One of my first concerns when I began pursuing treatment for OCD 18 years ago (or so) was that the secular assumptions of the treatment might ask me to do things or believe things that contradicted my faith. In listening to many stories of other Christian OCD sufferers, my fear was not unusual. And I suspect that it’s not an unusual fear for those with other conditions as well. The reality is that many people designing psychological treatments make assumptions about the human person, our teleology and the nature of truth, and some of those assumptions are wrong and can lead to problems in treatment. It’s also the case, in my experience, that traditional therapy can be highly effective and move people toward recovery and healing, even in Christian terms. I’m not about to wade directly into the “biblical counseling” versus “secular counseling” wars, and all the shades in between, but I do want to consider what my experience has been and how I have generally been able to navigate some of the ideas and practices of secular therapy. Specifically, I want to look at three concepts: “Workability,” “Thoughts are Just Thoughts,” and “You are a Good Person.” In my opinion, for most conditions, secular therapy can largely be beneficial so long as you remain as discerning as you should be in any other area of your life.

For a wider treatment of the challenges of modern psychology as a whole, I highly recommend Resisting Therapy Culture: The Dangers of Pop Psychology and How the Church Can Respond, written by my good friend . It releases tomorrow and I was honored to write the foreword to it. I highly recommend it.

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Things fall apart. Your life falls apart—potentially. The worst thing possible might happen. It’s possible. It’s technically possible. And that’s all you can think about. It pounds in your head. Your thoughts race. You try to calculate every possibility, every outcome, every bad outcome, to identify the danger so you can protect yourself and those you love. You prepare for the worst despite lack of evidence that the worst is going to happen because if it did happen then it would be too much to bear. In short, you catastrophize.

And while all this takes place, your heart races, your palms sweat, your body gets ready for action. Maybe you take action and try to prevent the imagined catastrophe. You call someone and apologize. You try to “fix” something. You take a test to make sure you aren’t sick. You clarify a point you made. You text someone to ask their opinion. And maybe this gives you relief and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe you just have to sit and wait and see what God has in store.

We all catastrophize from time to time. Bad news hits us and we rush to the worst possible outcome to prepare ourselves. It’s a survival mechanism, and the intention behind it isn’t altogether bad. But when it keeps us stuck, when it causes us to despair, when it makes us act irrationally, when it drives us to assume the worst, it actually prevents us from hoping and trusting in God and his promises. Rather than drawing us closer to God and healthy frame of mind, catastrophizing often involves us panicking and trying to resolve our fears on our own power.

It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to sit here and tell you to “trust in God more” when you hear some news and start catastrophizing. The words themselves wash over you like Job’s friends’ advice. But here’s what I mean in practice:

When you are hit with some errant thought and the spike of anxiety comes and you start catastrophizing, instead of fighting it, and instead of working out all the possibilities, accept that the worst could potentially happen as a matter of technically fact, and shift your focus back to the here-and-now by praying and thanking God that he is sovereign over the situation.

This takes practice, of course. But the goal is not to deny that the worst outcome is possible. Because in most cases the worst is possible. It’s just not very likely. It’s a product of your highly tuned imagination which is anxiously looking for danger to keep you safe!1 Thanks, imagination!

It is also a practice of hoping and trusting in God. It is one thing to say, “Trust in God more.” But this is what it looks like to trust in God more. You trust him and turn from catastrophizing by acknowledging your fear, giving it to God, and shifting your focus to the present moment. 1 Peter 5:7 tells us to cast all our cares on Christ because he cares for us. This is how we practice that.

The reality is that some terrible things will happen to us in this life. Some of us will get laid off, some will get cancer, some will lose their children, some will experience infidelity from their spouse. Things do fall apart. But the center holds. God is sovereign, and he loves you and is working your good, somehow, through all this. We don’t need to be afraid of troubles. Christ said, “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

And he has. All of this suffering is passing away. And one day your tears will be dried. In the meantime, there is great joy and beauty in this life, in the here-and-now, if we only have eyes to see. But if we get too caught up in the future possibilities of tribulations, we will miss it. God has gifted us with wonders in creation, in people, in human works to delight in. If you spend your day wondering if you will be laid off tomorrow based on a conversation you had with your boss, you’ll miss the wonder of playing a game with your daughter, or talking with a friend, or watching a good movie, or reading a good book, or taking a walk.

We rob ourselves of the present moment when we exchange it by arming ourselves for a future that will probably never come. And we never get that present moment back. When all we have to do is trust that God loves us, he is working our good, and we desires us to delight in his gift of this moment.

