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 compelled to adopt AI, we feel controlled by our mental health diagnoses, we’re (again, as a nation—not me specifically) addicted to sports gambling and pornography and all sorts of substances—in other words, we seem to be helpless. To a large extent, we are not active agents in our own lives. We are subjects pushed around by massive forces: our biology, our environment, the government, corporations, social media, our passions, and so on.

And what’s so fascinating about this to me is that this inhibition comes at a time when we are promised and sold radical autonomy. We are told that we create our own lives. That we are masters of our own destinies. That we can and must make our lives meaningful and rich and exciting and purposeful. My theory is that it is precisely this promise of radical autonomy that has led to the widespread feelings of helplessness in contemporary society. To the degree that we have been told that we are responsible for our own individual sense of belonging, identity, meaning, value, and purpose,1 we freeze up, we feel helpless to act, and we allow others to choose for us. Part of the tragedy of this is that God designed us to be active agents in our lives, to make wise choices. When we rightly see ourselves as belonging to God, and therefore belonging to the Church and our family and our neighbors and even creation, we also rightly see that we have a moral obligation to act purposefully in our lives.

The Weariness of the Self

In Alain Ehrenberg’s 2009 book, The Weariness of the Self, he argues that the contemporary experience of depression is marked by inhibition (12). But it’s the causes of this inhibition that interest me most. Ehrenberg writes: “The individual, free from morality, creating herself by herself and aspiring to the superhuman, . . . is not our reality. But, instead of possessing the strength of the masters, she turns out to be fragile, lacking in being, weary of her sovereignty and full of complaints” (218-219). In other words, we are weary of trying to be our own sovereign selves. We have radical freedom to remake our identities (think of social media’s powers of self-expression), but it has come at a great cost: “If moral constraints have grown lighter, psychic constraints have taken their place. Emancipation and action have stretched individual responsibility beyond all borders and have made us painfully aware that we are only ourselves” (226). Elsewhere he refers to this as the “illness of responsibility” (4). In other words, as we are burdened with responsibilities to “be ourselves”, we (ironically) grow less able to be ourselves in the sense of who God created us to be.

Let me tell you what this can practically look like. It can look like society pressuring you to conform to a certain body image so you can compete in the dating market (which is now literally a market with dating apps). And so you optimize your life, your diet, your body, your exercise, your schedule to maximize your opportunities to meet someone with the highest potential to give you an experience of validation, but it never lasts. And the more you try to “be yourself” and “express yourself” the more you end up conforming to social expectations so that you can receive affirmation. Your choices are made for you by TikTok beauty or lifestyle gurus. You feel less capable of approaching people. Calling someone on the phone seems impossible. You feel more and more inadequate and less and less able to move. And shame covers everything. The shame of being an individual in a world of personalities.

We bear this shame because we were never meant to bear the burden of self-creation and we are meant to be active agents in our own lives. This tension weighs on us, filling us with feelings of inadequacy and helplessness, and yet I think most of us know that it ought not be this way. We were made to be free, yes. But that freedom looks different from the freedom offered by the World.

Agency in Christ

When you recognize that you belong to God and you are not radically autonomous, you are actually more free to advocate for yourself to God’s glory. By belonging to God you belong to his Church, which comes with certain duties and obligations. You have responsibilities to serve, to care for others, to worship, to participate in the life of the Church. This sounds like the loss of agency, but it’s actually the opportunity to act righteously. Each of these responsibilities is a choice, and it is your duty to listen to the Holy Spirit and the Word and act, to invest in the Body of Christ. Many Christians view church passively, as something that happens to them. They expect to be entertained or engaged with a professional presentation. Consumption makes us inhibited subjects, eyeballs watching instead of whole bodies participating. But when we rightly see ourselves as made in the Image of God and delighted in as sons and daughters of God, then we know that our active participation in the Body of Christ is a joy!

Similarly, in various ways, once we recognize our belonging to God we should have the courage to advocate for our good. Because in seeking our own good, we seek God’s good. Let me tease that out, because it may sound selfish, but rightly understood, it’s not. When you seek your own good, and your good is defined properly according to God’s will, then it is not selfish. It is glorifying to God. Philippians 2:4 says: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” Note that Paul does not say to “ignore your own interests!” Paul acknowledges the goodness of looking out for your own interests but desires that the Philippians also look out for the interests of others! In a like manner, it is good for you to seek your own good, when that “good” is defined by God’s will. For example, it is good to seek your physical and mental wellbeing. That is taking care of the body God has given you stewardship over! That pleases God! Another example is being a prudent steward over your finances and talents. Another example is taking the initiative to make friends or go out on dates.

