A few days ago, asked me to write something on the challenge of rootedness in the contemporary world. Which is ironic, because had just left me a comment on Instagram where he criticized the way “people talk about rootedness and rootlessness.” I’m afraid I’m going to make Andrew, who is a faithful reader and commenter, frustrated by talking about rootedness and rootlessness. Sorry Andrew!

Here’s the challenge as I’ve seen it play out in many people’s lives:

You grow up in a specific place with your family and make friends, then you go off to college and make new friends and slowly grow a bit detached from that place and your old friends and even your family. Then you decide to find a job based on where you can find employment or where you and maybe your spouse think it would be exciting to live. Later, you have kids and discover that it’s hard to be distant from your family. You miss their support. They miss watching your kids grow up. But by that point you’ve already put down roots. The kids grow disconnected from grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, but moving is a huge commitment and finding work (in this economy?) can be overwhelming. So instead, you make do. You try to travel to visit family when you can. You FaceTime with them. You make friends locally. But all along you have a sense that you are split. A part of you will always belong to where you grew up: the people and places you grew up with. And a part of you will belong to where you live now.

But is that okay? Do you have an obligation to move to be closer to family? If so, how do you know when you have that obligation? What demands do our belonging to people and place put on us, and how much should we follow our own vision of life? Should we just follow our dreams wherever they take us, or do we have a duty to consider our obligations to others?

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The following is a section that didn’t make it into the published manuscript of To Live Well for pacing and length reasons, but I quite like it, so I edited it and expanded it a bit for our purposes here. It was meant to be one of the “application” sections under the virtue of temperance. I hope you find it beneficial and order the book!

Normally we think of “curiosity” in positive terms. We desire our children to be curious in their education, for example. But for Aquinas, and of course Josef Pieper, curiositas is a form of intemperance, and one very relevant to our own time. Pieper notes that “Aquinas assigns curiositas to the ‘roaming unrest of spirit,’ . . . which he says is the first-born daughter of acedia” (The Four Cardinal Virtues 200). This deserves some unpacking because it is a significant claim. First, curiositas is a “roaming unrest of spirit,” a restlessness, an anxious consumption of knowledge, an unsatisfiable gaze, a constant scrolling, shall we say. It’s a feeling of dis-ease deep in your spirit that won’t let you stop consuming more and more information, gathering more data, experiencing more things, seeing more sights. And interestingly, Aquinas says this is the “first-born daughter” of another condition, acedia. Understanding acedia will help us understand why it is that we are driven to the intemperance of curiositas.

Pieper defines acedia as “the dreary sadness of a heart unwilling to accept the greatness to which man is called by God; this inertia raises its paralyzing face wherever man is trying to shake off the obligatory nobility of being that belongs to his essential dignity as a person, and particularly the nobility the sonship of God, thus denying his true self” (200). In other words, we are each created with an innate nobility due to our being made in the Image of God, and on top of that, those of us who have been adopted by God through Christ now experience sonship, a place of honor, which is one reason Paul calls us to conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel in Philippians 1:17. We are to live up to our “essential dignity.” But some of us grow frightened by the enormity of that task, and despairing that we will fail, we fold in on ourselves and turn to acedia. A restlessness, a weariness, a particular kind of depression that rejects the greatness God has bestowed upon us and which is true about us. Acedia is not a form of intemperance, but a temptation of despair which I discuss in chapter six of To Live Well, on the virtue of hope. Pieper’s point here is that when we are in this mood of despair we are inclined to distract ourselves through curiosity, a fruitless quest for endless knowledge.

Whether your curiositas is born from acedia or not, if you are living in the contemporary world, it is likely that you struggle with this form of intemperance. Our Information Age has overwhelmed us with data, and sites are engineered to invite us to see more and more information, to watch one more video, click on one more Wikipedia article, ask AI one more prompt, and so on. There’s no end to it. On social media, sensational headlines about horrific crimes or stories of abuse lure us into narratives which we have no part in, but the temptation to read about scandal is too great for us to resist. And so we find ourselves reading stories or watching videos which include lurid and intimate details of other people’s lives. While it is natural and good to want to pursue some knowledge, an intemperate pursuit of knowledge leads to perverse results and reveals something unsettling about ourselves.

