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There’s never been a good time to have kids.

An optimal time to bring a baby into the world is an optical illusion.

But we’ve had them anyways.

In the documentarian Daniel Roher’s The AI Doc, he gathers some of the top experts in tech to ask them this basic question: is AI going to doom the world into oblivion?1

He’s not just amiably wondering out loud; there’s a deeper (and personally relatable, for this writer) impetus behind his curiosity. His wife’s pregnant. So the not-so-subtle paranoia he invites the viewer into is: Will there even be a world left for our kid grow up into?

This paranoia is pretty common. It’s the kind of anxiety that creates questions about whether having kids is even worth it—which leads to The Los Angeles Times articles like “It’s Almost Shameful to Want to Have Children.”

The journalist behind that particular article interviewed a plethora of Gen Z and Millennials to get their take on having children in light of impending global disasters. One girl answered: “I know that things aren’t going to get better. So why would I want to put a child through that? Even when my sister gave birth to my nephew, I was like, Why? They’re gonna go through so much.”2

She’s not alone; according to the most recent Pew data, 44% of 18-49 year olds say they’re never going to have kids.3

And aside from “just not wanting to,” the overwhelming reason for “why” is because people are terrified about the state of the world. Thus not having kids is a kind of mercy.

In one of the darker ends of this conversation, the philosopher Matti Häyry even argues that because of climate change, the best gift we can give our kids is non-existence (i.e., it’s virtuous to not procreate).4

Now, I’m inclined to believe most concerns about the state of the world are valid (though, in many cases, they’re greatly exaggerated). We’re not living in a new Eden. But everytime I see something like this, I can’t help but think: there’s never been a perfect time to have kids. But right now is not, comparatively, the worst.

Purely from a medical standpoint, it’s never been safer to have kids.

In the 19^th century, the child mortality rate in the U.S. was 462.9 deaths per 1,000 births. According to the CDC’s most recent data, that number is now at 5.5 out of 1,000.5 Meaning, a 98.8% decrease.

Even beyond the medical angle, we have substantial evidence to suggest that the vast majority of doomsday predictions made by some of the world’s leading experts never pan out.6 This isn’t to suggest that climate change or economic concern shouldn’t be taken seriously; in fact, it’s the opposite: because we take these concerns seriously, we’ve been able to avert innumerable natural, political, and economic disasters.7

Yet, even in spite of how many steps on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that we can easily provide our kids today, we’re more skeptical of having kids today than at any other point in history.

I just got through The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck based the novel on factual accounts of real migrant workers moving westward during the dust bowl. Most places, wages were 15 cents an hour in exchange for grueling sun-up-to-sun-down labor. And even though 15 cents was enough to feed the parents, it wasn’t enough to feed the kids. Which is to say: it wasn’t a good time to have kids.

And yet: they were really excited to have kids.

They talked about Rose of Sharon’s pregnancy like it was a gift, and lamented when the baby was stillborn.8

Taking it back to Bible times, they had an even higher view of procreation. Some scholars even argue that barrenness was one of the worst evils that could fall upon a woman.9

Keep in mind that this is way before all of the medical luxuries that help create a safe birthing process. There was none of that. And yet, they recognized childbearing as something that was such a deep blessing that being deprived of it was a unique injustice.10 It was such a blessing that Hannah even offered to devote her son Samuel’s life to the Lord if she was simply able to bear him (1 Samuel 1-3).

And yeah, AI is scary. So is lots of other stuff. But also, it’s categorically superior to the birthing environment of whatever was going on here:

Anyways, I’m of a small camp of people who are optimistic that things are generally going to be okay in the long run. I’m often (usually graciously) told that I’m naive and it’s better to assume the absolute worse. This is deemed the “smart” position.

John Stuart Mill noticed this too: “It is not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, who is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.”11

Maybe I’m just more depressively inclined, but I don’t function very well when I believe the forecast is an entropic spiral into oblivion. I prefer the philosophy of hoping and praying that things will generally be okay and then making my decisions accordingly.

And maybe I’m totally off and things go DEFCON 5 (or 1? Is lower worse than higher?). And that will be genuinely horrible. But I’d rather not let the possibility of bad dictate the possibility of good.

The logic C.S. Lewis uses to shape his reasoning for continuing to learn even during wartime feels relevant here:

Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes.12

I know the world isn’t perfect, but I also doubt a perfectly “suitable moment” will ever come.

The authors of Scripture wrote about children as if they were a blessing—an inherent good. So even if this world is marred and drenched in a horrible amount of bad, bringing something good into the world isn’t going to increase its bad. It can’t.

It’s endlessly more beautiful, good, and gracious to exist than it is to not. This world is abundant; it can handle another child. Life is a gift.

So anyways, as you probably picked up on, my wife and I are having a baby:

And for us personally, it’s a little easier to recognize this as a “good gift” (James 1:17). It’s been a difficult road. Similarly for many of our friends and acquaintances, fertility didn’t come easy. Of both of our adult lives, this journey has easily been the most harrowing. For those in on the lingo, our daughter is a double rainbow baby.

To put it like did in one of the most affecting books I’ve read in ages, I’ve already had kids; I’ve just never met them.13

But I’m sure I’ll meet them someday.

Because we have so many friends and online wellwishers who are reading this and still struggling with infertility, please know that God sees you. I know it’s cliche. But it’s true. His compassion for your pain is limitless; you are and will remain in our prayers.

Also: we’re definitely terrified in many ways. In one sense, it’s because, as Andrew Solomon wrote “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.” Are we even mature enough to handle entering this permanent relationship?

In another sense, and despite optimistic forecasting, we really don’t know what’s going to happen. Life for her might really be harder than life was for us.

But regardless of all the challenges she’ll face, we’re thankful. And sometimes, I’m even thankful that the world she’s coming into isn’t perfect. Neither of us ascribe to the belief that a life without resistance, hardship, let down is what makes for a flourishing life. We need every note on the scale of human emotion in order to stumble into a textured, beautiful life.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1877 short story titled “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” he writes about a man who dreams about an alternative version of Earth, where everything is mostly the same, but it’s missing one thing: suffering. At first, the man feels like he’s stumbled into heaven on earth. But it soon sours into meaningless misery. Without any sense of pain, the love that his soul is designed to crave isn’t given enough oxygen to breathe:

“I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left, and I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other!”14

So even though philosophers like David Benatar argue that reproducing is immoral simply because you’re going to expose your kids to unavoidable suffering, we can feel confident that this isn’t true in the slightest.15 The less-than-ideal state of the world freaks us out, but a frictionless environment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; without the bitter the sweet isn’t as sweet.

Lastly, I also can’t help but mention how unproductive it feels to have a baby. I like to hustle and work and create. And this is necessarily going to slow that down a tad (a lot, really). I’d wager that this is a subtle fear around a lot of modern childbearing paranoia.

And paranoid I was. Not even about the normal things, like having less time to see friends or go to the gym or wallow in introverted brooding.

But plenty more eccentric pre-father jitters popped up, such as: I need to start working on the great American novel.

“What if the next 8 months are the only chance I ever get to become Gen Z’s Hemingway?” is a real thought I had.

Now, please know: I’ve never aspired to write the great American novel, let alone a novel, before this. But this inexplicable paranoia arose in me that told me I had to, right now—because, come November, I’ll never get the chance to cook that manuscript.

And yes, it’s probably one of the more selfish fears I’ve had in a long time. This bit about the novel is the most extreme example; but it’s bubbled up in a lot of other productivity-related ways: What if I don’t have time to do what I’m supposed to do? What if I can’t write anymore? Or read? Or finish my PhD?

What if I can’t do what I’m called to do?

All those fears evaporated around the 10-week mark.

We were at the fertility clinic getting an ultrasound. I didn’t know any of the details beforehand, but the nurse said that we were gonna try to hear the heartbeat.

Which brought in a sick, trauma nostalgia for both of us. We’d been through this routine twice before and heard crickets. So we held our breaths.

And within a second of hearing our baby’s heartbeat, I knew that this was exactly what I was called to. This was the main gig.

Having less time to write won’t imply the giving up of my vocation even a fraction. I knew from that moment in time that I was actually stepping into the most important calling I’ve ever had.

It’s hard to stay cynical when you see a baby’s heartbeat.

I realized, and am continuing to realize, that so much of what I think matters in life (productivity, excelling, doing good work) isn’t really life.

This is life.

And I love life, thank you.

I also loved this reflection on becoming a dad by that just came out yesterday. Highly recommend.

Experience? Mental fortitude? Motivational speaking?

Take a second and rattle off the top three qualities that come to mind. What turns an average leader into an exceptional one?

Okay, do you have them?

Great.

Chances are, you just described yourself.1

For example, if you’re extroverted, highly opinionated, and punctual, you’re likely to think, “A great leader has good people skills, speaks their mind, and gets things done on time.”

But if you’re introverted, analytical, and strategic, you’re more inclined to answer, “A good leader takes alone time to recover, thinks through scenarios from every angle, and isolates the best route forward.”

Now, these qualities aren’t necessarily wrong—lots of them are exceptional leadership building blocks. Social scientists simply used this as a thought experiment to show that we all struggle to see reality as is.

Like the famous Babylonian aphorism goes: “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”2 It’s why we tend to skew our perceptions in ways that flatter the self.

Truth is, we’re all far more biased than we give ourselves credit for. And even those who’ve heard that “we’re all more biased than we give ourselves credit for” a billion times are sadly not that much less biased than those who’ve never heard this news.

Even after all the research I had to do on the science of bias for my dissertation, I’m still wildly, surprisingly, and egregiously biased.

Which, yeah, there are probably bigger problems in the world.

But the danger isn’t just projecting biased leadership qualities; the danger is more so that whenever we encounter something that’s ambiguous, we subtly reshape it into our own image—and we even do this with God Himself.

But thankfully, there are some key tips and tricks—well, one tip and trick, technically—to help us see reality as reality is.

And even though that might not sound all that fun—because, you know, we prefer our cozy illusions—it’s far superior to become the kind of person who tastes reality as it is. Those who live in Plato’s cave forever can’t become radiant because they never step into reality’s shine.

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Open this article in Substack to read the whole thing—the email gets cut off!

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The roommate we rarely heard from surveyed the wreckage before retreating upstairs. He descended originally to inspect the arguing overheard from the second floor. I was doing lots of it.

A rite of college life is rhythmically winding up in bleary late-night conversations over sophomoric philosophical disagreements. We were sprawled around the cookie cutter living room with Facebook Marketplace couches shoved against each wall. One girl mentioned that it was okay to get mad at God, and I thought that sounded like heresy. I’d only been following Jesus for two years, so I was in the thick of that phase where everything unfamiliar sounds like heresy. I shot back that getting angry with God was insubordinate—treason-lite—since it showed we didn’t trust His plan and/or will.

She said that anger was just honest—a vulnerable confession of emotion. It admits the conflicted guilt—the frustration that God isn’t showing up more tangibly in your life—in a way that allows you to process and reappraise the feeling in healthy ways. She pointed to a couple imprecatory psalms as proof texts.

I said you might as well skip that part and just get better at trusting God and went to bed.

Later, I found out that she was, of course, exactly right.

For a long stretch of my Christian life, I was closer to embodying a Jesus-y stoicism than Christianity.

One of the most common criticisms I’ve gotten—from friends, mentors, employers—is that I can get so cerebral that I end up analyzing emotions to skip experiencing them. One time I got upset with a therapist because he told me that understanding why I was feeling depressed couldn’t fix depression. I thought that if I kept an intellectual buffer between myself and my experiences, I could control them.

Even today, I’m still an embarrassingly big fan of suppressing emotions. Telling myself I’m not anxious or sad when I’m one or both those things. I prefer it. It sort of feels valiant—like a vague toughness (or “tuffness”).

And sadly, this brand of avoidance isn’t always called out by Christian community. Some considered my affectlessness a kind of strength. It allowed me to rise above the emotional hurdles that got in the way of ministry.

But Christianity isn’t a stoic coping mechanism.1 We need our emotions—all of them, not just the convenient, pleasant kind. The whole spectrum is necessary; they’re gauges that allow us to live well—and put us in closer alignment with Jesus’ orientation to living.

Even when Jesus’ emotions were inconvenient, He didn’t dance around them. His “familiarity with sorrow” attests that experiencing emotion with utmost sincerity isn’t a burden, but an invitation into a textured, paradoxical, abundant life. The good life is upside down.

So, TL;DR: Christian maturity and stoic tendencies can get confused because they really do overlap in several ways. But stoicism forfeits two things Christians can’t afford to lose: an affirmation of

(1) the goodness of creation and

(2) the moral goodness of our embodied suffering, desire, and emotions.

To illustrate, let’s talk about the difference between Jesus and Socrates.

The Stoic Yeshua

If you hang around philosophy circles, you might come across this observation: many great philosophers were unjustly executed by the empire for spreading counter narratives. And each of them died emotionless, stoic deaths. These lists often include Socrates, Protagoras, Seneca, and Jesus of Nazareth.