In these ways you are taking an active role in advocating for your life, rather than passively allowing life to go by. But you are taking an active role because you know that your life matters before God, because you know that it glorifies God, and because you have a responsibility to act wisely. And the exciting thing is, there is grace for when you don’t act wisely. You see, the World says you must be a radically autonomous individual who masters his or her own world, and if you mess up, the very meaning of your life is at stake. But when you belong to God and your identity and belonging and purpose and value and meaning are hidden in him, there is grace for your mistakes. You are free to act with purpose because you already belong to him. You don’t need to be afraid.

I did two wonderful podcasts this week that were very different! One was the Holy Post:

And the other was Mere Fidelity:

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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Last year, wrote a moving essay entitled “Why We Doubt Everything” for her Substack, (which I highly recommend). In it the article, she argues that it’s not so much that the younger generation has lost faith, but that they never were taught to have faith to begin with. She calls Gen Z “a chronically doubtful generation,” doubting God, relationships, identity, beauty, and so on. And entire industries are built to feed into this doubt, to prey upon it. India is a perceptive analysis of contemporary culture, and I think she’s correct. Young people in particular are plagued by doubts. I certainly don’t think it’s only young people, however. Uncertainty is a part of our culture. On the one hand we are made to feel uncomfortably doubtful about our wellbeing so that we feel the urgent need to purchase products and services, and on the other hand we’re promised relief from doubt by these products and services. We are kept in the liminal space between anxiety and safety. What exacerbates this problem is that so many of our institutions have been weakened through fallen or corrupt leadership. Our trust has been broken. So the doubts we have about our wellbeing are not relieved by appeals to institutions that can aid us, because the State, churches, corporations, and schools have all let us down. Even families have let us down. Relationally our trust has been broken. This is especially true, as India notes, for those who have experienced online dating. The number of people who have had their sexual imaginations disordered by pornography (especially violent pornography) is horrifying. So what does it mean to have faith in a culture of chronic doubt? It means having faith in a Person, the Person of Jesus Christ. And to allow that faith to give you the hope and courage to reasonably trust other people and confidently navigate this chaotic world.

As I said, I believe India is basically correct that we live in a chronically doubtful culture. I think there are market reasons for this, and I think there are other sociological reasons for this (the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals or the numerous sexual abuse scandals in evangelical congregations for example), and I think there are ideological reasons for this (with the loss of a belief in shared reality, we are increasingly skeptical of everything). But whatever the causes, the effects are that people suffer from chronic doubt that prevents them from living flourishing lives, that makes them inhibited. They are afraid to venture out and date someone because what if they are abusive? They are afraid to apply for a job because what if they get rejected? They are afraid to commit to a friendship because what if they get betrayed? So this basic lack of faith keeps them from acting courageously.

But if this is a matter of faith, is it wrong? Should you have faith in someone else? Should you have faith that your spouse will never let you down? Should you have faith that your friend will never share your secrets? Should you have faith in fallible human beings? Should you have faith in yourself to be honest at all times? In his essay on “Faith” as a virtue, Josef Pieper argues that properly speaking, we are right to not have faith in other fallen human beings. True faith demands utter reliance upon a person. It demands that we put ourselves in their hands. That we believe what they speak.

Think about what a radical proposition that is. I love my wife and trust her immensely. But I don’t believe what she speaks as 100% reality. I know that she experiences reality from a subjective position and can only report her view at the best of times, and will sometimes unintentionally forget to mention things. I know myself and trust myself deeply, but I know that I am an unreliable narrator of my own experience. I know that I sometimes paint experiences in ways that flatter my ego or denigrate my self-worth, depending on my mood. The fact is, fallen humans are not worth putting our true faith in.

To truly have faith in someone is to believe what they speak. Who can we believe completely? Whose words are worthy of our faith? Who except Christ? Except God? When we have true saving faith, it is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives moving us to accept Christ’s Words and believe in them. To believe not in the abstract idea of Christ as the Son of God, but the reality of the Person of Christ, and therefore to believe what he speaks, and to believe the whole counsel of Scripture.