The anxious scrolling, feverish watching, obsessive consumption of content may reveal in us a person “in flight from himself” (201). We are sick of ourselves, bored with our own interior life which has been destroyed by despair. And so we distract ourselves endlessly. That distraction can take the form of reading novels or watching great films or watching TikTok, but when it is done out of that anxious curiosity which has no aim except the selfish goal of distraction from reality, then it is curiositas.

The opposite of curiositas is studiositas, a careful, intentional, reality-centered, loving, devoted, courageous search for knowledge. In order to enter a state of studiositas, which is important for all of us but especially for students, a person must “hermetically close the inner room of his being against the intrusively boisterous pseudo-reality of empty shows and sounds” (202). Practically speaking, we must take the step to separate ourselves from external distractions so we can devote our attention to the reality we are trying to study. This task gets harder and harder as technology only intrudes more and more into our daily lives, but it is necessary for attaining knowledge that we learn to shut off the sights and sounds of the distracting world around us.

In silence and contemplation we focus on what truly matters and study it, seeking a temperate knowledge. Part of how we know that the knowledge we are seeking is temperate is what is motivating us. If anxiety, emptiness, or an urge to distract ourselves is driving our desire for knowledge, we are probably crossing over into curiositas. If we can calmly, intentionally study something out of love, then we are probably practicing studiositas. But ultimately what matters is rightly ordering our desire for knowledge according to what is honoring to God, and therefore loving to our neighbor.

Ironically, the rush of curiositas to gain and control knowledge does not lead to more wisdom and understanding but less. Because it is only in slowing down, silence, and contemplation that we see reality rightly and are able to process God’s Word and creation.

We are going to be tempted to intemperate pursuits of knowledge. This is a besetting sin of the Information Age. Our duty is to practice the virtue of temperance, to practice studiositas, to allow the Holy Spirit to discipline us so that we can sit and be silent before God and His creation and therefore really know God and His creation.

I’m very excited to be joining at this event on April 29th! It’s FREE, but there are limited spots available, so please sign up while you can!

A mental health condition does not just affect the person who has a diagnosis. It affects the people around them as well, their family and friends, their support system and coworkers and loved ones. When you can’t show up to work because your depression is so heavy on you, that affects your coworkers. When you can’t take your kids to school because your anxiety is spiking, that affects your spouse. When you snap at a customer because you’ve been ruminating and your anxiety is high, that affects them and your employer. When you break promises because you feel like it’s more important to pay attention to obsessive doubts that your OCD is feeding you, that affects everyone involved. The list could go on. The question many sufferers from mental afflictions want to know is, How responsible am I for the harm I’ve caused others? If doctors and therapists agree that I have a mental health condition, does that mean it’s not my fault that I’ve acted in these ways? This question has a practical importance to it, because it affects how you seek to address the harm done. Do you apologize for the harm you did or the harm that the condition did? Or both?

As always with these pieces on mental health, I’m writing as someone with lived experience, pontificating from my position, not as an expert, but as someone who cares and has thought about these issues a great deal. So take them for what they are worth. It is my belief that in most cases, we don’t get to know where the condition starts and our agency begins. I make this argument in On Getting Out of Bed. We don’t get to know. We each must make our best effort to act with agency and take responsibility while accepting grace for our condition.

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As AI tools begin to mimic the quality of some actual human musicians and artists, and as writers continue to experiment and test boundaries of how to use AI, questions around the authenticity and purity and value of human-made creations have arisen.

If AI can make a song that moves me as deeply as a song written and performed by a human, does it matter if I choose to listen to the LLM-generated song?

If a book cover generated by AI fits the vision in my head better than the mock-up made by a human designer, does it matter if I choose to go with the LLM-generated cover?

If an article written by AI on enduring with mental health struggles resonates with me profoundly, does it matter if it was generated by an LLM?

Is something lost in creative works when we turn to machines to produce them instead of relying on human creativity? Does the process of human creativity itself matter, or just the product and my experience of it?

These questions aren’t going away. They are going to get louder and louder in the coming months and years. And if you don’t have an opinion, you should develop one soon, because how we collectively approach answering these questions will affect the livelihood of a lot of people. Our answers will help shape the future of creativity.