🎶One of these is not like the other🎶

The philosopher Charles Taylor specifically called out the comparisons between Socrates and Jesus because their approaches to death were completely different.2

Socrates spent his final moments convincing his friends that he wasn’t losing anything valuable—that death is the cure to the disease of life.3 As such, he can peacefully accept the death-by-drinking-hemlock because, for him, death doesn’t imply the loss of anything good.4

Conversely, Jesus suffered pure agony. He prayed that God would spare Him so intensely that blood poured from His pores. We call the sequence leading up to His burial the “Passion” narrative because it’s absolutely brimming with it.

Sure, He prayed “not my will but yours” and “Father forgive them,” but these aren’t mantras of stoic acceptance—they’re drenched in embodied suffering. And regardless of your interpretation of His last words, it’s hard to deny that they’re emotionally loaded: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

For Socrates, he could leave life serene and unbothered because he didn’t consider this life “good”—which made renouncing it way easier.

For Jesus, He couldn’t not experience agony. In fact, if He didn’t feel anguish over His impending death, then it wouldn’t have been a sacrifice; it would’ve been a mere robotic furthering of God’s will. As Taylor puts it:

The great difference between Stoic and Christian renunciation is this: for the Stoic, what is renounced is not part of the good.

For the Christian, what is renounced is affirmed as good—both in the sense that the renunciation would lose its meaning if we were indifferent and in the sense that the renunciation is in furtherance of God’s will, which precisely affirms the goodness of the kinds of things renounced: health, freedom, life.

For the stoic, loss isn’t all that “bad.”

But for the Christian, loss is always a “breach in the integrity of the good.”5

We mourn not because we need what’s lost but because it’s worth lamenting the loss of anything God calls “good” (Gen. 1). To deny lament is to deny the beauty and intention in the way God crafted those things—whether it’s life (in Jesus’ case), food (in the case of a fast), or rest (in the case that we’re combatting sloth).

As such, the only Christian way to “renounce” something is by affirming the goodness of what we renounce beforehand. This is why it should be impossible for a Christian to self-righteously reject something (think high-horse teetotalers).

C.S. Lewis describes renunciation best: “Marriage is good, though not for me; wine is good, though I must not drink it; feasts are good, though today we fast.”6

It’s also very biblical: “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude” (1 Tim. 4:4).

And yet, even though Jesus and Paul affirmed the goodness of creation and embodied existence, how is it that stoic acceptance become a mark of Christian maturity?

Genesis of Jesus-y Stoicism

Even though Socrates and Jesus are very (very) different, stoicism and platonism (the school inspired by Socrates) influenced a lot of Christian thought. Not in a *clutches pearls!* kind of way, but in the casual way that all pop-culture subtly influences people within that culture. So kind of like the way that two plants that grow side by side tend to intertwine, some stoic ideas snuck into Christianity and became “just the way we do things around here.”7

Which matters because: if our worldview fires off from a stoic starting point, we’ll become way more likely consider the present world bad or unnecessary. From there, we might punch instructions like “don’t love the world” (1 John 2:15-17) into an equation that concludes that the present material world is useless, transient, un-holy. What God called “good” and “very good” gets downgraded to mere distractions or pleasures that we’re called to shun.8

We can see this all over church history. In the 5^th century, the theologian John Cassian encountered a Christian monk who was getting praised because he took an insult without reacting at all. While many of the Christians thought it was tough (or “tuff”), Cassian criticized this kind of monastic detachment: “He did not feel the insult because he felt nothing at all.”9

Even Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (possibly the highest selling Christian book of all time besides the Bible) contains hints of stoicism: “A wise man heeds little what he feels.”10

Today we see traces of this mindset in the anecdote that “Bible” is an acronym for “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”11 There’re also some corners of the modern spiritual formation movement that risk treating faith as an emotional numbing agent rather than an invitation toward reality.

All that said, theologians like Ireneaus, Augustine, and Aquinas got it right: creation and everything in it is good.12 It’s the corruption of that good that creates evil. As such, salvation is never an escape from earth, our bodies, brains, or matter—salvation is the restoration and reordering of all things toward God’s reality (2 Pet. 3:13).

Christianity > Stoicism

And yes, there are plenty similarities between stoicism and Christianity. Those who’ve read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (probably the most essential work in the stoic canon), will even notice similarities. “The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injustice,”13 writes Marcus. “Never avenge yourselves; instead, if your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat,” writes Paul.

Paul even quotes stoic poets to land his points (Acts 17).14 But he’s not just quoting them to look well-read, like I just did with that Aurelius line; he’s quoting them to show that Christ is supreme—the hope they’re really longing for. Like Justin Martyr argued, Jesus was and is the fulfillment of everything the philosophers were philosophizing toward.15

From the very beginning, the theologian’s job description included showing that Christianity will always “outnarrate” other worldviews. In particular, it supersedes the stoic worldview by encapsulating all its strengths into a healthier container.16

• Whereas stoics cultivate self-sufficiency, Christians cultivate a deeper dependence on God (Phil. 4:12-13).17 And it’s a weird upside-down kind of dependency, because as we feel more dependent, we paradoxically come to feel more sufficient.

• Rather than let go of the attachments that we desire for the sake of mitigating desire, we rightly order desires around a perfect kingdom.

• Rather than live according to the flow of whatever comes our way, we live according to God’s will.

• Stoic formation is driven by self-discipline and effort; Christian formation is driven by an overwhelming love of God, grace, and the Spirit’s transformation.

And while both embrace suffering, their approach is totally different.

Stoics embrace suffering as a way to get better at controlling their reactions to suffering. But Christians don’t suffer for the sake of getting really good at suffering; we suffer for the sake of dying with Christ and participating in His glory (Rom. 8:12-17; Col. 1:24-29).

As the Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper put it, “Suffering for its own sake is nonsense.”18 The martyr doesn’t sacrifice their life because it’s brave; they lay down their lives because they cherish the good of what they’re dying for more (John 15:12-17).19

That’s why we can suffer and suffer well. We suffer lovingly.20 We don’t reject or mute or discipline ourselves to hold back tears whenever something bothers us. We acquaint ourselves with grief until it reframes our experience of everything as more rich, full, colorful.

Our maximize pleasure, minimize pain culture usually thinks of negative emotions a useless detour from the good life. But Christianity metabolizes all those dips and valleys and emo modes so that we can discover as much value in grief as the classically desirable positive emotions.21

Surprisingly, happiness and negative emotions can more than coexist. A 2026 study in the Journal of Happiness Studies even found that that minimizing pain and pursuing pleasure does not lead to the happiest kind of life.22 Apparently, brief encounters with negative experiences leads to higher overall wellbeing because they give our positive emotions something to compare themselves to.

To illustrate, when I lived in LA, I never once thought “Thank God it’s sunny.” The sun in Southern California is a constant. But when I moved to Michigan around December, I immediately went through 4 months of reminders about why the sun was so great. In the same way that it’s harder to appreciate summer without winter, so the bitter of negative emotions makes happiness all the sweeter.

As such, strong-arming negativity away doesn’t create a flourishing life. What does is affirming the goodness of created existence without ever becoming indifferent to loss and grief and mourning—inhabiting our imperfect bodies and imperfects days with a knowledge that we’re licensed to rejoice.

Here’s Sort of How This Works, Practically.

I’ve noticed that as I’ve gotten older, when people ask me how I’m doing, I just say “I’m great.”

There’s a rationale behind it. Even if I’m not subjectively doing “great,” I’m still technically not that far off from objectively doing great.

For example, a few months ago, when my college’s registrar asked me how my Christmas was, I said, “Oh I got vicious food poisoning, but it was great.”

She paused and tilted her head and said, “Oh, so…not great then…?” And I said, “Well, no, it was still great—just couldn’t get out of bed for a couple days.” She sort of nodded at the oddness of this response and the conversation fizzled out.

Now, this response isn’t a continuation of college days emotional suppression. I didn’t skip or bypass my frustration; I expressed anger that God hadn’t led me away from the food poisoning, and that anger allowed me to process and reappraise the situation.

But over and beyond that, I just legitimately believe that our worldview affirms that life in general is both good and bad, but the good objectively outweighs the bad; and therefore, I’m pretty much always close to an objective sense of doing “great.”

Yes, Christmas did suck this year. I threw up constantly and couldn’t walk without getting dizzy. But at the same time, it was great: I got to talk to the God of the universe amidst my melodramatic groaning; I was reminded that I had a wonderful wife and friends and family that cared enough about me to express sadness that I couldn’t make it out of bed.

So having a “great Christmas” isn’t denial; to me, it’s just a way to “rejoice always” and “give thanks in all circumstances.” Because, you know, our lives are a perpetual celebration of the Resurrection—the historical happening that now reverberates, proclaiming that even despite all our pain and hardship and loss and grief and turmoil, all of it can and will eventually bloom into good in the long run.

The good life isn’t the absence of pain and control of emotion; it’s the presence of God in the midst of it; the reality of His created goodness and promises to restore it all in the future.23 That’s a hope that makes every drop of suffering, grief, and unmet desire eternally worth it.

That’s why Christianity outnarrates stoicism.

Someone invited me to a post-church lunch at one of those places where all the produce probably came from the Walmart and somehow a frier is involved in every dish. Chili’s is a decently close archetype.1

I’d only been sober for a few months at this point. Nothing too dramatic, just the typical third or fourth backslide until recovery finally took root. As my fork hovered back and forth, a guy who’d been in recovery much longer but attending church much shorter was now on his third or fourth critique of our pastor. “He doesn’t show up to volunteer days,” “He doesn’t listen to my suggestions,” “Etcetera.”

Now, I might’ve been grumpy, I don’t really remember, but I figured I should say something. As we were waiting for the checks, I watched him while timing out the first millisecond pause in his speech where I could interject.

“Ya know, I understand the frustration, but we do have some New Testament instructions to avoid talking badly about our leaders and whatnot. So, if you’re really upset, you should probably just talk to him face-to-face so that you don’t keep dropping this stuff into conversations with the rest of the church.”

In my mind, I said it gently and kindly; realistically, I probably said it too rigidly.

Offense and defensiveness bloomed right away. Starts asking for chapter and verse. I provide them. He says he’s not so sure. I say that’s fine.

But before we all left, he said something that’s stuck with me for years: “Well, if I don’t vent my frustrations, it’s just gonna pile up in me and then burst out in other unhealthy ways.”

And that was the problem—the street-level pop-psychology camaflouged as wisdom. It’s not the worst logic; but just because we can arrive at a conclusion via logical deduction doesn’t mean that it leads to healthy embodied practice (ex: just read up on the lifestyles of 20th century postmodernists).

The truth is that venting our anger isn’t a virtue—it has no capacity to make us better, healthier, more like Jesus.

Let’s start with one of the biggest outlets us moderns resort to:

complaining.

I love complaining; I enjoy hearing gossip. It’s embarrassingly fun.

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Audio voiceover available here for paid subs!

Millennial Pause, Gen Z Shake, and Influencer Accent

In the academic linguist ’s Algospeak, he offers an overview of what makes for a successful Tik Tok and IG reel, dumbed down for short-form video ascetics like myself. One tip is cutting “the millennial pause”—the few seconds of dead air at the start of a video before someone starts talking:

Conversely, younger creators do the “Gen Z shake,” where their phones shake because they set it down after hitting record, fabricating a sense of urgency.

Interestingly, many tips for boosting exposure on short-form video platforms run in this same vein.

For another example, take the “influencer accent.” You’d recognize it if you heard it—initially popularized by “famous for being famous” celebs like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. The trick is to inflect the end of every sentence upward, almost like you’re pointing it with a question mark, so that your words sound like one long, never-ending paragraph.

It boosts engagement by cutting out quiet pauses and making it seem like you’re perpetually in the middle of a thought. The inflections subtly grip a viewer into hanging onto your every word. Male content creators do something similar, but their strategy is more about talking faster—as seen in Mr. Beast’s progression from talking at 120 words per minute when he started making videos to his average of 175 WPM nowadays.

There’s obviously way more to it, but lots of virality tips basically boil down to: do whatever you can to cut out every possible millisecond of silence.

But maybe the most interesting part is what Aleksic says those milliseconds of silence actually do. When a user hears silence, they’re reminded for a split second that they’re a person staring at a phone.

In other words, those gaps and spaces when our content isn’t stimulating our brain are precisely where we remember that we’re human beings.

And for this exact same reason, I’d argue that we literally need those moments. They teach us that we’re not just brains on a stick amusing, scrolling, and vegging1 ourselves to death. Silence—or just the lack of stimulation—reminds us that we’re embodied souls aching for something deeper than dopamine.

Now, this observation has been made to the point that it’s almost gotten cliché. But the solutions are typically: trade the smartphone for dumbphone, delete social media, cancel Netflix, etc. All that’ll definitely help—but it doesn’t really touch the deeper problem.

Life-hacking our surroundings is a good start; but personally, I’m learning that I also have to deal with the issue underlying the issue: my craving for stimulation, disdain for boredom, and discomfort with silence.

Distraction-maxxing and Social Acceleration

Maybe the most relatable feature of modern life is distraction. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that we’re “distracted from distractions by distraction.”2

On average, we watch 5,000 films in our lifetime. We read 700 books (probably at least double that for Substackers). We listen to 1.3 million songs.3 We watch roughly 78,000 hours of television. Based on projections, most of us reading this will spend around 130,000 hours scrolling on our phones. You can do your own screen time calculator here:

As humans, we’re obsessed with things that stimulate our imaginations. And we’ve been consuming more and more and more every coming year.