Last week I made the argument that we need to make a better, more aesthetic case for the creational design for sex, the body, procreation, and marriage. Part of the beauty of that story is the design, that it fits together, that it’s not just chaos or up to the individual’s will. Implied in my argument was that in the past we’ve made bad arguments or no arguments at all. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today. I know “purity culture” has been written about a lot. I’m far from the first person to tackle this issue, but I did live through fundamentalist/evangelical homeschool culture in the 90s. I do have some experience with purity culture and its effects. And unlike some critics, the memory doesn’t conjure up some horrific, abusive, controlling evangelical past. It reminds me of a time when a lot of adults were doing their best with what they had to help their kids stay holy in a culture increasingly obsessed with sex (remember, for all the pornography flooding our society, teen sex is down and even sex in films is down!). Rather than view “purity culture” in purely negative terms, I think a healthy retrospective looks back and acknowledges that people were doing their best, that chastity is actually a spiritual and physical and mental good, that our culture actively seeks to deceive us and our children about their sexuality and created design, and that a culture of permissiveness is currently leading to broken hearts and loneliness and broken identities and addictions and insecurity and inhibition.

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All summer long my children have been coming to me while I work, researching or writing, to tell me that they are bored. That they have nothing to do. Sometimes I’ll stop and play a game with them—two-player solitaire with my 11-year old, a board game with the whole family—and then I’ll get back to work. While they struggle with the seemingly endless fight to find something to do, I carry various loads. I carry many loads as an adult. We all do.

I carry a financial load. The urgency to provide for my family, to remember to pay all the bills (“Is that medical bill legitimate or a scam? I don’t remember this doctor.”), to make sure there’s money in the bank. And so I must keep working.

I carry a relational load. Friendships and family relationships that need nurturing and healing. Some are fractured and need reconciliation.

I carry a work load. The need to please my employer and excel at my job. The obligation to meet my duties at work and get along with others.

I carry a civic load. A burden to know what is going on in my city, state, and nation so that I can properly vote and advocate for justice and love my neighbor.

I carry a mental load. The reality of weakened mental health, perhaps due to all these other loads, but also perhaps due to biology or some other cause.

I carry a physical health load. The ticking reality of age and a declining body, and the knowledge that every day I don’t exercise I’m losing a bit of myself.

I carry a spiritual load. The sense that I should pray more and read the Scriptures more diligently and care for the poor and check in on someone from church. Also the pressure to turn from sin.

I carry a household load. The need to keep the house clean and operating and hospitable and to do my fair share.

And so on. And so forth.

I admit that at times I complain about these loads, but mostly adulthood to me has looked like bearing up under these loads without complaining. That’s part of what it means to be a responsible adult, is that you carry your loads well, sacrificially for your spouse, or family, or friends, or coworkers out of love.

This doesn’t mean that you should never advocate for yourself and try to reduce your loads when they are unjust or unhealthy or unsustainable. That’s not my point. My only point is that being an adult looks an awful lot like eating it. Eating words of complaint. Grinding out work. Pushing through monotony. Fighting for relationships. Having hard conversations. Disciplining your passions. Carrying your various loads. And carrying them silently.

I don’t mean this silence as a kind of stoic resignation or grim despair. Instead I think of it as a confident resolution grounded in Christ and his love for us. Because in Christ we are already loved, we seek to love others by serving. And we serve not loudly and complainingly, but graciously and quietly.

What’s important to remember is that our tiredness is not a measure of God’s love for us or our righteousness. It just means we’re tired. In our accelerated culture, exhaustion is treated as a badge of achievement, as if we should all shoot for being burned out. But that is not what God is calling us to. That is not adulthood.

Being a healthy adult means knowing your limits and practicing temperance, making space to go off and rest as necessary, but still bearing many different loads silently. By “silently” I don’t mean that you shouldn’t talk to a therapist, friend, spouse, or pastor if you are struggling. And if someone asks you in a space of prayer how you are doing, you should tell them if you are feeling beat down! But I do mean that when you are in a healthy place, even if it is difficult, you bear up under it. You don’t bring others down by your constant complaining and whining about how terrible everything is and how busy you are. Here I’m preaching to myself. Bear up, carry your load, and serve as an adult.

And when you do this, what I think you’ll find is that your burdens get lighter, because complaining doubles the weight of a burden. And it also makes your environment more joyful, as you give other people space to be free from the burdens you carry.