How does that true faith affect our ability to arrest the chronic doubt of our times?

First, it grounds us in hope. Because we believe in the Person of Christ and his Words, we believe in his promises. And his promises give us hope for the resurrection and for tomorrow. We know his Father is working all things together for our good! That doesn’t mean that we should recklessly walk into broken institutions and be harmed by toxic leaders, or that we should jump into harmful relationships and expect God to protect us from harm. But it does mean that we can have confidence that God is sovereign and caring for us and that it is good for us to take risks and trust. We can hope all things because God is making everything new. This isn’t blind optimism, but a cautious, prudent hope that trustworthy people and institutions are worth trusting in! We don’t have to and we should not give into the vice of despair.

Second, and relatedly, we have reason to take courage. As we are confronted with opportunities to strike out and trust other people and institutions, we need to take a risk, be vulnerable. As I have written about before, it is worth taking this risk. We can have this courage and act confidently because of our faith in Christ. Whatever suffering we may or will experience, Christ will be with us. So we don’t have to be afraid. And if we are trusting people and institutions for the sake of the good, because we desire to build relationships and glorify God, then it is honoring to him that we do this work.

Third, I think we need to become the kinds of people who are faithful to each other. No, we can’t be worthy of true faith; only Christ is worthy of that. But I can be worthy of human faith from my wife by remaining faithful to my wedding vows. I can be worthy of faith to my children by being a safe and supporting and loving father who always points them to Christ. I can worthy of faith to my students by being safe and supportive and encouraging and knowledgeable and pointing them to Christ. And so on. One of the reasons Gen Z has so many doubts is that older generations have given them reasons to doubt. We need faithful adults. If you are not one today, become one, starting now. And the only way you’ll be able to do that is if you have true faith in the Person of Christ, who is the model of all faithfulness, the one who made you righteous, and the one who loves you.

If you found this discussion of the virtue of Faith helpful, you’ll enjoy my new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times which is now available!

Also, I had the joy of being on the “Oh My Word with Katie” podcast. Take a listen.

Finally, two reviews came out for To Live Well:

The Gospel Coalition

1517

Once again, if you have a chance to read and review the book, please do so. If you purchased it from Amazon, please leave a review there. If you purchased it elsewhere, please leave a review on Goodreads. Thanks.

Today is the day. After working on To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times for three years, it’s finally (officially) out. So I wanted to write a piece that explains what this book is all about, where it came from, who it’s for, why you should read it, and how you can help get the word out. Because I do need help. I deeply believe in the message of this book. I believe it’s a needed word for our times. Am I convinced that I articulate those words well or even beautifully? No. Perhaps I could have done better. But I do believe that I tried and that the ideas are important. That’s what I can offer you. So what is this book about?

The What

To Live Well makes the simple argument that we live in morally chaotic times. We receive conflicting messages about what it means to live a good life. We are given “A heap of broken images,” to quote T.S. Eliot, and are expected to craft something meaningful out them. But it’s all so incoherent. A YouTube guru tells us one thing. A TV personality tells us another. A teacher tells us a third. What does “love” mean? What does “justice” mean? How can we practice temperance? How can we have hope? These questions sink deep in our bones.

In To Live Well, I argue that we can turn to the four cardinal and three theological virtues, grounded in the gospel, as a path forward to navigate a chaotic world. These virtues, heralded by theologians in the church such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin among many others, orient us toward who we were created to be in Christ and who we are called to be for God’s glory. These virtues are not “quick fixes” or “Seven Easy Steps to a Good Life” but hard won practices which we learn thanks to the empowering work of the Holy Spirit and grace.

The Where

To Live Well came directly out of You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. As I went around the country giving talks about this book, one of the most pressing and repeated questions I would receive was: How do I practice belonging to God? This was a perfectly legitimate question, one which I touched on in You Are Not Your Own, but only touched on. People wanted more practical advice. They wanted more examples. They asked me how belonging to God related to smartphones, raising children, and their jobs. All of these were good questions which I didn’t have space to address in You Are Not Your Own, but they deserved an answer.

To Live Well is that answer.