While machines will be able to generate creative works that mimic human creativity, one of the values they will never be able to offer is presence. Behind a wedding vow written by ChatGPT there is no “I” who says “I do.” Behind the pop-punk break-up song you generated with Suno, there is no “I” who shares his teenage experience of getting dumped. There is only output. What humans can offer that machines cannot is presence, an intentionality of being-there to create for others. The question is, will we honor that presence as a human good based on the imago Dei, or will we prize efficiency as more important?

In Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he makes the claim that mass reproduction of art robs it of its “aura”: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” He goes on to define this “aura” as a “unique phenomenon of a distance.” So for Benjamin, we lose something, something he actually ties to tradition, when we mechanically reproduce art instead of making unique works of art. He goes on to identify two tendencies in contemporary culture that lead to this decline in art’s “aura”: “Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”

I want to use Benjamin’s foundational essay as a jumping off point to make an argument about presence in an age of AI reproduction. Benjamin starts from a Marxist perspective and gives us only a loose definition of “aura” and “distance,” but I think he’s almost halfway to something true. The creative arts, as I see them, are fallen human attempts to communicate some truths about God’s creation. The “aura” they have is the presence of human intentionality, striving against finitude and sin to say something true and resonate about life. The “distance” is the difference that every person inherently brings to a creative work, the otherness. You may have heard a thousand break-up songs, but have you heard a break up song from The Smiths? The miracle of human life is the radical otherness of each person combined with our ability to create works that communicate across that otherness! And God made us that way.

So to sum up, I believe that creative works have an “aura” about them because they were intentionally created by people made in the image of God who are mysteries to us and even to themselves. It matters that they took the time to make those works, to write those words, to write those notes, to paint those lines, because they matter as humans.

But Benjamin warns us that mass culture has a tendency towards two things: closing distance and reproduction over uniqueness. We see the first tendency in our drive to know everything, to understand every detail, to read intimate details of people’s lives, to consume content endlessly—it’s the vice of curiosity. What this posture doesn’t do is respect and enjoy the beauty of difference and distance, the unknowability of other people, the fundamental mystery of your spouse or neighbor or child. Art, especially good art, speaks to that mystery. Second, and more importantly, in this drive for reproduction we see the rise of AI. Culture is concerned not with what is good, true, and beautiful, but what is efficient. How we can lifehack our way to success. This is especially true since we’ve been incentivized to think that way. Many people are satisfied with a mediocre children’s story told read to their kids by an AI bot. They’re satisfied with a generic sounding email that has been “improved” by AI. They’re satisfied with an AI image that is a blatant rip-off of a unique human creation. They want the more efficient product because it meets their immediate desires and needs.

Eventually, AI will improve and the stories won’t be so mediocre and the emails might not sound so generic (I have my doubts). But AI will never have presence. When I write this, I am sacrificing some of my life to offer up an argument I care about to people who may or may not read it, because I think it matters and I think they matter. It is an act of love and intentionality. It is a gift. AI cannot offer a gift, it can only produce outputs. Behind these words, behind someone’s song or painting or poem stands a human person made in the image of God with all the mystery and wonder of their own being. The question before us is, Will we continue supporting human creations, or will we choose the route of efficiency? Does it matter that when we resonate with a creative work that we are being addressed by someone, or do we just care about our emotions?

If we live in God’s universe, and we do, then I believe it matters that we choose human creative works to support. Because the most important thing is not what we feel or experience but what is real and true. And what is real and true is that humans are speaking. They are speaking through their creations. And we honor their presence and lives, and the Creator of their presence and lives, when we support their works.

Just 18 days until To Live Well is released! Preorder now. And while you’re at it, sign up for this online forum at on the 29th of April!

A recent study released by the Institute for Family Studies reports an alarming rate of demoralization among young men:

One possible takeaway from this is that young men should get married and have kids, get a full time job, and/or get a BA. But I think it’s still remarkable that 26% of young men with kids feel like they are failures! If anything, this study shows that the feeling of being a failure is incredibly common for young men. And having worked extensively with young women in my job as a college professor, I can say that many young women struggle with this feeling too. In fact, I’ve found that many older people of both sexes struggle with impostor syndrome and doubts about whether they are “good enough.” And in my experience, many of the same core doubts that trouble older people and women trouble younger men. But on top of those, there are some demographic specific challenges that face young men. My task today is to explore what some of those core challenges are and how we can invite young men, and others, to live into the fullness of who they were created to be before God.