Which isn’t all that surprising. The sociologist Hartmut Rosa says we live in an age of “social acceleration.”4 Basically, the rate at which the world is advancing—in terms of tech, transportation, social trends—is so rapid that it’s making us all frenetic, restless, and fatigued.

Even though tech advancements seem to offer more freedom via promises of more time to spare, their rapidity actually causes us to feel increasingly caged and rushed. Researchers note that regardless of how much time we actually have, more and more people are suffering from a cognitive disorder called “chronic time pressure.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: feeling rushed and crunched for time for no tangible reason.5 As Henri Nouwen put it, “Indeed, it seems like we no longer have any time—but time has us.”6

So why do we keep up with the frenetic pace, noise, and distraction? In author Leighton Ford’s assessment, “Often we keep ourselves busy and distracted because we fear that if we slow down, we may look inside and find nothing there.”7 One study even showed that when subjects are told they can either sit in silence or administer electric shocks to themselves, many chose the shocks.8

Which is a little sad, because scientists have noticed that silence is wildly good for us.

Science on Silence

Even though electrical shocks can feel preferable to silence, researchers have found that silence promotes (1) relaxation, (2) creativity, and (3) information processing.

1. Relaxation

If you’re stressed, sometimes the initial impulse is to drown out the stress in more noise. But unfortunately, adding more noise usually just prolongs stress.

In a follow up to the electrical shock study, researchers had students sit in a quiet room alone without the option to shock themselves. Afterwards, they found that the exercise unanimously decreased their baseline stress levels.9 Interestingly, silence is even more calming than relaxing music.10 So even though it feels uncomfortable at first, it genuinely (and eventually) chips away at anxieties.

2. Creativity

It also makes us more creative.11 One of my favorite directors, David Lynch, said that whenever he’s stumped on how to keep writing a script, he just sit backs in his chair with his hands folded, stares, breathes, and commits to staying there until an idea arises that unclogs the writer’s block.

The writer Nicholas Carr explains how this works:

When people aren’t being bombarded by external stimuli, their brains can, in effect, relax. They no longer have to tax their working memories by processing a stream of bottom-up distractions. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind.12

3. Information Processing

Silence is the perfect frequency for processing information, problem-solving, and deep thinking.

When I get in the car, my immediate reaction is typically Apple Music or calling someone to get some background chatter going. But whenever I wait a second, I’ll notice some unprocessed stuff in me: some sin I haven’t repented from yet, some fight that I don’t feel right about, some emotional disappointment or jealousy or resentment that I’ve tried to shove down rather than deal with. Sitting in silence allows it to bubble to the surface so that God can sterilize its infection and kickstart the healing process.

All to say: something about the way God designed our minds and bodies makes it so that silence is like cherry-flavored medicine—it might make us gag on the way down but inevitably tunes up our immune system.

But sadly, our world today is increasingly cutting out spaces that are free from noise—churches included.

The Necessity of Tiny Cracks of Inactivity

The journalist Andrew Sullivan said that modern life fills in each and every “tiny crack of inactivity” with some distraction: a text message, a new show, another email.

Sullivan’s solution is kind of funny: find spaces where you can feel bored.

And his recommendation for finding a space that’s conducive to boredom is even funnier: go to church—so long as it’s a quiet one.

He’s got a point. Churches are one of the last phone-discouraged public spaces where you can just sit with your thoughts—the things stirring around your consciousness, your paranoias, the self-reflection you’ve been putting off. While it’s not necessarily the most captivating marketing point (“Come on in! We’re boring and quiet!”), shared silence and slowness really is uniquely restorative.

Unfortunately, today, many churches create more distractions than they free us from, which is a big part of Sullivan’s critique:

If churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary.13

Again, he’s not wrong. As the church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has noted, ecclesial quiet has been on the decline since the Reformation era; from that point onward, attention increasingly shifted toward the pulpit.14 Many churches slowly became more oriented toward the expression of onstage opinion than quiet formation.

So for many congregations—and apologies for cosplaying the Grinch whining about Whoville here—everything became “noise, noise, noise.” Like Tik Tokers filling in cracks of inactivity, it’s like we try to fill in every possible moment of dead air to retain engagement.

And if these complaints come across too curmudgeonly, I should note a few wonderful cloud of witnesses in my corner:

• Augustine lamented the presence of stringed instruments in church, thinking it only added distraction to praying—a practice he already found challenging to stay on track with.

• Aquinas thought similarly, declaring that instrumental music was simply “amiable pleasures that divert the faithful.”

• Bernard of Clairvaux followed suit, but upped the ante by critiquing building size, statues, and paintings. His point was basically: “ornament distracts from prayer.”15

Now, if you go to a loud church, please don’t leave, criticize, or resent it. I proudly attend a loud church. However, I’ve just made sure to carve out more silence in my free time and small group.

Thankfully, in recent years—in reaction to increased busyness and noise—silence is making a comeback. This renewed interest is thanks to spiritual formation writers like Dallas Willard, Henri Nouwen, Ruth Haley Barton, James K.A. Smith, and Richard Foster.16 Silence is a perfect medium for formation: it sets our souls up like a stone to God’s sculptor: exposed for the sake of getting honed, carved, shaped.17

Fish Need Water, Christians Need Silence

Maybe you’re thinking: well quiet and stillness might work for some people, but everytime I try to get quiet, the movie on the inside of my brain starts spazzing through hundreds of clips per millisecond, so silence can’t be all that helpful for me.

It’s a fair point; but I’d also suggest that those random distractions are almost certainly a good thing. There’s a solid chance that they’re exactly what God’s trying to put in your mind.

In The Screwtape Letters, the chief demon tells his apprentice to encourage the human to get frustrated with the distractions that come his way during silent prayer time:

When this, or any other distraction, crosses his mind you ought to encourage him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the normal prayer as if nothing had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main theme of his prayers and his endeavours, then, so far from doing good, you have done harm. Anything, even a sin, which has the total effect of moving him close up to the Enemy, makes against us in the long run.18

This is why even though my ADHD makes silently sitting still each morning difficult, I don’t want to give up on it. And honestly, it’s the point where most of my days peak. Those rapid-fire distractions are often exactly what we’re supposed to take captive.

However: plenty of times, they’re not—as when I spent 20 minutes of a recent morning prayer time mentally debating which Saved by the Bell character was the show’s moral backbone.19 But, generally speaking, most distractions that come our way in quiet prayer are precisely what the Spirit is leading us to lay before God.

And as you lay down more of your thoughts, worries, and concerns, it’s like taking an additional brick down, piece by piece, of the wall obstructing you from seeing God, allowing your mind freedom to glorify God and enjoy Him more clearly.

Like the Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper (pronounced “peeper”), of Hot Pieper Summer fame (still pronounced “peeper”) put it, “Only one who is silent is listening.”20 All good thinking, all good speech, all wisdom is downstream of a posture of silence.

And so are good relationships.

Silence is often considered the universal sign of awkwardness. But in reality, it’s the universal sign of intimacy.

For example, when you first start dating someone, the quiet is unbearable—your social-thermometer fires up along with questions about whether you’re compatible. But as time goes on, you find that comfortable silence is the only way a relationship can progress. If you’re not comfortable in shared silence, then you’re not comfortable with them in general—you don’t really, truly, deeply, know them. “The most defective human relationship is precisely one in which the silence of attention is absent.”21

Same thing goes with our relationship to God. When we start praying, it’s a lot of rambling on and on about every little thing. But as we continue praying, we say less because we know God sees our heart more.

Crazily enough, neuroscientists studying silent prayer have noticed that it activates regions of the brain that register relational attachment—suggesting that people really do experience a felt relationship with God in prayer.22 As such, perhaps one of the most joyful things we can do at any given moment is cut out distraction and connect with God; sitting with Him; loving Him; being loved by Him.

Anti-Stimulation Summer

Now I’d like to note: I’m not a spiritual director, pastor, priest, or someone I’m campaigning others to look up to. I’m a layman—the most laymen of laymen.23 So this is more me comparing notes than prescribing things.

A few months ago, I noticed I was spending way too much time online—checking notifications, posting, sharing, scrolling, and layering distractions (i.e., playing music while having conversations while jotting down notes while eating milk chocolate almonds). Reaching into my pocket became an automatic reaction to tiny cracks of inactivity. And this was even after I’d already been through all the life-hacking: grayscaling the phone, setting time limits, shutting the phone off once a week for sabbath, etc.

So rather than pile on new life hacks, I’m trying to train myself to desire that stuff less by using up more free moments to sit, reflect, think, pray, or just sit with God. This includes reclaiming more car rides, commutes, and other checkpoints throughout my day (Substack’s “schedule notes” feature has been a life-saver in this regard).

For me, there are two levels of silence. The first is way less drastic and ascetic; I basically just consider it “daydreaming with God.” Daydreaming is a lost art—it’s remarkably good for us. The silence from no music or podcasts drive is where 90% of my ideas come from (and where 100% of the ideas that turn out to be any good come from).

But then there are some stretches of my day (like a 20-minute stretch in the morning and another few minutes before bed) where the silence is more deliberative, contemplative, and meditative. Usually it’s coupled with some Scripture and lectio divina. This is the second level of silence—sitting still, minimal movements, focused on a single prayer or biblical passage.

All this said: we don’t need silence because a monastic lifestyle or mysticism is the goal; we need it because silence disrupts us from the nagging impulse for stimulation. And once our brains are detoxed from craving more and more stimulation, we’re more open and available to give and receive love—and love is and always will be the real goal.

Lastly, a line from the poet Christian Wiman has really resonated with me lately: I want to become “more fluent in silence.”24

Eventually, the silence that many of us experience as hell can become heaven to a tortured mind. We become fluent in silence because we notice God there. And wherever we’re more available to God is where I’d prefer to be.

1

This isn’t your typical Reality Theology post—we’re trying something new.

Audio voiceover available here for paid subs!

“Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?”

Jesus looks at the man and then answers: “If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.”

You’re probably familiar with this exchange. It’s the story of the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:16-30). Here’s how one writer interprets the passage:

The Gospel of Matthew tells of a rich young man who asked Jesus what good works he must do to inherit eternal life (Matt. 19:16). Jesus responded that if the man wanted to be judged by his works, then he must keep the entire Law—and do so perfectly. The young man thought he had done enough good works to earn a place in heaven because he was judging himself by man-made standards rather than the perfect standard of God. But that’s not how it works. As the apostle James clarifies, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.”1

To me (Griffin), this is a pretty standard reading—nothing really jumps out as “wrong.” But the New Testament scholar Paul T. Sloan bases the intro of his book Jesus and the Law of Moses on all the wrong embedded in this passage.

First off, the man never says anything about being “judged by his works”—and neither does Jesus. Instead, he asks how to obtain this so-called “eternal life” that Jesus had been advertising all over Jerusalem. And Jesus replies, “Keep the commandments.” He doesn’t call out any perfection complex—and there’s no reference to this guy’s belief that he can obey the Law perfectly.

In fact, just one chapter earlier, Jesus tells His disciples how to deal with those who break the commandments (18:15-17). Which tells us that perfect obedience wasn’t assumed; realistically, perfect obedience wasn’t even on their minds.

Beyond that: before and after this exchange, Jesus mentions that He’s going to “repay every person according to his deeds” (16:27; 25:14-46). So if we take that at face value, Jesus’ “Keep the commandments” probably isn’t a cryptic diss to emphasize this guy’s need for grace—it seems more like a very plain response to the man’s question.

Then after saying he’s kept the commandments, the rich young ruler asks, “What am I still lacking?”

Jesus replies, “Come follow me.”

Now, this new invitation doesn’t undo the previous instruction. Meaning, following Jesus isn’t against the Law—it’s what we do to supplement and properly obey it.

So the rich young ruler’s problem isn’t that he wants to keep the Law; it’s that he doesn’t understand Jesus’ interpretation of the Law.

This goes enormously against the grain of popular interpretations that paint the religious folks of Jesus’ day as a foil of Christians who live by grace. Despite the popularity of this interpretation, it isn’t accurate for two reasons:

1. Jews knew they were God’s people because of the covenant, not because of doing good works.

2. Most Jews realized that God didn’t demand moral perfection; they assumed God forgave all their shortcomings—it’s why the sacrificial system existed in the first place.2

Meaning: Jews also lived by grace; it was just a grace that was transferred through the sacrificial system.

This pokes a huge hole in the interpretive status quo. Many modern Jesus followers assume that the Mosaic Law was impractical—a mess that turns us into unloving, legalistic rule-keepers.

Following that line of thinking, many assume that Jesus tossed out all His ancestral customs—as if all the rules about dietary restrictions and ritual purity were silly and unnecessary.

But for Jesus, the Law is less a set of rules to begrudgingly follow than a necessary trellis that the Christian faith is planted within and then grows out of.

Legalism isn’t the problem; our misunderstanding of the purpose of the Law is the problem. And once we see the beauty of Law, it makes delighting in God—and everything about His design—so much easier.

