broader. I know that’s controversial and probably unacceptable, but just let me run with this for a few minutes. This essay is an test, an attempt, a trying-out of an idea. And that idea is this: in the contemporary world, the threat of a totalitarian system is less from an absolute State like Communism or Fascism (as it was in the Twentieth Century) than from the union of the State and Industry, particularly Big Tech, into one omnicompetent system. In other words, it’s not that the State controls all your data and tells you where you can work and what to think. It’s that that State and tech companies control all your data and nudge you to work in certain places and pressure you to think certain things. It’s less 1984 and more Brave New World. Together, they create what I want to call the Worldly Powers. And what makes these powers particularly totalitarian is that they work to atomize us by wearing down thick mediating associations and institutions, which as Robert Nisbet and others have noted is a defining feature of totalitarian regimes. So what I am suggesting is that with the accelerating growth of Big Tech through things like AI, we are facing a looming threat of a kind of totalitarianism. One professor of politics, Sheldon Wolin, described this as “inverted totalitarianism.” I think there are many potential dangers here. I’d love you to read and help me with this argument.

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One of my favorite cultural analysts, , published an article at yesterday titled “The Commodification of Christianity” which posits that the growing interest we’re seeing among Gen Z in Christianity reflects a thin, digitized, plastic, frictionless and faceless vision of faith: “The problem with religious apps is the sa…

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One of the pieces of advice I try to give my classes early each semester is that I can’t facilitate their growth in learning unless they choose to have a posture of humility. This might sound a bit arrogant of me, a bit “sage on the stage” as opposed to the “fellow traveler” model of teaching, but after nearly 20 years of teaching, it’s a conclusion I can’t avoid. Humility is a necessary sub-virtue to all true forms of learning. Aquinas puts humility under the virtue of temperance and that seems right to me since you are rightly moderating your perception of yourself, but as with all the virtues, there is a mixture of other virtues: justice and love especially. It is an injustice to God, your neighbor, and yourself to perceive yourself wrongly because it is not giving those individuals their due regard. But it is also unloving because when you love someone’s existence, you naturally respect them and show them honor. So I see humility as touching temperance, justice, and love, but mostly temperance.

When a student enters my class convinced that they have already mastered the content, they are condemning themselves to learn nothing. When a student enters convinced that they lack knowledge, they open themselves up to the possibility of wisdom. And this necessarily means being humble before teachers, professors, elders, pastors, the wisdom of the past, and the subject. This is true for all of us, not just students. For all of us, the path to knowledge comes through humility.

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Recently I have been building the case that inhibition marks contemporary culture, particularly the sense that we lack agency in our lives. A few weeks ago I argued that because we are taught that we are radically autonomous, we get overwhelmed with our freedoms and freeze up, coming to despise the very freedom that we’ve b…

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A week ago I asked for suggestions for things to write about, and my friend suggested I address the challenge of cultivating virtues in our children. It is difficult to raise children to be virtuous, particularly in a culture that celebrates vice. Aristotle knew this and addressed the problem in his Nicomachean Ethics, right at the end: “It is difficult, however, for someone to be trained correctly for virtue from his youth if he has not been brought up under correct laws.” And so we need good government to set up strict laws to cultivate virtues in our children! Simple. Except that anyone who has witnessed public attempts at instilling even civic virtues like obeying the law, voting, and basic communal spirit can attest that the State is a very, very poor moral tutor. Yes, the State can teach us what we are free to do by granting us liberties, but it is not very good at teaching us what we were made for through propaganda. The exception, Aristotle notes, was an extreme form of violent oligarchy: Sparta. If we want to grant any kind of liberty, then we can’t rely on the State to cultivate virtue in our children. So what’s the alternative? Aristotle’s answer is that “it seems fitting for each individual to promote the virtue of his children.” Thanks, Aristotle. But how do we do this work of “promotion”? If children need a holistic understanding of the virtuous life that the State should but fundamentally cannot provide without restricting liberty, how can parents provide that? I believe parents can cultivate virtues in their children by inviting them into a virtuous life, by modeling virtues, by using the language of the virtues, and by surrounding their children with a community of virtuous people.

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I recently came across this article from an Association of Certified Biblical Counselors counselor on how to treat OCD “biblically,” which begins by rejecting the psychological label altogether. This isn’t the first time I have objected to some biblical counseling views of OCD. There are many objectionable things in th…

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Learning to live with AI in higher education has not been easy. While some advocates are praising the pedagogical possibilities, many professors are concerned about rampant misuse of AI. Students are using AI to write entire papers for them, to summarize readings, to do their math questions, to create presentations, …

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In 1948, Richard Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences, a classic of conservative thought. And he was right. Ideas do have consequences. For example, as our culture has increasingly come to accept the belief that humans are sovereign over their lives, it has fed directly into abortion and assisted suicide amongst other evils. The problem with this phrase is that it seems to have more explanatory power than it really does. Ideas have consequences, yes. But so do material conditions. So does our environment. Also, we can’t often disentangle the web of ideas that produced an outcome. It’s not just one idea, but several. “Ideas have consequences” is a powerful phrase to use when there is a tidy direct line to draw from, say, radical individualism to assisted suicide, but even then we must be cautious. What role does the medical industry and cost-saving measures play? What role does our disrespect for the elderly play? It’s complicated! What I want to argue today is that we should be very cautious when arguing that ideas have consequences. Not that we shouldn’t make that case, but that we shouldn’t flippantly use that phrase as a causal argument. Sometimes things seem to have a direct causal relationship based on an ideology, but that isn’t evidence that there is a causal relationship. The reality is, ideas have consequences, except when they don’t—which is all the time! And evangelicals across the theological and political spectrum use this phrase (despite its conservative origins) as a hammer to hit at their opponents. Progressives claim that abuse is consequence of the ideas of complementarianism. More conservative types claim that sin is the consequence of the ideas of more centrists types. When the reality is much more complicated and human. We’d all do well to use this phrase sparingly.

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Increasingly I am convinced that inhibition is a defining characteristic of contemporary culture. As a nation, we’re dating at lower rates, having less sex, young people are delaying getting their driver’s license, we’re in a loneliness epidemic, people are turning to AI companions for love and attention, we feel compelle…

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A few days ago, I had the pleasure of joining the MereFidelity podcast (the episode isn’t out yet), the podcast hosted by . And asked me an excellent question which I didn’t answer adequately, and I want to take the time to elaborate on here. He asked me about the Love chapter in To Live Well, specifically the section on “Friendship,” and about how we can practically develop and nurture deep friendships. I want to take that a step further and ask the question, what does love mean in a friendship? How ought we love our friends in practice if we intend to develop deep friendships that will carry us through life?

My theory is that many contemporary people have never been taught these practices of love in friendship, or they have allowed these practices to atrophy so that their friendships have atrophied as well. Certainly the statistics on friends suggest that something has changed. And my fear is that with the rise of AI companion bots, some percentage of Americans will continue to neglect these practices by turning to a simulacrum of a companion who sycophantically never requires love.

So what does love in friendships entail? How do we love our friends well? What does that look like in the day-to-day trenches of modern life? And how does our love of friends fit with our love of God?

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