What I think we’ll find is that the absence of clear life plans, the abundance of idolized public figures, the underdevelopment of courage, and the failure to understand grace all lead to an overwhelming sense of failure in life.

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One of my working theories about contemporary culture is that we are deeply inhibited. Obviously when you make a sweeping claim like that there are a million exceptions, but I think it’s true for a lot of people. I think a lot of people feel frozen, stuck, afraid to act on their God-given agency in a world that seems increasingly hostile, uncertain, and accelerating. And so they fold in on themselves. To cope, they distract themselves, they get therapy to treat the inhibition (which is not a bad thing), they take medication, they work long hours, or they avoid working, and so on. But the point is, they seize up in some area of life. They develop a belief that they lack the agency to act in their own lives in meaningful ways (we could talk here about the way the State, Big Tech, and technique have robbed us of our sense of agency, but now is not the time). And one area where I think this is true is our ability to turn from sin and act virtuously, even as Christians.

I think that many Christians believe that prudence, justice, courage (or fortitude), temperance, faith, hope, and love are for the most part virtues beyond their ability to obtain. Particularly in the case of the cardinal virtues (the first four). Prudence (practical wisdom) is not cherished or cultivated. Justice is too complicated to figure out these days. Courage is for the especially brave, not the average person. And temperance is just too hard in an age of manufactured addictions (sports gambling, pornography, smartphones, social media). The virtuous person can easily be viewed as either an unusual kind of person, a kind of super-Christian, or a phony just waiting to be revealed as a hypocrite. The reality is that all virtuous people are sinners. But not all of them are also harboring some terrible, scandalous affair. And more importantly, all it means to be a “virtuous person” is to strive by God’s grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit to live as you were created to live, in a manner worthy of the Gospel (Philippians 1:27), to glorify and enjoy God forever. The virtues are concrete practices that are in line with that created order. And you can practice them because God endowed you with the intellect and ability to act virtuously and (more importantly) because you are a New Creation!

In Augustine’s City of God he writes about God’s creation of humanity and how he endowed us with the cognitive abilities to live virtuous lives:

It is God Who has given the human soul a mind. In the infant, reason and intelligence are in a certain sense dormant, and it is as if they were not present at all. But they are soon to be awakened and exercised as the years pass; and in this way the individual becomes capable of knowledge and learning, able to perceive the true and love the good. This capacity enables the mind to drink in wisdom and to achieve those virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice by which a man is equipped to resist errors and the other vices implanted in him, and to conquer them by fixing his desires upon nothing but the Supreme and Immutable Good.

….we have this capacity to live well and to achieve immortal happiness by means of those arts which are called virtues, which are given only by the grace of God, which is in Christ, to the children of promise and of the kingdom” (1161 XXII Chapter 24).

Augustine argues that humans are given this powerful capacity for knowledge and learning which can enable us to “drink in wisdom” and achieve virtues which equip us to resist sins and fix our gaze on the Supreme and Immutable Good, by which he means God. By itself, however, this paragraph gives the impression that all humans have access to these virtues thanks to the power of reason and the intellect. But that is not quite what Augustine means. What he means is that God uses the gift of the intellect and reason to develop these virtues. But by themselves, they are not enough.

To get the full picture, we need to move to the next paragraph, where he says that we have this capacity “to live well” (shout out to my book?) through the virtues which are only given by the grace of God to the Children of promise. And this is a point he makes elsewhere in the City of God. That virtues that are merely humanistic virtues are not true virtues.

What does he mean by this? The Scriptures give us plenty of explanation. In 2 Corinthians 5:17 Christians are called “new creations.” In Ephesians 4:22-24 Paul calls us to put off the “old self” with its sin and put on a “new self” with holiness. And in Romans 6:17 Paul describes how the Roman Christians were slaves to sin but are now free to obey from the heart. This is our reality. When we believe in Christ, repenting of our sins, and surrendering our lives to him in baptism, we do not just continue to be enslaved to sin. We are changed. We are given new agency. We have the choice not to sin, not to live in vice. We have the ability to be virtuous. Not of our own ability, but because of the grace of God and the work of Christ.

Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” That’s how I think about living a virtuous life. Now that I am a New Creation, I am called to put on a new self each day, to walk in the good works that God has prepared beforehand. They aren’t my works of virtue. They are his workmanship. But they are still steps that I must choose to make each day. I need to think about how to walk justly and think prudently and love my neighbor and live temperately and be courageous through suffering. These practices aren’t easy, but I can do them through Christ who strengthens me. And besides, the works were already established beforehand! All I’m doing is walking in them!

Yes, turning from sin and choosing to live rightly is difficult. The world will always call for you to give up, to rest your weary hands and surrender to your fears of being insufficient or inadequate or a failure. But here’s the thing. You’re not. Because your righteousness is in Christ. Not your good works. So your task is to just faithfully walk in the good works that God has prepared beforehand out of love and joy and gratitude. You can live a virtuous life. And what a blessing that will be to other people. Yes, you will sin and make mistakes, but you can keep moving and striving in grace and gratitude for God’s glory. And what you will discover is that you are moving. And God is glorified. And people are blessed. Don’t be afraid to try.

If all this talk of virtues interests you, please preorder my new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times! Also, apparently Barnes and Noble is selling it now. So if you want a copy now, try them!

I was told recently by an enthusiastic advocate of AI that this technological juggernaut is going to rapidly advance at an astounding pace regardless of our desires and intentions. And as a result, human experience is also going to radically change, including how we understand human nature. Hartmut Rosa has argued that one of the main marks of “modernity” is acceleration, technology and the pace of human life and our experience of life goes faster and faster until we live at a dizzying and disorienting pace. Acceleration, in my opinion, is another way in which we live in a “Liquid Modernity,” which is Zygmunt Bauman’s language. Everything is shifting beneath our feet. And that is certainly how living through the acceleration of AI feels.

But acceleration is more than just technological progress. It is a choice that particular people make to live in certain ways. It is a choice that institutions make to operate at certain speeds and efficiencies. And those choices always come with tradeoffs. One of the greatest tradeoffs which acceleration forces us to make, particularly as it reaches higher speeds and efficiencies, is rest. And as we will see, with rest comes a sense of the world’s solidity and coherence in God, an awareness of our sin and need of a Redeemer, and an awareness of the grandeur of God and his creation. When we learn to rest in God, the uncertainty and liquidity caused by acceleration is held in check by the reality of God and his sovereignty and love. But we must cultivate temperance through rest.

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When I research for a book, I scour other books and articles to find sources, ideas, authorities, and wisdom to understand my topic. And inevitably I miss something. Every time. There’s just too much to read in the world.

When I wrote You Are Not Your Own, I missed the section in Calvin’s Institutes where he directly talks about the fact that we are not our own (Book 3 Chapter 7, if you’re curious). After my book came out, I stumbled across the passage and felt stupid for not discovering it before publication. For To Live Well, I quote Augustine, but not from City of God. I didn’t think he’d talk about the virtues in City of God. I was mistaken, which I realized only after I turned in final edits for To Live Well. In reading City of God for another project, I found several beautiful passages which I shall explore over the coming weeks leading up to the release of To Live Well as bonus content for the book.

Today’s passage comes from Book XIX Chapter 4, and it deals with the question of happiness and the virtues. Why do we practice the virtues as Christians? Is it to avoid suffering? Is it to achieve happiness? When I ask this question, I’m not referring only to the emotion of happy feelings, but a classical sense of happiness, a profound sense of fullness or completion, a sense that you have lived up to your created purpose.

Here’s what Augustine has to say:

True virtues, however, can exist only in those in whom there is true godliness; and these virtues do not claim that they can protect those in whom they are present against suffering any miseries. True virtues are not such liars as to claim such a thing. They do, however, claim that though human life is compelled to be miserable by all the great evils of this world, it is happy in the hope of the world to come, and in the hope of salvation. For how else could it be happy, seeing that it is not yet saved?