Why We’re Writing This

I (Griffin) don’t read much in the biblical studies genre. But everyone’s been talking about Sloan’s book.

I read it, loved it, and wanted to dedicate a whole post to it. Sloan’s been on some great podcasts, but a short-form interview can’t really capture the scope of his work.

So I asked my friend Daniel to help me condense and popularize the book’s ideas for Substack. I’m a theology doctoral candidate, Daniel’s a biblical studies doctoral candidate. And since I’m a little clumsy in the biblical studies genre, I enlisted Daniel to help tone down the heresy.

Doctoral Discipleship

My name is Daniel, I am a doctoral student in Bible. This blog aims to bridge and blend scholarship and discipleship for the Church.

Also, just to clarify: every bit of wisdom in this article is Sloan’s, not ours. He gets full credit. That said, if you want to push against anything here—we’re not the best guys to push against; we’re just offering an overview of an incredibly important book.

And if this article fascinates you, please buy the book—it’s so good (and surprisingly readable).

Let’s start with probably the most obvious question:

But Didn’t Jesus Break Mosaic Law?

In the church traditions we grew up in, we read Jesus’ skirmishes with the religious leaders throughout the Gospels as if Jesus was breaking—or at least going against—the Law.

So for example, when Jesus healed on the Sabbath, we figured He was ignoring the Law—but it wasn’t “sin” because the healing was for the greater good.

Weirdly enough, Sloan makes a case that even when it really seemed like Jesus was breaking the Law, He was actually staying directly rooted in it.

Yet if that’s true, then why did other Law-keepers get mad at Him? Sloan breaks up the reasons that Jesus got into theological scuffles into three categories:

1. Interpretive disputes—the Pharisees had their own interpretation of the Law that they obeyed as Law; meaning, they built up a system around the Law and treated that system like it was the Law itself. So when Jesus breaks their apocryphal rules, they get heated—not because He’s literally breaking the Law, but because His interpretation of the Law ignores theirs.

2. Messianic signaling—the religious leaders get annoyed when Jesus hints that He’s the Davidic Messiah, the figure foretold in the prophets

3. Temporal misunderstandings—since the Kingdom of heaven is at hand, this means that the future reality of God’s eternal Jubilee is now overlapping with the present, broken world. As such, laws that were specifically reserved for Jubilee can now be lived out in the present, even when it goes against the standards of Law-keeping per usual.

That last one is what causes most of the misunderstandings.

Basically: now that Jesus is here, we’ve entered into a new phase of Law-keeping: one in which the rules that were reserved for “Jubilee” (the celebration that was supposed to happen every 50 years where captives were set free, debts were forgiven, and all creation rested) were now in session.

This is idea is laced within what’s called “Jewish Restoration Eschatology.”3

Jewish Restoration Eschatology

This is essentially the worldview most Jews held to at the time of Jesus’ arrival. The gist is:

This framework is exactly where the Gospels situate Jesus. He arrives to obey the Law perfectly and then relieve Israel of the punishment that’s been accruing ever since they started breaking the covenant in the first place. He’s there to renew, console, heal Israel (Luke 2:25).

And the big difference between Jesus’ interpretation of the Law and everyone else’s is that He’s interpreting the Law as if the restoration is already starting.

Because the coming kingdom is now “at hand,” we have certain liberties with how we should now interpret and live out the Law.

But these liberties aren’t licentious—they’re actually keeping in perfect step with what was already written in the Law. When it’s Jubilee season, the way we imbibe the Law looks different.

In that sense, what puts Jesus at odds with the religious leaders is this rationale: the eternal banquet of heaven is pretty close—and the bridegroom is already here—so why worry about some of these trivial things we usually worry about?

So in a way, the rich young ruler comes to Jesus expecting advice on how to participate in the restoration. And Jesus just says, “Keep the commandments” and “Come, follow me.” The first response invites him to obey the Law; the second invites him to obey the Law like Jesus—as if Jubilee is now in session.

To illustrate how this works, let’s jump through some examples.

You Have Heard That It Was Said…

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives His manifesto for living the best possible life. Importantly, He prefaces it all with: “I have not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.”

Yet, to be perfectly honest with you, I’ve (Griffin) read this line a million times and assumed Jesus was saying that just to sound respectful before launching into a bunch of Law-rewrites. But He’s (unsurprisingly) true to His word: He literally doesn’t change a single dot or iota. For the most part, He’s just moving around the emphases.

Take His six teachings in Matt 5:21-48 for example:

You have heard that it was said…

This is a rhetorical signal that He’s about to quote the Law, which He does:

You shall not murder, and everyone who murders will be liable to judgement.

And then He offers an interpretation (that I wrongly considered a rewrite):

But I say to you: everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement.

According to popular interpretation, this is Jesus moving beyond exterior commandments and putting the focus on the interior heart posture. Basically: renovating your interior so that you cut off the thoughts that might lead to murder at the source, killing two birds with one stone.

That’s part of it. But Jesus isn’t replacing the first part (“don’t murder”) with the second (“don’t be angry”). In fact, He’s actually not saying anything new. The Law banned murder, of course; but it also warned against “harboring anger” and “holding grudges” (Lev. 19:18)—the kinds of behaviors that could lead to murder.

So Jesus is just offering a fuller interpretation by connecting ideas that were already within the Law. His commandment against anger isn’t a modification of what was already there; He’s just putting the spotlight on the purpose of the Law in light of the onset kingdom.

Same thing goes for the next five interpretations:

1. Jesus calls out adultery by restating principles from what the Law says about coveting (Ex. 20-17).

2. Jesus doesn’t undo divorce laws—He just emphasizes that divorce was never the Law’s goal.

3. He grounds His teaching on honest speech in the Law’s existing commands about vows and truthfulness.

4. Jesus doesn’t get rid of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” He tells them to “turn the other cheek,” which is practical take on Deuteronomy 32:35’s prohibition against vengeance.

5. Lastly, He caps the list by saying that we should love our enemies. Even though many assume that caring for the enemy is just a New Testament idea, caring for the enemy is all over the Old Covenant (Ex. 23:4–5). So this commandment is essentially just “love your neighbor” interpreted through a Jubilee lens—one that expands the definition of neighbor to include enemies, foreigners, or opps (sorry).

So Jesus isn’t rewriting the Law. And He also isn’t making the Law too lofty or impossible to actually follow—which is another popular interpretation. He’s staying in the sandbox that the Law built but showing us all how to move and stretch our joints in a way that affords us even more freedom and joy within it.

Now let’s look at how Jesus handles food laws.

Jesus’ Teaching on Food

Here’s an (abbreviated) passage from Mark:

Now the Pharisees noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands. So they asked “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders but eat with defiled hands?”

And Jesus said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! Listen to me and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile…

“Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) (Mark 7:1-20)

Most of us (and New Perspective on Paul scholars) come away from this passage thinking: okay Jesus just loosened the distinction between Jew and Gentile and we can eat pork now. But in actuality, “this scene is not about the permissible menu, but about ingesting permissible food that has become impure.”4

The reason we misinterpret this passage is because we forget to make a distinction between ritual purity and permissible foods. Theologians have made this mistake ever since the church got going.5

But the Pharisees aren’t mad about the food they’re eating—they’re mad that the disciples are eating with unclean/defiled hands. And Jesus calls them out for “keeping to the tradition” rather than the Law. There’s nothing in the Law about making sure to wash your hands before eating food—their concern is based on a Pharisaical addition to the Law.

So Jesus’ counter-criticism comes from the fact that He knows that food eaten with unclean hands (and even unclean food) is purified through the body’s digestive processes. Basically, what goes into a person doesn’t defile them, because it doesn’t touch the “heart.”

So weirdly, the phrase “thus he declared all foods clean” is a poor translation of what’s actually happening here. Instead, it’s better understood to mean that the body itself “cleanses” food through digestion. Jesus isn’t tossing out food laws, He’s just pointing out that eating with unwashed hands doesn’t make someone ritually impure.

So yet again: Jesus isn’t rejecting the Law—he’s pushing back on an added tradition and making a point about how impurity actually works.

Now for (maybe) the biggest elephant in the room:

The Cleansing of the Temple

Most people think of the cleansing of the temple as the crescendo of Jesus’ annoyance with the Jewish religion. But again, He’s not undoing their traditions or practices; He’s simply critiquing the way those traditions and practices became distorted. In fact, Jesus was even evoking the same frustrations that various Jewish sects of His day felt toward the way the temple was being managed.6

Plus, the cleansing of the temple isn’t impulsive lashing out; it’s shaped by Jesus’ realization that Israel still hasn’t repented from the very actions that made them fall out of God’s favor—and their rejection of Him was the last straw. It’s why He weeps over the city as He approaches it and curses a fig tree: He knows judgment is coming their way.

As such, His arrival at the temple simply reiterates what He already knew: that the people’s unfaithfulness was going to destroy the temple (and it actually was destroyed about 40 years after His resurrection).

So the main reason He cleanses the temple is because, despite He and John the Baptizer’s warnings, the temple still isn’t functioning as a true “house of prayer.”

I Am Who You Say I Am

There’re plenty other similar cases in the Gospels—like telling a man not to bury his father or “breaking” the Sabbath.

But if Jesus’ claims about Himself are true, then He can override certain commands. So what looks like “breaking” the Law to a Pharisee is actually more like a priest doing necessary work on the Sabbath, or a priest telling a man to put off burying his father because the God of the universe has become flesh and that warrants some exceptions from our usual day-to-day obligations.

And this is precisely what creates the tension that gets Him killed: since the Pharisees don’t recognize His priesthood, every move He makes gets under their skin more and more.

Sloan uses this analogy: normally, running a red light violates the law. But if you’re driving an ambulance en route to the hospital, you’re allowed to run lights because the situation is urgent. However, the ambulance has the advantage of being visibly recognized as an ambulance. But if an unmarked car runs a red light, the driver needs to make a case for why they were in such a rush—and a driver that can’t prove the urgency would get ticketed. So the same action—running a red light—is permissible for a driver whose authority is recognized but transgressive for someone who’s unauthorized.7

So thanks to the way the religious leaders refused to recognize Jesus’ authority, they don’t detect His picture-perfect Law-keeping and He’s put up for crucifixion.

The Cross

Since God’s people yet again rejected God’s call to repent, Israel still remains in a kind of ongoing exile from God’s blessing.

So Jesus steps in to deliver them from their exile by giving His unblemished self as a ransom to pay for the weight of their sins—taking the brunt of Israel’s outstanding failures so that they can return from exile and participate in the blessings God had to withhold on account of their rebellion.

The debts that corrupted their participation in this kingdom way of life are forgiven—washed clean, demolished, the veil that exiled them from the holy of holies is torn.

All of which is confirmed by His resurrection—signaling restoration through His enthronement as Messiah over Israel, the nations, and the human heart.

(!!!!!!!)

From this Messianic posture, He sends out his followers with a clear mission: call everyone to repentance, announce forgiveness through the new covenant, and invite them to live under the Law according to Jesus.

Okay great; we’ve covered a ton of ground so far.

But now you’re probably wondering: if Jesus wasn’t opposed to the Law, and didn’t abolish it, then are we in sin for eating pork and not abiding by ritual purity laws?

Great question.

Peter’s Vision in Acts

Many astute Bible readers are probably thinking of Peter’s vision in Acts 10 as a rebuttal to Sloan’s argument. But let’s break that scene down: Peter receives an apocalyptic-like vision and falls into a trance. In said trance, God seems to declare that all the food laws are abolished (i.e., “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” 10:15).

But according to Sloan, this is a misreading. The book of Acts is a story from start to finish about the inclusion of Gentiles—and thus we should read almost every moment in Acts in this light.

The food in Peter’s vision represents not just mere sustenance, but Gentiles themselves. So in contrast to the way Jews rejected certain foods as “unclean” (unholy), God declares that we need to accept “unclean” Gentiles as if they’re clean (holy) food.

Which helps us make sense of the pivotal moment in Acts just a few verses later where Peter sees the Holy Spirit fall on Gentiles and says, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34).

This line shows us that it wouldn’t really make sense if Peter’s vision from a few verses earlier was about food. As Sloan notes, Jews were already able to dine with Gentiles without breaking food laws—so why would God use this pivotal vision to redeclare something they already knew?

Thus, Peter’s vision more likely refers to Gentiles as opposed to tossing out food laws.

And this idea leads to the

Jerusalem Council

What do we make of the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15)?

Sloan’s argument here is so dense that we’d recommend checking out the book if you’re curious or confused. But the gist is: the council debate wasn’t necessarily about whether Jewish believers should keep the Law; it was always very much assumed that Jewish believers would still keep the Law. So instead, the debates are more about which parts of the Law apply for Gentiles and which don’t.

And the council’s answer actually draws directly from Leviticus. The Mosaic Law already distinguished between laws that applied for Israel and those that applied only for non-Israelites living among them.

Which is very wild; before Sloan pointed this out, I didn’t connect any trace of Mosaic Law as informing Gentile NT guidelines.