My children are slowly learning to carry their own burdens: chores, school, relationships, hobbies. But for now, most of the big burdens in their life are carried by their mother and I. I hope that modeling this for them will help them grow into confident adults who can bear up under heavy burdens for their children.

Out of the reader survey I ran a few weeks ago, one of the requests that came up a few times was for articles addressing sexuality/gender/transgenderism and the church. I want to say from the outset that my good friends Rachel Gilson and Rebecca McLaughlin are both better voices on these topics. But I will venture an answer, since I have been asked.

I have argued before that the church needs to offer a better story about sex, marriage, the body, and procreation. And I want to repeat that here in detail. Because when churches are faced with questions like, “How do we love transgendered individuals who walk in our doors?” Or “Should we baptize people in same-sex marriages?” Or “Is it really sin for two same-sex people to be in a faithful monogamous marriage?” At root are two principles: first, the nature of sex and the body and marriage and procreation. And second, the nature of love. If we don’t get these principles straight, we will do harm to the very person we are seeking to love. And the Church has done harm to many people experiencing same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria, sometimes by treating them with hatred and sometimes by affirming what was sin. But grounding our approach to these issues in creation and love gives us a healthy way forward.

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On another note, someone recently asked me how they could help share my newsletter. This didn’t used to be a hard question. You could just post it to Twitter and Facebook and hundreds or thousands of people would see it. And while those platforms still have some value, increasingly they downgrade links. Instead, there are a few things you can do.

1. You can give a gift subscription to someone

2. You can forward an email to someone who might enjoy it

3. You can send a direct link to the article via email or text

4. You can encourage someone to subscribe

5. You can recommend the Substack on your Substack

6. You can share on Substack’s notes

I’d just encourage you, if you read something that resonates you, please share it.

Earlier this week a friend shared a compelling article on AI and the way it will affect labor in the near future. It was so compelling that my stomach felt like it dropped from my body. What would my future look like? How would I provide for my family? What does the future of work look like? What does the future of democracy look like? All these questions raced through my head. And with them came anxiety. Anxiety about the future and its manifold uncertainty.

And if you have read any AI coverage, you are probably familiar with this experience. An AI CEO gives some gleeful interview and makes some bold prediction (to improve the value of his company) and yet the prediction usually looks like the desiccation of human life. And so we close the tab and walk away and do something else. We turn away. Because it’s all too much. And we can’t stop it. OpenAI and Antropic, and all the “smaller” AI models (which are still run by massive companies like Google and Meta and SpaceX) are running away with their agendas and there is nothing we can do about it—so it feels. We stand as atomized individuals before these companies (by design), so all we can do is whine about things on social media—which is also controlled by the same companies that build these AI models, so even our whining is scrapped to train AI models!

When you think about all this, it’s easy to spiral. It’s easy to get lost in AI news and feel like humanity is headed toward a cliff, like elite companies are driving us frantically toward an unknown future out of greed and scientific passion. And that by the time we figure out what the costs are, it will be far, far too late to do anything about them.

How are we to hope and not be overwhelmed by AI news? How do we avoid doomerism? How can we keep from despair and inhibition?

The most frightening thing about our AI future is that it is radically open. Despite all the “predictions” by experts, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. We are treading new ground here. We have never had a technological innovation which will be so disruptive, so widely, and so fast. It’s that uncertainty about tomorrow, that wide open future that is so deeply unsettling to us. How will the government react, how will it shape human cognition, how will it affect the economy, how will it change the purpose people find in working, and so on—these questions haunt us.

For small uncertainties you only need little hope. But for vast uncertainties you need an expansive hope. Our times call for an expansive hope, and in our faith we have the resources to support this hope.

Hope is grounded in what God has promised us in Christ. And he has promised us that he will provide for us (Matthew 6:26), that he loves us (John 3:16), and that he will work our good (Romans 8:28). That is our reality. Everything must begin there. In times of uncertainty, we need to ground ourselves in those facts. Whatever the future may bring we can walk in confidence knowing that we will be provided for, loved, and that God will work our good.

Hope also allows us to break out of our atomization, to work in institutions to resist the effects of AI. I have argued before, and still believe, that AI is a choice that we are making, not a determined fact. But as for what we can do as people who don’t control AI companies, we can act together in communities to have shared values and virtues that buffer us from some of the negative effects of AI. What does this look like? This looks like churches that choose not to use AI for sermons, art, music, or videos and that encourage members to come to elders and pastors with theological questions rather than turning to AI models. This looks like colleges that ban or heavily restrict AI use in the classroom so that students don’t cognitively offload their thinking onto machines. I’ll have a lot more to say about how institutions can help us in my next book.