Let’s start off by observing Augustine’s stark claim that “True virtues. . . can exist only in those in whom there is true godliness.” This would preclude atheists from living “truly” virtuous lives. They might have the semblance of virtue, but not the substance. For Augustine, there are no virtuous pagans (sorry, Dante). True virtue comes from godliness. Why is that? The key for Augustine, as we will see in later installments of this series, is that virtues are inherently dependent upon a telos, an end toward which everything points. And the only true telos is God.

For example, as I talk about in To Live Well, you cannot act prudently without knowing the good in a particular situation. And the ultimate good in every situation is to glorify God. The person who tries to act prudently without that frame of reference will have to replace God with some infinitely lesser, mortal good and will end up serving an idol. Instead of prudently considering what it looks like to glorify God in a decision they are making, the person who denies God as their telos will look to their own desires as the final good. And that will never allow them to pursue true virtue.

Next, notice Augustine’s second point: the virtues don’t claim to protect you from suffering misery. A point Augustine returns to again and again is that human life is filled with misery (but that’s not the end of the story!). Living virtuously does not protect you from that. Accidents will happen. Sickness will befall you. Growing up, I remember being horrified when I learned that a friend’s mother fell ill with cancer despite being one of the healthiest, most temperate women I knew. Virtue couldn’t protect her and it can’t protect me.

Which is not to say that in the grand scheme of things the person who lives a vicious life and the person who lives a life of virtue will on average experience the same sorts of outcomes in life. The Bible, and Proverbs in particular, is very clear that sin has consequences. But it’s also the case that living virtuously does not protect you from misery, from suffering. You will experience loss, pain, heartache. In fact, one virtue, courage, even involves a vulnerability to suffering in its very nature. Suffering is a fact of life. But that does not mean we cannot be happy.

It is not in our effort, our virtue that we find happiness for Augustine, as opposed to Aristotle who believed that happiness was found in living virtuously. Our happiness for Augustine is found in hope. Hope in the resurrection: “it is happy in the hope of the world to come, and in the hope of salvation.”

From this above quoted passage he goes on to quote Romans 8:24: “For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?” And then he elaborates:

We are in the midst of evils, and we must endure them with patience until we come to those good things where everything will bestow ineffable delight upon us, and where there will no longer be anything which we must endure. Such is the salvation which, in the world to come, will also itself be our final happiness. Yet these philosophers will no believe in this happiness because they do not see it. Thus, they endeavor to contrive for themselves an entirely false happiness, by means of a virtue which is as false as it is proud.

These parting lines are particularly to the point. Pagan philosophers see the pursuit of virtue as a path to human fulfillment (happiness). But it’s a false happiness for two reasons. One, because it’s a false virtue. It’s a false virtue because it’s proud, vain, self-centered. Its telos is not focused on God and his glory but on the individual. But it’s also a false happiness because our efforts cannot bring us ultimate fulfillment. We only find that in hope in God’s promises, in God’s work, not ours.

Great, so why are we even practicing these virtues then if they don’t bring us happiness? We practice them first out of love. Because we love God, we desire to glorify him, and orienting ourselves towards him in our practices is what the virtues are all about. Second, because this is what we were created to do. God created us to serve and worship him. It’s part of the creational design of the cosmos for us to live temperately, to walk justly, to think prudently, to have faith, to show love. Third, as Proverbs teaches us, “Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness, and honor” (Proverbs 21:21). Living a virtuous life will not protect us from all suffering and misery, but it will give us life and honor.

We don’t practice virtues to earn God’s love, but because he first loved us. Our world is filled with moral confusion and vice, conflicting voices and weak knees (Hebrews 12:12). We need adults with moral courage and character, who are virtuous for God’s glory. Such men and women will still struggle with suffering, but through the hope given by God, they can have true happiness in this life.

Just one month and one day until the release of To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times. Preorder today. It makes a world of difference for authors.