So by following the instructions that Leviticus prescribed for non-Jews living among Jews, the council welcomes Gentiles on the same basis. Except now, the “foreigners” (Gentiles) are welcomed entirely through the gift of God’s grace. As such, they can participate equally with the Jewish Christians. The difference is that Gentiles are exempt from certain laws that Jewish believers are still technically supposed to follow.8

So for Gentile Christians, we’re not expected to keep the entire Law. So we can eat pork! Wahoo. Going off of what the Law itself teaches, we’re only required to abide by certain commands—such as avoiding idolatry, sexual immorality, murder, and everything else specifically outlined by the NT.

This same pattern shows up in Paul’s letters, but it’s a little harder to pick up on since his discussion of Law and grace is coded in the theological debates of His day.

Pauline Theology for Us Today

Paul says some pretty radical things about the Law. He calls the Law a “curse,” says Christ is the “end of Law,” and that the power of sin is the Law. So, how does Sloan’s argument fit within Paul?

Weeding through this maze just requires looking at Paul’s audience. Most of Paul’s readers were Gentiles—or the nations, pagans, etc. And one of Paul’s main frustration points in his ministry is Gentiles trying to become Jews through keeping the Law.

In Galatians, Paul (heatedly) writes that if justification came through circumcision or obedience to the Law, then Christ died for nothing. He warns against getting “Judaized,” or feeling the compulsion to keep the Law as an addition to following Christ.

So Paul’s point isn’t that the Law is bad: he says it’s holy and blameless (Rom 7:12, Phil 3:6). He’s just stating that the Law on its own doesn’t lead to being “in Christ.” As such, those who try to earn good standing through the Law are basically making a statement that Christ’s work toward inclusion of the Gentiles was all for nothing.

Paul doesn’t end the Law, but calls for participation in Christ as the measure of justification for Gentiles.

Okay, now it’s finally time to ask:

So What?

Sadly, scholars have spent a lot of the post-Reformation era criticizing the Law as legalistic and subpar for the sake of highlighting what makes Jesus unique. Thankfully, we have plenty of reasons to reject that suspicion. The Law of the LORD really is perfect.

Now, Sloan admits his work may still have errors. The paint is still wet on his theories. We’re excited to read more responses to Sloan’s work in the coming years.

But for now, there are some incredibly important takeaways:

• Jesus doesn’t reject the Law—He keeps it and teaches others to do the same.

• When He or His disciples “break” certain rules, it’s not that the Law no longer matters, but that higher obligations (Messianic realities, Jubilee) take priority in specific situations.

• And in places where the Law merely permits something—like divorce, or taking a fellow believer to court—Jesus calls people toward a higher ideal rooted in God’s original intent for those laws in the first place.

Personally, our favorite takeaway is how this unveils the hidden joys of obedience.

Israel never framed the Law as if it was a legalistic burden. They compared the Law to the sweetest things their taste buds could imagine (Ps. 19:10).

We can especially see this in Judaism’s longing for a future restoration. One component of their restoration theology was the idea God would give them a new heart that would allow them to obey the Law perfectly.

In other words, the Jewish vision of heaven didn’t include becoming “free” from the Law; it was a heaven where they could keep God’s law without failure.

So, flipped around, this tells us that the laws God gave us on earth are the same laws that govern heaven. By keeping God’s guidelines on earth, we bring ourselves and those around us closer to heaven.

In this sense, God’s laws are literal pedagogies for living a flourishing life.9

It’s just hard to notice it from the outside. To use an analogy, picture someone from a thousand years ago time traveling to your living room as you decorate for Christmas. They might ask: why go through all the hassle of hanging up a tree, decorating the walls, putting up lights, wrapping gifts? And we’d tell them: that’s the best part!

From the outside looking in, the Law seems arduous, difficult, or just a general drag. But from the inside, all the effort and ceremony is part of what “revives the soul”—just like how decorating our homes for Christmas is part of what makes the season so fun.

Point is: if we continue to frame the Law as if it was a legalistic nightmare that Jesus criticized, then we’re missing the purpose that was always embedded in the law: that by keeping the commandments with a pure heart—best demonstrated by Jesus, our perfect model—we’ll learn to delight in God as God delights in us.

C. S. Lewis captured something like this when He wrote about how God woos us into loving Him before revealing the reward that comes packaged with it:

Note that life after death…was itself a late revelation. God trained the Hebrews for centuries to believe in Him without promising them an after-life, and [God] trained me in the same way for about a year. It is like the disguised prince in the fairy tale who wins the heroine’s love before she knows he is anything more than a woodcutter. What would be a bribe if it came first had better come last.10

Say what you want about it, but it’s a great illustration: God trains us to love Him on earth through guidelines that offer glimpses of heaven. And when we learn to love Him on earth, it makes earth—and even the eternal promises that come along with heaven—all the brighter.

At some point in our life with God, every commandment stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling as it was meant to feel: an invitation to participate in heaven on earth.

All of which is best experienced through the Messiah who showed us how to live the Law as if heaven was already in session.

Translated into conversational vernacular, it basically comes out to something like: if we keep setting our hearts on achieving the perfect, we’ll forget to celebrate small victories that we encounter on the way toward the better.

Failing to realize the small victories in moving toward the better is a chronic condition of modern politics. Someone introduces a plan to lower homelessness or increase housing availability or modify public transit, but after one person voices a single flaw in the plan, the motion loses steam and crashes out.

Yet just because there are issues with a plan doesn’t mean the plan isn’t good—it just means it isn’t perfect.

But perfect isn’t realizable. On this side of the eschaton, it’s an illusion, a mirage, a chimera; perfection exists only “in obituaries and eulogies.”2

And treating the perfect as if it’s a realistic goal sabotages all our small, remarkably ordinary, steps toward the good.

On top of that, ignoring “good enough” is actually terrible for us. To illustrate why, let’s walk through a concept in the psychology of well-being—one that’s crucial for living the good life—called “satisficing.”3

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Scientists love talking about happiness. But if you study what they say about it, you’ll find a lot of contradictions.

For example, every couple years a new study comes out about how getting married and having kids boosts your happiness. And also every couple years, another study comes out that says staying single and childless and grinding away at your career is the best way to find happiness.1

This is why it’s smart stay a little skeptical when someone says “this study says.”

Not because all research is shoddy, but because it’s really hard to produce a finding that’s true for everyone, everywhere, all the time, across the universe.

The economist Alex Edmans highlights how this happens a lot with studies about creativity. Sometimes a new article comes out saying, “Research shows that a messy office space is a sign of creativity,” and then another comes out saying “Study shows that geniuses maintain a tidy workspace.”2

Both can be true because a small survey showed that they were true—but it’s literally impossible to prove something this arbitrary as “true” for all people at all places at all times.

In a much more troubling example, Brian Nosek rounded up 270 researchers to try to reproduce 100 studies from the world’s top three academic psych journals.3 What they found was shocking: they could only reproduce 36% of the studies. And even the ones they reproduced showed weaker results than the original studies claimed.

Meaning: POSSIBLY HALF OF ALL STUDIES DON’T ACTUALLY PROVE ANYTHING.

Which is why, even though I love studies, I try to use them more as analogies that can inch us toward the truth rather than as the truth itself.

However, I’m a big fan of “meta-analyses”—which are basically studies of studies. They take a pile of peer-reviewed research about a similar subject and then see if they can come to any definitive conclusions when looking at what they say as a whole.

Here’s a couple basic truths about the world that meta-analyses have found:

• It’s not good to be lonely.

• Prosocial acts (basically, acting generously toward others) are good for you.4

• Humans have an impressive resilience toward traumatic experiences.5

• The American voter has a uniquely low level of political knowledge (this isn’t a snarky joke, check the footnote).6

Nothing groundbreaking—but they’re nice reminders.

Now, I’ve been ramping up to a point thus far, and now that ramp ends. There was a huge analysis a few years back that teamed up 18 of the top happiness researchers from around the world to reassess this universal question: what should we do to become happy?7

It’s super fascinating; given that the 18 researchers all had their hand in some happiness meta-analysis at some point throughout their careers, this study was almost like a meta-analysis of meta-analyses (and now it’s time to retire that word for the rest of this article).

So these 18 leading happiness experts boiled down all their expertise into 68 key strategies for becoming happier.

Here are the top 10, modified slightly for the theological angle.8

10 Ways to Become Happier

The researchers broke up their recommendations into a few different categories:

1. Connect with family and friends.

When we’re in a good mood and want to celebrate, the average American’s first thought is: let’s buy something.

It’s not entirely our fault; we see roughly 8,000 ads per day, many of which show humans happily using products, insinuating that we’re incomplete without whatever they’re selling. Ads are a way stronger formational machine than we give them credit for.

However, if we’re looking to celebrate or boost our happiness, we actually have a perfect example in Luke’s Gospel. Like the woman who sweeps her house all day looking for a coin (Luke 15:8-10), the best way to keep joy flowing is by inviting people over (or going out, if your house is too disorganized at present thanks to your pipes bursting and ruining half of it—which may be based on a true personal story).

Even though our go-to for letting good times roll is buying stuff, it’s much (much) wiser to treat our happiness impulse by investing in relationships.

We apparently don’t even need to do anything extravagant—just cutting out unnecessary clutter in our daily schedules (checking email, putting in extra hours at the office, refreshing the Substack app way too much, etc.) does wonders.

Your future eulogy will not include things like “Grinded a lot,” “Stared at their phone frequently,” or “Put in more hours than their coworkers.” Instead, your eulogy will consist of memories of how much you loved and cared for those closest to you. Live in such a way that makes for a good eulogy, not just a good resume.

George Vaillant, one of the researchers behind the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development summarized almost a century of research on human well-being like this: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”9

It makes sense; in God’s presence is fullness of joy (Ps. 16:11). And what is God? Love (1 John 4:16).

2. Join a club.

Have you ever wondered why The Breakfast Club is such a classic?

It’s because it’s 90 minutes of catharsis. Strangers come together, work through their problems and insecurities as a unit, and find that, in spite of all the things they felt self-conscious about, they all still like each other.

For a world that’s increasingly lonely, stories like this represent something we all crave: a community that lets you come as you are and they’ll still accept you. It’s sort of a metaphor for church (I think? Film analysis is best left to ).

So “join a club” basically just means finding a group of people who speak your language—who share fascinations about the same niches.

Obviously, church is the best community. But beyond that, my friends and I built a book club. Less bookish friends joined a volleyball league. My mom volunteers at a food pantry.

We don’t really think of clubs as producers of happiness—but it turns out that they’re often where we feel the most belonging, and where we feel the most belonging is usually where we find ourselves happiest.

3. Make a habit of getting active (both mentally and physically).

Workouts—both the physical and mental kind—are preposterously good for us.

We don’t have to morph our whole personality into “gym” or populate our IG with mirror pics. But a habit of moving our bodies is critical. And same thing goes for challenging our minds: whether it’s by creative problem solving, reading, or sudoko—mental exercise bulks up mental health.

This pairs nicely with David Mathis’ A Little Theology of Exercise and my recent post on the uncoddling of the Christian mind. Mathis argues that exercise is a wonderful way to care for the imago Dei of our bodies (so long as it’s not for vainglory or mogging); and I argue that our minds are a frontier we should train for the glory of God.10

4. Practice religion.

Obviously, I’d put this one at the top if I was in charge of the study—especially considering that the first three are enhanced through the Christian worldview.

It isn’t rocket science. Materialism and scientific naturalism aren’t all that compelling. Religion safeguards us from the terror of no purpose, no belonging, no metanarrative.

And even though there’s a lot of talk about how horribly atheistic our world is, the social sciences are surprisingly pro-religion. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation, says his family attends synagogue every week even though he’s an atheist: he knows that religion is just plain good for us and for society.11 Various studies over the years have shown that religion lowers depression, anxiety, suicidality, loneliness, and even cardiovascular disease.12

Also, importantly: they mention that we should practice religion rather than just be religious. This is crucial—especially for Christians. As Dallas Willard put it, the promises of Christianity ring hollow to those who claim to follow but don’t actually follow.13

So for the Christian worldview, this involves any number of activities. Prayer, Scripture study and memorization, fasting, generosity, gathering for worship—these are among the happiest activities we could choose at any given moment.

Point is: life is boring without transcendence. We could use much more of it.

5. Act how a nice person would act.

Our culture glamorizes the idea of the disagreeable lone wolf hustling their way to success, stepping on other people’s heads to get up the ladder. Sadly, young men are given exactly these kinds of role models in the online space. Aggro-influencers like Andrew Tate or Clavicular attract thousands of young disciples through peddling a pseudo-heroism and distorted-masculinity that looks less like a brave Hercules rising to their culture’s challenges than a horrendously selfish Dionysus. It’s not only a hollow way to live—it’s horrible for our well-being.

Agreeableness, along with kindness, is usually seen as weakness—but it’s consistently, highly, and positively correlated with more happiness and a better overall life.

Oddly enough, even though the alpha archetype is usually who we assume gets the most jobs, promotions, and opportunities, the opposite is true: no one likes working with disagreeable people. So they tend to have less job opportunities and business partnerships (and community).

6. Do generous stuff.

The brain rewards us with more dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin when we perform acts of kindness than when we pursue self-oriented pleasures.