Hope begins with you and your neighbor, your family, your friends working to love one another, glorifying God in the here and now. Choose to read a poem. Go for a walk. Pray. Read the Word. Have coffee with a friend. Not in ignorance of the future, but choosing a good future in your sphere of influence. And what is beyond your influence, trusting that God will provide, even if you cannot imagine what that looks like. That’s okay. You don’t have to. Your imagination isn’t the one in charge.

As I mentioned last Monday, I’ve been reading this very dense but insightful book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by one of my favorite thinkers, Hartmut Rosa, as research for my new book. And in doing my reading I came across this passage on the way social acceleration has affected our understanding of different generations:

An institution that was self-evident for traditional societies, namely, that of “wise elders,” to whom outstanding status was attributed because they had “seen everything” and hence could no longer be surprised by any of the troubles of life, has practically disappeared in late modern society: instead the old are stigmatized by the fact that they no longer know their way around and can no longer keep up. (116)

I’ve long wrestled and worried about the crisis of mentorship in our society, the lack of cross-generational discipleship that is so desperately needed, particularly in a time of deep moral uncertainty. Rosa addresses one of my questions: Why is it that in the contemporary world generations do not pass on their wisdom to the succeeding generations? And the answer is because they have nothing to pass down. The world is moving so fast that the younger generations have more knowledge than the older generations. And so older people feel “useless” and young people feel like they have nothing to learn from the elderly (however you define that).

But what if we’re thinking about all this wrong? What if we’re valuing all the wrong things and so we’re afraid to share our gifts from one generation to another?

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As I’ve said before in these “pages,” I don’t rest well. Or at least I didn’t. But God works on us, doesn’t he? He pursues us like a jealous lover who desires that we don’t stay in our sin and weakness but grow towards righteousness and virtue and Christlikeness. In November of 2024, I wrote these words:

But there are three related barriers to my being able to fully rest…

The first is my OCD. I don’t bring this up as an excuse, but as a matter of fact: what OCD does is send you intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-producing thoughts that capture and torment your mind. And when is the best time for OCD to send those thoughts? When you are sitting still and doing nothing in particular. Second, despite knowing the lies of the modern Total Work agenda, I still fall into it. I still feel like I need to be constantly doing to make my being valuable. And third, I have not taken the time to cultivate many interests outside of writing and research. So the idea of doing leisurely activities seems foreign to me.

Well, it’s July 2026 and while I won’t say I’ve mastered rest, I can say that these words are no longer completely true of me. And I want to share how things changed and what that looks like.

First, I sought and fought for good OCD treatment so that I could have the mental space to rest without intrusive thoughts invading every spare moment. That is not to say that I’m 100% free of doubts—no one is. But it is to say that I can be alone with my thoughts without anxiety welling up in me. What this taught me was that sometimes we need to take the time to address underlying causes of unrest.

We can’t wait until those causes are addressed before we pursue rest. We need to seek rest daily and weekly, trusting in the Lord for our provision. But if we struggle with distress, it may not be a lack of trust in God. It may be trauma, generalized anxiety, OCD, or other factors that can be treated.

Second, I practiced resting, particularly Sabbath resting. This was difficult for me because I teach on Mondays and I publish Substack articles on Mondays at 7am. So I have things to prepare for on Monday mornings. But my goal has been to shift all work off of Sundays—the Lord’s Day—onto Saturdays, so that I can be fully present and rest on Sundays. Some days there are extenuating circumstances, but I try my best to stick to that rule. I even plan to let my students know that I won’t be replying to emails on Sundays.

The most important part of this practice was practicing. At first it was difficult. I still felt my old guilt and shame for not being productive. For not submitting to what Josef Pieper calls “Total Work.” Shouldn’t I be writing? Shouldn’t I be researching? Shouldn’t I be reading for class? What if I’m falling behind, falling out of time, becoming desynchronized? Naps were difficult because of the racing thoughts. But the more I devoted myself to these practices, the easier they became.