The Atlantic recently ran a horrific but important article on the Dutch doctor Menno Oosterhoff who has gained notoriety for putting to death teenagers who are “mentally terminal.” In the Netherlands, this is legal. The article starts off, quite jarringly for me, with the story of an 18-year-old girl with severe OCD who requests that Oosterhoff take her life because she has had years of treatment and things are not getting better. For those of us who have been in the OCD world for any length of time, this story of treatment is not new. It’s common for someone to take a long time to find the right medication, right therapist, and right treatment for them. It’s also common to lose hope, to feel like things are never going to get better. But what’s absolutely horrifying in this story is that this young woman, with a still forming mind, in a emotionally vulnerable position, didn’t have a doctor who told her to keep fighting for her recovery. She had someone who confirmed for her that despair was the answer. And she lost her life because of it. All in the name of autonomy.

“Right to Die” battles are happening all over. Thankfully, one was just defeated in Scotland, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes up again. 12 US states plus DC and New York (starting in June) allow doctors to inject terminal patients with lethal drugs. Canada “is likely to start permitting psychiatric euthanasia in 2027.” How far behind will the US be? Once you accept that it is ethical to end suffering by actively ending life, the line between physical and mental suffering begins to break down. And in a society that prizes the individual’s sovereignty over everything (you are your own and belong to yourself!), the individual’s will to end life is a private choice that cannot be restrained by family, community, morality, or religion. So while this article is about the Dutch, we could be looking at our own future, unless we do something. As Charles Lane, the author of the article, states, “[T]he right metaphor for the risks of euthanasia is not a slippery slope but a runaway train.”

If that is the case, what can we do now? Obviously, we can oppose bills that allow for assisted suicide in our states. But what are the steps we can take to reframe the way we think about mental health? Because on the mental health side, before we even get to assisted suicide, there is a fundamental problem with despair as a medical response.

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We’ve been told that the AI revolution is inevitable1. That what’s coming is coming whether we like it or not. You either adapt or get left behind. It’s going to change our world and make our lives easier and more efficient. Either America leads with AI innovation, or China will, and we can’t allow that. While ther…

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Recently, of shared a fascinating chart on the ol’Twitter:

There are several different ways to read this chart which have implications on how and why we attend church and our practices in church. I want to go through these possibilities and weigh them with some data points. What I think we’ll find is that reality is murky. The reasons conservatives report lower mental health challenges when attending church regularly might not be what you expect. But regardless of our reading of this chart, our reason for attending church should remain the same.

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J.D. Salinger’s most popular novel receives a lot of negative criticism. In part, this is the lot of being an author’s most popular novel. I was just on a podcast with where he admitted to not liking Moby Dick. I’ve heard other people complain about The Great Gatsby. Popular works draw more readers, and the more reader…

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One of the main tricks that OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) (and I suspect other mental conditions) plays is that it profoundly undermines your basic, reasonable trust in your own senses and yourself. So that a person who knows they aren’t going to harm their children will have terrible, unwanted intrusive thoughts about harming their children that keep them stuck in bed out of fear of acting out. And then that knowledge that they aren’t going to harm their children is doubted over and over again until they are confused and begin to doubt themselves, their very character. They have no inner intent or desire to harm anyone. They have never harmed anyone before. So their senses are telling them they are safe, but the doubts keep them locked up in “what ifs?” “What about that story I heard of someone who suddenly snapped?” “What about that time I lost my temper and yelled?” “What about this feeling of anxiety?”—all of which are not direct evidence that they are a threat to their children. They are just irrelevant doubts. In the practice of I-CBT (Inference-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) for treating OCD, we learn to trust ourselves and our senses normally so that we can navigate life without getting caught up in endless doubts.

But for Christians with OCD, there is an extra layer of doubts. We are told in Jeremiah 17:9 that:

The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?

So why should we trust ourselves? Isn’t it foolishness to trust ourselves? Isn’t it prideful and arrogant to believe in ourselves? Proverbs 3:5-6 says:

5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
⁶ In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.

This feels like a direct rebuke of what I-CBT teaches regarding trusting yourself and your senses. Is there a way to reconcile these teachings? Is there a way to rightly believe the Word’s truth that we must trust in the Lord with all our heart and yet also learn to trust ourselves and our senses “normally” in order to navigate daily doubts according to I-CBT? I think so. And I’d like to explain how.