In this book I begin each section with a description of why a virtue is difficult to practice in our contemporary world, which ties it back to You Are Not Your Own. Then I give an example of how Christ practiced the virtue, followed by a technical definition of the virtue. Then I explore the virtue in-depth to help you understand its nuances. Finally, I have at least two sections of practical application. What does this virtue look like applied to the real world? What does it mean in concrete terms?

All of this is answering the question: What does it mean to belong to God in an inhuman world.

The Who

I want many audiences to read To Live Well. I would love non-Christians to read the book and see the beauty of a Christian ethical system. I would love older Christians to read the book and find encouragement in understanding what the virtues are and how we can orient our lives toward God. I would love Christians in their 30s-50s to read the book when they are struggling with doubts about vocation and marriage and find resources to navigate those decisions virtuously. I would love Christians who are struggling with definitions of “love” and “justice” to find clarity.

But the one target audience that I am most passionate about reaching are young adults. I dedicated the book to my students, and I did that because I had many of them in mind when I wrote this book. It’s my opinion that many young people are under tremendous pressure to “figure it out” and yet are given very little mentorship or guidance. This book cannot and should not replace embodied mentorship, but it can offer encouragement and some guidance. And I hope that many young adults (say, 18-25?) will pick it up and read it.

The Why

I would encourage you to read this book if you have any interest in the virtues, if you have any sense of anxiety about how to navigate a contemporary world that feels liquid and out of control, if you resonated with You Are Not Your Own but wanted practical application, if you want to be stirred up to love and good works, if you feel inhibited and want to know how to break out of that, if you want to grow in wisdom, if you want to read pastoral counsel on how to make choices, or if you enjoyed my other books and writings.

As I said in the beginning, I believe the message of this book is important, especially for people who feel confused, inhibited, anxious, and lost about how to live in the contemporary world. I can’t promise you I executed on that messages perfectly, but I can promise you that I believe that the message is needed. I fall back on my favorite T.S. Eliot quote, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” I tried.

The How

Publishing a book is difficult in the Year of Our Lord 2026. There are a billion books and fewer and fewer readers. Basically the only way this book gets into the hands of the people it can help is if you share it, tell someone about it, hand it to them, buy them a copy, or review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads. That’s it. Ads aren’t very helpful. Podcasts hardly get the word out. The most important thing is people who read and love books telling other people that they read and loved a book.

So please. If you have a minute, share on social media. Buy the book and tell someone about it. Tell your pastor about it. Tell your college minister about it. Give it as a graduation present. Give it to someone who is going through a confusing time in their lives. Share the word.

At the bottom of this post I’ve included three images you can share of endorsements of the book. Feel free to download them and share them on social media to help get the word out.

But first, tomorrow at 11:30 CST I’ll be chatting with my good friends at about To Live Well. There’s only 100 spots available. I would love to see many of you there. Click here to register! The 100 spots are now full! Thank you!

And if you are in the OKC area, tomorrow night I’ll be at Commonplace Books at 7:00 pm for a book launch, discussion and Q/A.

Tomorrow is the release of my fourth book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times. I know I’ve talked about it a lot, but I am proud of the book. Tomorrow I’m going to publish a special post talking about the book and why I think you should read it. But for today, I want to share another excerpt cut from the book during the editing process. Each chapter contains several practical examples of how to exercise the virtues. Under the virtue of justice, I had a section on how to practice justice in relation to the “government,” which is not always easy for Americans. I hope you find it helpful and challenging.

Justice demands that we submit to the governing authorities (Rom 13:1), but also that we show them respect and honor. This is particularly difficult in liberal democracies like America where rebelling, criticizing, and condemning the government is not only seen as permissible but as responsible. There is a balance here between respecting governing authorities, recognizing their legitimate authority, and holding government leaders accountable to the people. For most of us, the challenge is not to defer to the government’s authority too much, it’s to see ourselves as superior to government leaders.

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It’s one thing to read that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). It’s another thing entirely to believe it and live it. This is especially true in a culture that degrades the body, that consumes the body, that commodifies the body, that abuses the body, that teaches men that women’s bodies are there to be tortured for sexual gratification, that teaches women to torture their bodies for the male gaze, that teaches both sexes to give into their fleshly passions instead of developing chastity. Sometimes when people choose to participate in this culture’s sex death cult, they do so out of perverse glee, because they have had their consciences seared. But I suspect that many do so out of despair, because they don’t feel like they have an alternative. Men who turn to pornography because they feel insecure, inadequate, or inhibited. Women who commodify their bodies and participate in violent sex to please men because they have been taught by pornography that this is “just what women do.” What I’d like to encourage all of us to remember is that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. And that has radical implications. The first of those implications is that there is grace for our sins. The second is that we have a duty to care for our body, including our experience of sex. And the third is that we have the ability to learn self-control through the power of the Holy Spirit. Together, these truths mean we are not passive observers of our lives. We can act and turn from the world’s sex death cult and to the beautiful vision of the body that God has for us. But we must act.