Third, I focused on prodigal practices to replace the efficient practices that filled my week. The efficient practices were not evil, but they were generally focused on me providing for me and my family. For Sabbath rest, I wanted to do activities that focused on God providing for me and my family. For example, taking a nap is an act that trusts that God will provide for me, keep me and my family safe while I close my eyes. Reading poetry (I finished John Berryman’s collection of Dream Songs recently) is prodigal because it doesn’t provide anything. It’s done for simply for the beauty and goodness of reading poetry! Going on a walk with my wife is prodigal (if it’s not done for exercise, as C.S. Lewis notes in The Screwtape Letters) because I’m just delighting in her company and God’s creation. Playing a board game with my family or watching a movie is prodigal because it does not accomplish anything to provide or sustain my existence. God is doing everything. I’m just delighting in his great works. Eating a large cup of ice cream (my one cup per week—usually) is prodigal because it’s excessive. It’s pure joy.

Done rightly, this kind of rest is not just practiced on Sundays but throughout our week. We take little rests to delight in creation, to rest at night, to remember that we are not sovereign—God is. We do have obligations to work with excellence unto the Lord to care for ourselves and others, but it’s always God who is really providing. So we don’t have to be anxious anymore.

Once again, I’m grateful for all of you who took the time to fill out my reader survey. The most common response to the question of what has been keeping you from reading lately is “time.” Overwhelmingly, everyone is crunched for time. Which resonated with me because I’m in the middle of reading the book Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity by Harmut Rosa for my next book, Shoring Up the Ruins (tentative title). In it, he argues that one of the three main ways the modern world has been dramatically accelerated is the “pace of life.” Yes, there has been what he calls “technical acceleration,” by which he means things like computers, cars, the Internet, AI, and other machines that have spend our actions along. But also the pace of our lives have sped up. Instead of the dishwasher freeing up our time so that we can sit and read books, we end up spending that “free” time doing other chores or managing other technologies (the washing machine, our text messages, our AI agent, and so on). Our pace of life also speeds up because we tend to multitask now. Instead of just doing the dishes, we do the dishes and listen to a podcast on self-improvement. We dictate a text message while we drive. While we watch a movie, we scroll on our phones. There’s always something else happening. Because if we don’t multitask, we fear we’ll be desynchronized, that we’ll fall out of time with the rest of the world which is moving at a much faster pace than us. And that sounds terrifying. So what are we to do? What does it look like to live temperate lives at a human pace, and how do we deal with the guilt and shame of desynchronization?

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We didn’t know what we were doing on Facebook in 2007 when we publicly posted pictures of our dogs, our children, and our vacations and shared opinions about movies and music and politics. But we were actually training an AI model. We didn’t know because nobody told us. I’m sure that technically there was some line…

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When a period of mental affliction hits you, your world shrinks down to controllable entities: what can I manage? What can I keep up with? Brushing my teeth? Bathing? Paying the mortgage? Going to work?—and one of the big questions for parents is, Can I continue to be a good parent? Even if I don’t feel like it, can I go through the motions and provide what my children need to survive and flourish. Can I get them to school, feed them, guide them, and even love them? Unfortunately, depending on your affliction, how much you are suffering, and how much support you have from your spouse (or friends and family if you are a single parent), these can be difficult questions to answer. Likewise, it can be difficult to answer the question, should I have children if I know I’m struggling with a mental health affliction? How will it affect my children? Many conditions are genetic, and even the ones that aren’t genetic, the environmental factors that children experience watching a parent suffer will affect them. Is that fair to put children through? If you already have kids, how do you deal with the fact that you may have unintentionally harmed your children through your affliction?

These are all heavy questions that can plague someone who is already insecure and self-critical and just trying to stay afloat. Parenting is one of the most important, beautiful, and rewarding acts one can do in life. But it is also a solemn responsibility. How do we carry that responsibility well while suffering? The answer lies not in avoiding the responsibility or giving in our insecurities, but walking in faith. Here’s what I mean.

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Former Google employee and current neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff has published a chilling article at the New York Times on Google’s shift from giving links to search queries to offering AI summaries. You may not have thought much about this shift, but it’s radical and is changing how many people perceive the world. G…

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

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

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

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Now that birthright citizenship has been settled by the Supreme Court, a number of high profile voices in the conservative and conservative evangelical world have been announcing that this means the end of America, that we will have no way of protecting our identity, population, and elections. Despite the fact that thi…

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

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

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

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

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A common experience as an elder millennial who grew up surrounded by fundamentalist Christian culture is watching your friends and family and people you grew up with or worked with slowly drift from orthodox views of sexuality toward progressive, more “inclusive” views. In a word, “deconstructing”; sometimes they stop at i…

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

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