Now, generosity always sounds way better in theory until we arrive at this question: what if I’m embarrassingly broke at present thanks to the deductible our insurance required to fix our flooded house?

A very relatable question. Thankfully, generosity doesn’t just mean giving money; it’s also generosity of presence—basically, giving away our time.

Think about Jesus’ teaching from the Beatitudes: “Flourishing are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”14 Mercy isn’t just financial generosity. The crowds Jesus preached to were filled with people who literally didn’t have money to spare.15

This is why the Welsh minister Matthew Henry argued that if you couldn’t show mercy through financial giving, then you should show mercy by hanging out with people who need the company, sitting with those who are suffering, and being a joyful presence to whoever needs one.16

It’s the only beatitude that’s perfectly proportional: those who are merciful will flourish, and those who flourish are merciful.

7. Check your health.

Over the past month, I’ve had a lot of random stomach pain. Because I’m a melodramatic complainer, my wife suggested I get proactive and figure it out, thereby mitigating the complaining. So I started by subtracting random stuff from my diet until I found the culprit: a snack that had pumpkin seeds in it. For whatever reason (and apologies to Big Pumpkin Seed), it made my stomach twist up like a contortionist.

I use this ridiculous story because: if you notice something wrong with your health, do something about it. I feel so much better now, and it’s just because I stopped being stubborn and ignoring something that seemed off.

Same thing goes for mental health: if you’re experiencing chronic anxiety, don’t just pretend it away. Seek professional help, talk to friends, pray, see a spiritual director.

There are plenty of measures we can take to raise our standard of health. And it’s easier to focus and do good work in every area of our life if we’re functioning optimally.

8. Experience nature.

Carl Jung said that the “faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature” was one of the basic factors that augments happiness in the human mind.17

Various studies have shown that spending time in a woods rather than an urban setting dramatically lowers stress, enhances memory, and increases positive emotions.

This is particularly beneficial for Jesus followers, since God uses His creation as a way to reveal His beauty, goodness, and design (Ps. 8, 19; Rom 1:20). But sadly, it’s something lots of Jesus followers take for granted.

I could ramble on for another 2,000 words, but I think Charles Spurgeon offers the best summary for why enjoying creation is part of our duty:

If I were a great artist, I should think it a very small compliment if my son came into my house, and said he would not notice the pictures I had painted, because he only wanted to think of me.

He therein would condemn my paintings, for if they were good for anything, he would be rejoiced to see my hand in them.

Oh, but surely, everything that comes from the hand of such a Master-artist as God has something in it of himself!

The Lord doth rejoice in his works, and shall not his people do so? He said of what he had made, “It is very good;” and he cannot be very good himself who thinks that which God makes is not very good. In this he contradicts his God.

It is a beautiful world we live in.18

9. Focus on the happiness of others.

As the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl famously said, “Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue.”19 We can’t find happiness by pursuing it directly; it’s more like a welcome side effect that happens while we’re doing other meaningful things—focusing on God and the good of others, namely.

The philosopher Charles Taylor notes that even though modern people try to define ourselves apart from other people, we can’t fulfill ourselves without knitting ourselves into a web of relationships with other people.20 So by paying attention to the needs and wants of those around us, we find both identity and satisfaction.

Also, at 12 on this study’s list of happiness boosting activities is “volunteer.” So, taken together, one of the best way to boost your own happiness is by boosting the happiness of other people via volunteering. Caring for others will take you a whole lot farther than obsessing over self-care.

10. Keep learning.

This doesn’t just mean “read more books.” Learning in this sense is geared toward growth.

Through stretching ourselves, we stumble into “psychological richness.”21 It’s a kind of experiential happiness that comes from adventure, going out on a limb, challenging ourselves, moving across the world, taking a leap in a different kind of job, starting a new hobby, or committing to spiritual disciplines that stretch us. It’s why traveling to new cultures or picking up a new hobby can make us feel so alive.

It’s easy to stay in comfortable ruts. But the brain makes less memories that way. For example, when you’re a kid, it feels like everyday lasts a week and summer break lasts a year because every experience is so new to us. But as we get older, time feels like it goes faster because we automate our routines. We might spend 30 minutes each day driving to and from work, but that rarely clocks in with our longterm memory because there’s nothing new to register. It all becomes a blur. But if you try something new, plan a surprise trip, or join a new group, the experience feels weighty and significant simply because we’ve never experienced it before.

The richness of growth—or even the kind of joy that comes from enduring difficulty and coming out the other end stronger—is a necessary component of a happy life. We could even retitle this rule “stay curious.” You’ll live a better life if you do.

Happiness Isn’t Selfish

I know lots of people like to dichotomize joy and happiness, but the two are much more related than we give them credit for.

The idea that happiness is selfish and joy is righteous only really makes sense if we’re going off pop-definitions of happiness.

If we define happiness as maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain through pursuing dopamine loops and passive living, then yes—that’s definitely not much of a priority for us in God’s mind.

But a happiness that comes from living a rich, moral life that’s centered around Him and His kingdom is something followers of Jesus have been pointing toward from the very beginning.22 Joy, happiness, flourishing, etcetera aren’t the goal of our spirituality, but they’re an undeniable side effect.

To end, here’s one of my favorite quotes from the evangelist George Whitfield:

Is it the end of religion to make men happy, and is it not every one’s privilege to be as happy as he can? Does Jesus want your heart only for the same end as the devil does, to make you miserable? No, the dear Savior desires to make you happy, that you may leave your sins, to sit down eternally with him.23

Amen.

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On September 13, 1980, the philosopher and diplomat Charles Malik delivered the inaugural address at the dedication of Wheaton College’s new Billy Graham Center. He shuffled to the podium and declared through his thick Lebanese accent that Evangelicals had “Two Tasks”: “saving the soul and saving the mind.”1

And at the dedication named after perhaps the most famous Protestant since Luther, he declared that the Protestant church was failing at the “mind” part. It’s worth reading this chunk in full:

The greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.2

No one was saying “mic drop” in 1980, but this might’ve warranted starting. Or perhaps “This slaps,” in case a Gen Z felt the need to differentiate themselves from “mic drop’s” millennial cringe. Almost 50 years later, it’s more relevant than ever.

Malik wasn’t reinventing the wheel; he was simply retrieving something that feels a bit foreign to modern Jesus followers: that Christianity always has been and always should be smart.

The foreignness of this idea is probably thanks to the way Christianity’s reputation for intelligence ebbs and flows according to its most famous living representatives; and in 1980, Malik believed the ebb was so low that the robust life of the Christian mind had been rotting away in tombs for at least a couple centuries.

Today, this seems like a give-in.3 I recently conversed with an atheist who mentioned something about space travel and then apologized like he’d said something politically incorrect because, given my faith, I probably found space stuff offensive. But historically, the reputation of lacking intelligence and stalling scientific advancement is kind of an anomaly.4 The points in history where intelligence or literacy drop are exactly the points where Christians swoop in to raise the bar.

For example,

when the economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann studied the impact of the Protestant Reformation, they found that early reformers raised the overall GDP of any society they settled in.

Specifically, they analyzed 450 counties around Wittenberg, the city where Luther nailed the 95 Theses. Before the Reformation, there wasn’t any variation in GDP between communities near Wittenberg and other areas around Germany; after the Reformation, there was an immediate jump in both income and literacy. This then spread throughout other Protestant settlements like a eu-contagion (good virus).5 As faith spread, so did economic growth.6

But even crazier, when they studied why, they found that it wasn’t just thanks to the good ole “Protestant Work Ethic.” It was thanks to reading.7

Around this time, most religious communities were Catholic, which meant that the Bible was largely reserved for clergy, and laypeople virtually only heard Scripture through their local priest. So when reformers like Luther and Tyndale started translating the Vulgate and Erasmus’ Greek NT into their mother tongues, it not only gave people more opportunity to learn to read but a moral imperative to learn to read.

Once the average working-class family learns to read, it opens up a world of possibility never before available. Literacy is a gateway drug to the entire web of human knowledge. They could read the best business practices or buy an anatomy textbook or start a literary circle.8 By empowering people to use their minds well, Christianity empowers us to do everything else well, as well.

This is just one example of the hundreds we could draw from. There’s the complex philosophy of the patristics to the rise of scholasticism to the founding of nearly every Ivy League to the 72.5% of Nobel prizes that’ve been awarded to Jesus followers. Christians have an impressive history of honoring God with their minds.

Anyways, thesis: a book called The Coddling of the American Mind made waves a few years back. It argued that we’re becoming more intellectually fragile thanks to a cornucopia of misguided cultural and educational practices. Even though we could carve out a similar history among Christians (in fact, someone already carved out that history, which we’ll talk about in a sec), I’m not gonna argue that here.

I’m going to argue the opposite: that we’re currently living through a recession of Christian brainrot. It’s still out there—the caricature exists and it’s sometimes even justified—but it’s dying. I’m convinced that there’s a great un-coddling of the Christian mind in progress.

Data to Support that Last Sentence

If you’re looking for empirical data to support this thesis, I have none. There isn’t any yearly census on Christian intelligence. I do wish more statisticians traveled from church to church asking parishioners, “How dumb are you?” but alas, no one’s started yet. However, I’m positive that they’ll start now; my Substack posts grease a lot of wheels in academia.9

So my argument is anecdotal.

But hear me out:

I first started noticing brainrot reversal back in the late 2010s when lots of Jesus followers started getting paranoid about big tech and social media.10 Whereas most of my secular friends didn’t think twice about waking up and grabbing their phone first thing, Christians started noticing the way infinite scrolls made it harder to sustain attention on prayer and Scripture. From there, it was just a stone’s throw from initiating church wide digital fasts, deleting social media, and investing in the life of the mind for the sake of reclaiming whatever parts of it big tech was stealing.

This probably contributes to why more and more Christians are picking up tough books for the sake of toughness. Not just the classics of the Christian canon like Confessions or Life Together, but genre-spanning works like Brothers Karamazov and Shakespeare and David Foster Wallace’s oeuvre.11 Reading tough books exercises our attention spans, which punches up our ability to read the Bible and invest attention toward God.12

While passionate preachers get the most social media airplay, there’s also been a mass resonance with the passionate preachers who also do their research. Personally, my first exposure to the idea that Christians were allowed to have intelligence was through listening to podcasts of John Mark Comer talking with Mark Sayers. Today, figures like Gavin Ortlund, Preston Sprinkle, Wes Huff, the guys from Mere Fidelity, and the Bible Project’s Tim Mackie and Jon Collins provide online materials to anyone interested in digging past the platitudes of the faith. You might not agree with some—or even any—of these people, but they’re all at least attempting to patch up the general slop of the Christian Internet subculture with some intellectually healthy oases.

Among my college students, I’ve been surprised with how many are interested in the deep end rather than the shallows. Some church history students show up knowing more about the Filioque controversy or the apocrypha’s history in the biblical canon than I do. These 19-year-olds are casually reading Plato and Kierkegaard and master’s level textbooks.

On Substack, Christians quote Byung-Chul Han and Hartmut Rosa with the ease of a teenager quoting Drake on X. Boethius’ 1500-year-old Consolations of Philosophy had a surprising resurgence last year, topping many year-end reading lists. Millions are joining a trend called Hot Pieper Summer, which is a deep dive into the German Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper. Others are voluntarily hopping on YouTuber Jared Henderson’s 2026 philosophy reading list—which, as a philosophy professor, I would not refer to as “light” reading.

But my favorite example

comes from the historian Mark Noll, famous for writing The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book traces the robust contributions that Christians made toward art, philosophy, and science before noting an abrupt drop off right around the rise of evangelicalism. The title is a snarky jab: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”13

For years, Noll became a figurehead for any interviewer that wanted to highlight how dumb evangelicals were.

But interestingly, Noll isn’t as sold out for his argument nowadays. Two decades after his book dropped, he said that even though “serious problems continue to bedevil evangelical thinking” he was hopeful for the future thanks to a “renewed intellectual life at Christian colleges, Christian study centers at research universities, further dialogue between evangelical and Roman Catholic scholars, the influence of Christians in the broader academy, and the launch of serious Christian periodicals.”14

Basically, even though there’re plenty bad apples nowadays, there’re also plenty reasons to stay optimistic. And historians like Noll note that this is because Christianity naturally inspires curiosity:

Since the reality of Jesus Christ sustains the world, so too should the reality of Jesus Christ sustain the most wholehearted, unabashed, and unembarrassed efforts to understand the world and all that is in it...The light of Christ illuminates the laboratory, his speech is the fount of communication, he makes possible the study of humans in all their interactions, he is the source of all life, he provides the wherewithal for every achievement of human civilization, he is the telos of all that is beautiful. He is, among his many other titles, the Christ of the Academic Road.15

That last line drops us at the next point:

God’s Not Dead in Academia

Thanks to films like God’s Not Dead, there’s a stereotype that Jesus is hated throughout higher ed—philosophy departments in particular. But this isn’t even close to true.

Awhile back, the passionately atheistic Quentin Smith complained about the “desecularization” of academia thanks to the theism that was overflowing from the philosophy departments.