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’s recent post at on the frequency at which people think about meaning and purpose is fascinating and well worth your time. In it he notes a massive gap between atheists and evangelicals in their contemplation of life. Only 26% of atheists and 36% of agnostics reported thinking about meaning or purpose weekly compare…

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As we enter war with Iran, as AI companies make deals with the “Department of War,” as people we know suffer loss and pain, and as we ourselves face difficulties, we all must learn how to care rightly. Recently I wrote about the importance of not trying to save everyone and everything. But that still leaves the problem of caring, of our emotional and mental rumination spent on the concerns of the world and our lives. We too often worry about the future or regret the past because we care too much. The etymology of “care” comes from the Old English caru meaning “sorrow, anxiety, or grief.” We are “anxious” about the world or even our personal lives because we don’t know how things will turn out, we feel personally responsible, or we feel helpless. We “sorrow” over past mistakes or future possibilities that could harm ourselves, those we love, or even those across the globe. Which can lead us into caring too much, to inordinate, intemperate caring, where we take on the role of God and assume that it is our duty to control the safety of the world. This burden is crushing and despairing. What I’d like to offer today is an alternative, voiced by T.S. Eliot in his great poem, “Ash Wednesday” and in the 46th Psalm. Our duty is paradoxically to care and not to care. To “be still and know” that he is God. When we learn to do this, we don’t abandon our responsibility to love our neighbor, but we rightly (temperately) accept our limits before God.

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We accept that suffering from some mental affliction will be painful and challenging. Even if you’ve never personally experienced this, you have images of those who suffer curled up, crying, stuck in bed, or with pained expressions on their faces. But what doesn’t get acknowledged enough is the dramatic consequences of suffering from a mental affliction, the toll it takes on relationships, the time it robs you of, the opportunities it takes from you. Yes, it can be terrible to deal with the mental and bodily experience of depression or anxiety or other ailments. But the fallout from those experiences can be a second suffering. And often it adds a layer of depression and despair to whatever suffering you already feel, as you sense that your life is slipping away from you.

I have felt this acutely. Time with my family and friends gone because OCD has hoovered up my attention with fantastical anxieties which seemed realier and more important than reality. Opportunities to write and speak gone because I couldn’t communicate coherently.

When you look back on your losses, you come to realize that there are moments with people you love that you missed because of your affliction, and you will never get those moments back. And you have to live with that. How do you live with that? There were opportunities which you would have enjoyed, and you can never get those back. There were relationships strained, and although you can apologize, you can never give back what they gave to you (more on that here). The losses of mental affliction can be severe. And if you are not careful, even after entering a period of healing, you may slide into despair over what you lost. So how do you keep from losing hope? How can you see God’s hand working through your losses? How can you learn to accept the losses of mental affliction?

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How to deal with this fact: the world is filled with suffering and you are only one person. And most days you don’t even feel like one person. You feel like half a person or a quarter of a person, pulled multiple directions at once by competing demands: friends, spouse, children, work, school, church. Always something…

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One of the greatest traps of ministry is the thought, “I’ll start serving when I’m ready.” And one of the greatest reasons to think you’re not ready is when you are struggling in mind or body. Whether it’s mental health struggles or physical health struggles, most of us will go through a time when our abilities to serve will be limited by our health. And some of us will have life-long disabilities or conditions which make service feel impossible or difficult. And then the question becomes: How can I serve? I have felt this acutely with my OCD. How can I be a mentor or servant to others when I struggle to get out of bed some days? It’s a good question, worth pondering. But I don’t think God wants us to use our health struggles as a reason to opt out of service. Rather, I think we need to see them as an invitation to a wider, a more expansive understanding of what service looks like, and to see that even our suffering can be turned to glorify God. As with many things in life, if we wait until we’re “better” to begin loving others through service, we’ll never serve at all. We must start to love our neighbor today. The only question is, what does that service look like when you are held back physically or mentally? What does sacrificial living look like when you are already weak? I think we look to God’s answer to Paul when he asked God to remove the thorn from his side as the model for our lives of service through suffering: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

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The culture wars gives the impression that the great cultural divide today is between the progressive left and the conservative right, but I think the deeper divide is between those who are fundamentally nihilist in their cultural logic and those who are what I want to call hopeful invitationalists. And on that account…

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