One major barrier for people turning from the lies of the world about the body is the weight of sin. Our past mistakes feel like they cling to us. We’ve already done so much, been used so much, viewed so much, consumed so much, that there’s no point in stopping now—we think to ourselves. This is the logic of despair, the lie of despair, that you are so far gone that Christ cannot save you, cannot redeem you. That there is nothing you can do equipped by the power of the Holy Spirit to turn from sin and to Christ because of what you have already done or what you fear you will do in the future. If ever there was a lie from Satan, it is this. God’s grace is sufficient, is more than sufficient for whatever sins you have done. And God’s love and acceptance are more than enough to cover any shame you may feel for what you’ve done or what has been done to you. There is grace and acceptance at the cross for you. Whether you have sexual addictions or have addictions to being desired, there is grace.

That grace, however, should always move us to action. If our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, then we don’t get to do whatever we want with them. For example, we don’t get to expose our eyes to pornographic images of women or men (whether real or AI generated!). We especially don’t get to masterbate to those images. That’s not how God designed sex to be experienced, which is in the covenant of marriage. Our bodies are sacred temples to be used for God’s glory, not for fleshly passions. As much as the world and our flesh cry out that we should gratify ourselves, we have to accept our duty before God to live chaste lives, controlling our bodies.

This also means caring for our bodies, not just avoiding premarital sex and pornography, but advocating for our bodies. You are the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are made in the image of God. You are a precious child of God. You (including your body) deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not abused, not harmed—even with “consent”—not pressured into sharing images, not conforming to disordered societal beauty standards, not demeaned, but treated with dignity. And you have to start treating yourself with that dignity and respect by not viewing pornography, not getting into harmful relationships, but by seeking out people who will treat you and your body with the godly respect you deserve.

Finally, being indwelt by the Holy Spirit means that you can develop the Fruits of the Spirit through the Spirit, which includes self-control (Galatians 5:23). If you have believed in Christ, then you are no longer in bondage to sin (Romans 6:6). You have agency. You can choose. I’m not saying it’s easy to break out of the gaze of men or women and stand before God, but it is possible through Christ. And I am saying that it is important. It matters. It matters that you make the choice to live a chaste life, a dignified life, caring for this temple of a body that God has given you which is so, so precious. It matters because young women desire to marry young men who don’t have an addiction to pornography. It matters because young men desire to marry young women who can trust them. It matters because all of us are being suckered into a perverse sex death cult by the world and it’s awful and terrible and makes us depressed and anxious and insecure and violent and inadequate and inhibited and afraid of each other and nothing will get better and I mean nothing unless we say no. I refuse to participate. I quit. I belong to God. I will treat my body like it belongs to God because it does. I will treat others as made in the image of God because they are.

God can redeem your story, whatever it is. But don’t let this day go by without taking the opportunity to turn from sin and turn to Christ. Yes, this will be hard. But you can do hard things. You have agency. And when you slip up, do not listen to the lie of despair. Get up and keep fighting. But do take active steps to shut off those voices that are tempting you back into the world of sin, whether those are specific people in your life, beauty influencers, social media apps, or even unfiltered access to the internet. Find mentorship. Know that you are loved and deserve to be loved as a beloved child of God. The world will whisper into your ear that you are inadequate and so you must mistreat your body in order to gain some kind of acceptance or relief or pleasure. It’s a lie. There’s no peace there. Only bondage. The truth is that real acceptance comes when we allow God’s loving gaze to fall on us and be enough, and then we begin to treat ourselves with the dignity that he sees in us.

I think there’s still room to join me next week as I talk with Jake Meador and Mere Orthodoxy about my New Book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, which comes out TUESDAY!

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 writ…

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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 inc…

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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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While this is a free post, now is a great time to consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can continue writing!

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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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