A philosopher’s theism is particularly troubling for an atheist because it’s the kind of theism that can’t just keep to itself. Since philosophy is an “organizing” or “second-order discipline,” it “keeps the books” on all other fields of knowledge.16 It’s why hospitals hire philosophers to help their doctors figure out when and where to draw the moral line. As such, when philosophers become Christians or vice versa, it spreads faith into other fields like a eucontagion.

And today, “perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.” Presently, the Society of Christian Philosophers is the largest special interest group among the entire philosophical community.17 As Smith lamented, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”18

Now, I’m sure you could come up with just as many counterexamples of Christians doing horrendously braindead things. Yet I also think that if you rounded up counterexamples, but subtracted any examples in which the culprit didn’t fit the profile of “resilient” or “engaged” Christian, I’m confident you’d see this trend more clearly. Cultural Christians don’t even pursue God seriously with their heart, so why would they pursue him with their mind?

But more important than whether this trend exists is that it should exist.

Why we should love the Lord with all our minds.

The Old Covenant’s Shema Israel gave us this incredible mantra: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:5). It’s a central affirmation of the faith—almost like the Lord’s Prayer of the Hebrew Bible.

But later, when Jesus is asked about the “greatest commandment,” He restates the Shema with one crucial difference: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).

Why add “mind”? Well, NT scholar Frederick Dale Bruner argues that

Jesus wanted to accent believers’ mental, critical, and rational love of God. Good thinking loves God as much as good loving and good strength, and this thinking deserves equal time with these usually more celebrated faculties.19

It’s also fascinating that Jesus threw “mind” on the Shema in a culture that was obsessed with philosophy and rhetoric. It’s almost as if Jesus was instructing His followers to punch up their mental fortitude because He knew they’d run into some high-minded doubters. And later on, the Spirit empowers these uneducated fishermen and poor communicators to go head-to-head with some of the philosophical heavyweights of their day (Acts 4:8-22; 17:16-34; 18:4; 24-26).

The Spirit empowers our thinking, reasoning, and imaginations—but our minds are also like muscles that we should exercise toward a deeper love of God.

God still makes plenty room for people with little intelligence; His appreciation of us doesn’t change in proportion to IQ or reading challenges. But simultaneously, “God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other kind of slacker.”20

Point is: Christianity is wonderfully accommodating toward anyone who doesn’t want to learn. But the curious will flourish—stumbling into a forever-deepening treasure chest of ideas and wisdom and deep contemplation.

However, the goal is always aimed toward thinking better rather than just knowing more stuff. While on earth, Jesus was constantly training people to think better. The Pharisees of His day didn’t lack head knowledge—they were just walking storehouses of misguided thinking. So Jesus tried to teach them to trade their bad theology for good theology.

For us today, the best and first venue for trading bad theology for good is our embodied communities. But beyond that, we should also try to read classic theological texts or listen to high-caliber podcasts or engage in dialogue with curious friends. That’s how we weed out bad theology from good theology, which brings us closer and closer to embodying the truth within Jesus’ way and life.

Okay now it’s time to

Cover All My Bases So I Don’t Get Roasted by Obvious Counterarguments

Everytime anyone makes an argument in this direction, there’s concern that it’s hating on the “simple gospel.” It’s not. The Gospel is simple in some ways (kids can understand it), but highly complex in other ways (see the never-ending stream of commentaries on Romans 9-11).

The basic truths of the Gospel are digestible for everyone—and we should never not rejoice in that—but the idea that digging deeper into theology makes the Good News less good just isn’t true. The fear that loving God with our intellects weighs down a vibrant, infectious faith is a total myth.

Take the 17th century French Mystic Jeanne Guyon, for example. Her writings are laced with some of the most spiritually profound sentiments I’ve ever read. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve come across anything that feels so deeply rooted in a love for God.

Yet, if you’ve ever read any of her books, it’s more than likely that you’ve read an aggressive paraphrase. To translate it word for word from the French would leave almost any reader without a doctorate alienated. You can read this footnote to fact check whether I’m exaggerating.21

And yet Guyon’s complex writings started a small revival throughout Dijon, France. It even caused such a stir that her book was banned. Then when authorities went house to house confiscating her book for a public burning, they rounded up a full 300 copies! To find 300 copies of anything in one small French village in the late 1600s is unheard of. This wasn’t just an intellectual curiosity, it was a spiritual hunger.

We could list plenty of other examples: Augustine, Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, Leonard Ravenhill, Dallas Willard, and Tim Keller. All of them were brilliant, and the brilliance didn’t get in the way of a vibrant inner life—if anything, it seemed to enhance their magnetic impact.

All to say, the contrast between the life of the mind and the life of the spirit is a false dichotomy. In fact, some recent research opposes the idea that faith and IQ have a negative correlation—in some ways, faith might refine IQ.22

We don’t have to choose between intellectual rigor and spiritual fire; we can and should choose both. And if you ever do find yourself on the path toward research-induced social passivity—as many have—the response is simple: repent and reevaluate the purpose of your learning (i.e., learning for the sake of love rather than punching up the ego). But even then, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just because the bathwater made the baby a little too introverted. To rephrase that in a way that humans actually talk: don’t throw out a plan just because you can rattle off some flaws; adapt it until its flaws turn into strengths.

So here’s the challenge:

read something hard this year. Maybe it’s just something two or three rungs above the reading level you’re comfortable with. Classics from a few centuries ago work great. Is there a book you’ve been curious about for a while but didn’t feel comfortable trying out? Give that one a shot.

But beyond that, bring some intellectual life into our communities: pick up a challenging Bible commentary to go through with your small group. Audit a course in something interesting. Go through some dense videos from YouTube didacts with friends.

For me personally, I’m going through the philosopher Charles Taylor’s bibliography this year (one down, a bunch to go). Everyone quotes Taylor, but few seem to actually read him all the way through. I’m not sure I understand every word of it, but I’m happy just pushing myself to try.

Just think of it as an intellectual workout. In the same way that we try to eat healthy or exercise to maintain the temple of our physical bodies, we should also challenge ourselves to exercise our intellectual life.

It’s part of what the Greeks called askēsis, or “self-mastery”/“discipline.” It’s a practice of stretching yourself for the sake of strengthening your thinking.

Intellectual formation is just as much a part of our spiritual formation as any other discipline.

To end, let’s think back to one of the lines from Malik’s brilliant speech:

For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

In our mission to save souls, we can’t forget to save minds.

It’s a common practice, but it doesn’t pay respect to historical complexity. Historians David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig describe it like this:

Using the past is as eating or breathing. It is a common human activity. What we have in common as human beings is that we employ the past to make sense of the present and to influence the future.2

So, that said, good historians shouldn’t just cherry pick their ancestors for anecdotes to back up or illustrate their points.

Thankfully, I’m not a historian. So I can play it more fast and loose, since I’m not really in the running for conference invites from the Historians Society of Academics (not real).

This is why I end my church history course with a class called “The Lessons of Church History,” in which I try to pick out advice from the past to help inform our present.

It’s essentially inspired by the work of the historians Will & Ariel Durant. After finishing their lifelong mission of condensing human history into 11 volumes, they decided to condense history even further into a slim, 100-page book about all the lessons they’d learned. So this class follows their general cues.

For some more context, I teach church history by breaking it up into six general eras. They’re not a neat standard that you’d find in church history textbooks, but it works well for the shape of my class:

1. Missionaries, Martyrs, and Messianic Jews (31 A.D. – 312 A.D.)

2. The Imperial Church, Monastics, and Seven Councils (313 – 787)

3. Medievals, Scholasticism, and Christendom Schisms (788 – 1499)

4. The Reformation & Counter-Reformation (1500 – 1650)

5. The Enlightenment, Great Awakenings, Missionary Expansion (1651 – 1946)

6. Neo-Fundamentalism, Pentecostals, and the Digital Revolution (1947 – Present)

So for “Lessons of Church History” class, I divvy out 18 different lessons among the six movements. But for this article, I cut out half since a 45-min read felt kind of abusive. As such, the nine leftovers are my favorites.

Now, I usually have no idea how much my students enjoy my classes. I often verbally ask them, “Are you enjoying this class?” Some say, “Yes,” but the authenticity is ambiguous. But the “Yes’s” seem slightly more authentic during this class. That said: I think this is good and interesting content. And I can say that because very little of it is my own original thought—it’s a conglomeration of the best of the best thoughts I’ve found.

Withoutfurtherado:

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Every friendship I’ve ever had kicked off over a shared experience. My best friend and I initially bonded through our mutual appreciation of 2000s indie music. I feel an immediate kinship with anyone who also loves footnotes.1 Sometimes it’s even a collaborative dislike of something everyone else unabashedly loves.

Yet it’s odd that even though we connect with one another best through shared experiences—and connection is one of the most joyful forces in the universe—we rarely share one of the most basic human experiences: rejection.

Whether it’s rejection from a dream job, grad program, relationship, publisher, literary agent, sports team, volunteer position at a local cat rescue shelter,2 scholarship, or medical trial, everyone knows the sting of rejection. It’s why lots of stories begin with the main character experiencing social ostracism (Catcher in the Rye, Harry Potter, The Bell Jar, Joaquin Phoenix’s The Joker, Perks of Being a Wallflower, and the most highbrow of all, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer): the audience immediately connects with them because everyone—even the most popular among your high school, community group, or local cat rescue shelter—empathizes with rejection. And yet, it’s probably the experience we’re least excited to bring out in the open.

Which is probably because it’s uniquely painful. Several studies have demonstrated that the areas of the brain that register social rejection overlap with the areas that register physical pain; rejection can feel worse than getting hit by a car.3 These parts of the brain are so intertwined that one group of researchers even found that taking Tylenol can lower the intensity of social pain.4

When I was younger, I was so petrified of this social pain that I rarely set goals. But after I started setting some, I realized that no methods for circumventing rejection actually existed. Nowadays, rejection emails from jobs, journals, and publications storm my inbox like a SWAT team on a weekly basis.

And even though every one still stings, they’re a necessary byproduct of trying. Along with death and taxes, rejection is a certainty of living: it’s a reminder that you’re alive and pushing toward something. Sidestepping all rejection is symptomatic of not trying—which might feel comfortable but doesn’t compute with growing toward the joy within the callings that God’s laid out for us (Eph. 2:9-10).

Rejection hurts and will always hurt a little bit. But if we train our nervous systems to receive rejection as an opportunity for maturation—rather than an invitation into sustained bitterness—we can alchemize the rejection into something that makes every rejection worth it.

And personally, I find that I’m immediately attracted to people who share rejections. Opening up about failure is a top-shelf social glue. So in the spirit of encouraging rejection transparency, I’d like to offer

a collage of rejection.

There’re too many places I could start. My natural lack of sportiness got me cut from most sports from first grade to freshman year (and I didn’t start making the team after freshman year, I just interpreted the cues that sports weren’t my thing). Or there was the time my seventh grade romance that basically only existed via Facebook messenger was broken off on the bleachers during PE.

But let’s just start with writing. I started writing when I was 22. And since I figured Christian writers wrote for Christianity Today, that’s what I should do. 155 essay submissions later, no dice. But sadly (and very understandably; a CT employee once described their submissions inbox a “never-ending slush pile”), there wasn’t much feedback. So I knew I was doing something wrong, but didn’t know what.

Then I started branching out and made a habit of submitting to a list of publications at least once a week. I did this for years before anything got accepted. Take a gander:

I have about 80 rejections Plough. I keep submitting essays periodically in anticipation that they will reject it within a comically short time frame.

Let’s also note that most of the bigger publications don’t send rejection emails, they just ghost you. So imagine about 250 actual rejection emails and then 400 assumed rejections and you’ll have a mental image of how many I stockpiled.

And that’s just magazine submissions. The rejections from publishers and academic journals, if printed out, could fill up about quarter of a paper ream. My friend keeps a folder specially dedicated to rejections from publishers.

Then there are job rejections. The first one is mine, the next is ’s, and the last one is ’s from Bridgetown Church (that one must’ve stung):

I also shouldn’t tiptoe around two of the more painful rejections of all, one from my alma mater and the other from Oxford:

Now, for the record, I did get published, I did get a job, and I did start a doctorate. But along the way, I had to weed through endless cycles of rejection—and I still receive rejection constantly.

Thankfully, every once in a while, you get a rejection email paperclipped with some advice. Take ’s from back when was Ekstasis:

To this day, it’s the best rejection email I’ve ever gotten. It explained exactly what was wrong with my submission along with the chance to revise it, resubmit it, and then eventually publish it. It’s the kind of email more publications should shoot next gen writers.

Now let’s talk about

a theology of rejection.

The horseback revivalist John Wesley wrote a lot of great stuff, but his travel journals are my favorite. For years, he kept a running diary of when and where he preached and noted his progress or lack thereof. They’re actually kind of funny:

Wednesday, October 20: At noon, I preached in the middle of town. No one accepted the Good News. Later, they came to the house I was staying at and tried to kill me. The owner would not let them.

Friday, October 22: At eleven, I preached in the town next over. Not one attentive person in the crowd. Then men started shouting me down. None were saved.

Sunday, October 24: I preached at noon, and the crowd listened intently. Dozens came forward. I’d never seen a crowd so enthusiastically receive the Gospel.5

What I love most about Wesley’s journals is that his progress was never linear. He never arrived at a plateau where all of his preaching became successful. No matter how many supported him, there were always just as many, if not more, who rejected him. Wesley’s journals remind us that rejection is just a normal occupational hazard for Jesus’ followers.

The New Testament is crammed with rejection—probably because the Christian life itself is crammed with rejection. Jesus casually tailored His disciples’ initial commission with advice for rejection: “If that town doesn’t receive you, depart and shake that town’s dust off your feet,” “When you’re arrested, don’t worry how to speak, because the Spirit will speak through you” (Matt. 10:11-15, 19-20).

Unlike the existing philosophies of the day, which typically encouraged growing a vague numbness toward rejection,6 Christianity revolutionized rejection. James encouraged us to count trials of all variety as “joy” (James 1:1-2). Jesus even crescendos His Beatitudes by saying that those who “suffer for [His] sake”—getting “reviled” “persecuted” and “slandered” (Matt. 5:10-11)—will enter into His flourishing life. Essentially, He’s saying that those who are single-mindedly devoted to the Gospel will be happier than those who are double-minded and stuck choosing between safeguarding their earthly status or storing up heavenly treasure.

While Christians will still, of course, experience the pain within rejection, we’re given a framework to receive rejection without internalizing its lingering aches. It’s like an authorization to interpret rejection as a tangible sign that we’re aligning ourselves with the abundant life Jesus outlined for us.

But yes, there’s a noteworthy chasm between the seriousness of getting “flogged in synagogues” (Matt 10:17; John 16:1-2) and losing out on jobs or getting non-fiction personal essays rejected. Let’s make every effort to stave off messianic complexes. Yet simultaneously, there’s no real reason to downplay the resistance that we face on the way toward whatever God’s called us to. The early apostles knew a rejection many of us never will, but that doesn’t nullify the discomforts we experience on a smaller scale.

So on that note, let’s discuss

four ways to metabolize rejection.

(1) turn it into humor

The comedy writer Nora Ephron once said, “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you; but when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh.”7

Tasteful self-deprecation is a superpower. By reverse engineering embarrassing moments into humor, we trade the original embarrassment for a newfound relatability.

But notice the qualifying word “tasteful.” Someone who walks into every room and calls attention to the thing they’re most self-conscious about is someone who spends too much time considering how others see them. Humility is thinking about the self less, not obsessing so much over your failure that you can’t stop bringing it up.

We also don’t want to use humor as a cover up. If we make jokes about rejection, we should posture the joke so that there’s a detectable note of sincerity within it. Laughter is best used to process reality, not avoid it.

(2) turn it into art

The creative writer Austin Kleon once compiled a long list of famous rejection letters into an aesthetically pleasing article about saying no.8 Here’s my favorite:

Kleon’s whole essay humanizes both the rejector and the rejectee; by demystifying the process, his aesthetically pleasing collection turns an emotionally devastating experience into a few minutes of escapism.

Then there’s J.K. Rowling, who submitted crime fiction under the pseudonym “Robert Galbraith” after writing Harry Potter. Posting her rejection letters showed every aspiring writer that a lack of talent wasn’t necessarily the reason they were getting rejected. Best part is, the letters offered her advice about how to write books that could have more “commercial success.”

Similarly, the theologian A.J. Swoboda once asked Wendell Berry to write a preface for his book on eco-theology. Berry said no. So Swoboda wrote up the process of getting turned down by Berry into an amusing anecdote for his follow-up book. He turned the rejection into a smile for his readers.9

Some experts even encourage young creatives to rack up 100 rejections just for the sake of growing some skin. This is sort of what The Call of the Wild author Jack London did early in his career. He plastered the sides of his room with rejection slips from publishers until it was hard to see any wall. He used it as a kind of motivating force until he eventually began covering up the rejection notices with acceptance notices.

And of course, you don’t have to be a famous writer to turn rejection into art. One study shows that processing the spiraling that’s going on in your mind by spiraling it out on paper tones down overall negative rumination.10 Regardless of your medium, art is great (and cheap) therapy.

(3) sharing rejection with embodied community.

While writing this essay, I got one of the most painful rejections I’ve gotten in years (I loathe it when Providence makes you practice what you preach). Because of the involved parties, it would’ve been too unprofessional to include here. I woke up one morning so excited for the day (I’m a morning person, so I peak around 5am and it’s usually all downhill after 7am), but then I checked my email and ended up getting next to nothing done. It felt like it whacked my stomach with a cricket bat.

And my first reaction was to conceal it. I was too embarrassed to tell my wife or my best friend. So I just sat in silence rereading the email and then got ready for work. But on the drive, I reluctantly realized that I shouldn’t just shove it down. I caved and told my wife and then got on the phone with my best friend later on. And it was instant relief. It’s so much better to suffer in community—inviting others to weep with you as you weep—than to do it alone.

I wonder if what made the apostles so much more willing and able to suffer rejection was knowing that they had their brothers and sisters constantly at their side. Since community was baked into their foundations, rejection wasn’t processed through an individualist framework—which meant there was way less schadenfreude and one-upping. Bearing one another’s burdens is easier when there’s zero degrees of status differentials and a win for one is a win for all and vice versa. Maybe modern individualism is what makes rejection so uniquely painful.

Bring sadness into your communion with God, of course; but the embodied comfort from embodied community is so crucial.

(4) use rejection to motivate others.

Lots of the people I look up to share a similar quality: they seem happier bottling up successes than failures. You know, the kinds of guys who confess that they’re struggling with patience toward their family but also run a 5,000 employee company that you only hear about through the grapevine.

I’ve always found something strangely intelligent about those who share rejection. In one sense, it’s a cathartic exorcism of embarrassment. But it’s also just a smart way to motivate others.

For example, the social scientist Xiaodong Lin-Siegler set up a study where her and her colleagues delivered a lecture to one group of students about the failures and eventual successes of famous scientists, and then lectured the next group about the same scientists but blotted out their failures. Apparently, the group that heard about the setbacks amidst the successes was more excited and optimistic than the group who only heard their triumphs—with some even expressing a desire to become a career scientist.11

In other words, the ability to pick oneself back up again after the umpteenth failure is just plain inspiring. Therefore, if we’re trying to raise up scientists, let’s weave in our setbacks on the way to progress; if we’re trying to raise up ministers, theologians, and faithful leaders for the next generation, let’s make sure to shine the brightest spotlight of the adversity we faced in our personal testimonies.

There’s even something motivational about the way Jesus was “despised and rejected by men” (Isa. 53:3). Knowing that the man who lived the fullest life, who knew best how to experience the whole spectrum of human emotion, was perpetually rejected offers us a model of what makes any and all suffering worth it. The stone that was constantly rejected became the cornerstone of all of our reality.

Okay, time to

end.

There’s lots of talk among self-help literature about learning how to “fail better” or “fail smarter.” This isn’t that. We don’t just want to self-help ourselves into metabolizing failure. We want to aim toward the calling God’s laid out for us before the foundations of the world and interpret pushback as part of the necessary sufferings within Jesus’ beatitude. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t feel sad about rejection—we should wallow over a disappointing rejection.

Sometimes, you get rejected because you’re not the right fit. Other times, you get rejected because you’re not good. When the problem is the former, it’s just a matter of finding the right niche. When the problem is the latter, as it was (and still frequently is) for me, the rejection itself becomes the antibody for growth. Like Marcus Aurelius said, the things that impede our actions are exactly what guides us toward future actions, “what stands in the way becomes the way.”12

Lastly, I’ve been absorbed with this book by the 17th century French mystic Jeanne Guyon called Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ. It’s one of the most insightful works on spiritual formation I’ve ever read. There’s one line toward the end that I’ve been sitting on:

Learn to suffer all that happens to you—even confusion—but learn to do so out of only one motive: love for God. Accept everything, whether it be ill treatment, neglect, or whatever else may come your way…Put to death the disagreeable feelings which rise up inside of you when unpleasant things enter your life. In so doing, you join in the sufferings of Christ.13

And again, to compare receiving a rejection email to the sufferings of Christ is a level of melodrama I’d rather never insinuate.14 But her larger point is endlessly relevant: learn to suffer for the sake of love of God. Like Henri Nouwen put it, rejection is never the final word. God’s love is.15 This isn’t just a naive optimism: it’s a rational exposure therapy to make all suffering meaningful and ultimately beautiful.

Humans love gossip. In fact, a leading theory among evolutionary biologists as to why complex languages evolved among humans is because they needed gossip.1 They wanted to know which members of their tribe were trustworthy, who was too licentious, and how to enforce social consequences.

Catering this theory toward the historical Christian (and my) perspective, we might say that ever since humankind’s earliest post-Eden days, we’ve been intensely interested in gossip—especially when that gossip pertains to high-status members of our communities.

So if you’ve ever wondered why celebrity tabloids are so appealing, this is essentially why.2

Apparently, celebrity tabloids are such a low form of entertainment that even chimps can enjoy them. If the first sentence of this paragraph already sounded too strange, feel free to skip to the next one. When researchers taught chimps how to trade tokens to receive food or other goods, they then offered male chimps the chance to trade those tokens for an image of a fertile female chimp. Since many capitalized on the offer, they concluded that male chimps, like many human males, will pay for pornography. Then out of curiosity, the researchers offered male chimps a chance to trade their tokens for a picture of the highest-ranking male of their tribe. They quickly and excitedly traded the tokens and began flaunting the photos as if they were a prized possession. Thus, the scientists concluded that even chimps will pay for celebrity gossip.3

Which is a wonderful anecdote to validate this uncontroversial statement: celebrity gossip is the lowest form of journalism.

Now, there’s an enormous chasm between chimps and humans—so much so that comparisons drawn between them are increasingly ridiculous—but there are, unfortunately, a lot of similarities in terms of social hierarchy.4 Like chimps, humans give preferential attention according to beauty, power, cunning, or resourcefulness. So even though celebrity obsession isn’t healthy, it’s more or less inevitable.

Oddly enough, celebrity is the first concept I ever dug into academically; the first journal article I got accepted was about how churches could deal with celebritistic leaders. I tackled the issue a little more naively back then (arguing for a flattening of hierarchy, which I patted myself on the back for at the time, but now consider too unrealistic (and unbiblical) to work in practice).

Yet the recent scandal with Philip Yancey, an author who deeply inspired me, made me want to reopen the old files and think about topic again.

This was partly inspired by one of my favorite things that Saint Augustine ever did: Retractions. In his final years, Augustine decided to revisit his earlier writings and sermons and revise his mistakes. Calvin basically did the same thing with his Institutes. Not over-romanticizing your own work enough to critically reevaluate it is the kind of humility I aspire toward. So what follows is basically an Augustinian retraction—revisiting some old thoughts and revising them into better shape.

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Sigmund Freud once went on a hike through the Austrian mountainsides with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. To Freud, the summery landscape was doing everything it could to maximize its own beauty—almost like it was showing off. Vibrant greens and blues and earthy browns, the birds’ songs sounded like a sonata, bottomless fresh air for their lungs. And yet, Freud noticed that Rilke was staring at his feet the whole time.

Apparently, Rilke saw it all as a reminder that the universe was outside of his control. The flowers were all ruins in progress, every tree’s leaves a reminder of their inevitable absence come winter, every bird’s song a dirge. And so Rilke’s anxiety blocked the joy of self-forgetfulness that gorgeous landscapes famously provide.

In Freud’s opinion, our awareness of the world’s uncontrollability—that plants die, flowers fade, birds grow old—should give us more reason to enjoy it. But Rilke only saw it as a reflection of his inner concerns, turmoil, and worry.

Later, Freud used this as a case study to describe a crucial feature of a psychologically healthy person: the ability to see past the potential pain of losing something long enough to allow ourselves to unreservedly love it.1 It’s a solid litmus test—are we so fixated on control or self-preservation that we can’t get outside our own heads long enough to enjoy innocent pleasures?

Put another way, if we can’t lose ourselves in the flowers of the field or the birds of the air, there’s a good chance we’re allowing worry to run our lives.

We Can’t Control Much

There are plenty ways to gauge where we’re at in terms of worry; but one of the clearest is just considering our relationship with money. Money wins the hypothetical popularity contest of tools we use for creating an illusion of control over an uncontrollable world. It’s our go-to bandaid for anxiety.

Every year, The Global Statistics throws together a meta-analysis of studies, surveys, and research on anxiety. Unsurprisingly, everyone’s pretty anxious:

And the worry that tops most lists of worries is economic concern.

It makes sense; in recent years, many have noticed that even though they’re not making less money, their paychecks aren’t going as far as they used to. That’s a real cause for concern. We prefer our status quo; if something happens that forces us to cut back on the spending that allows our status to stay quo, it can feel legitimately nerve-wracking.

In fact, economic decline reveals one of the most natural things about modern people: the idea that if we aren’t gaining, we’re losing. As the sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues, moderns live by an unspoken rule of life: “Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased.”2

Essentially, the “promise of increasing the radius of what is visible, accessible, and attainable to us” is the script we subtly live by, informing us whether or not we’re living the good life.3 So if our radius of potential regresses—or even stays the same a little too long—it can feel like we’re failing.

As such, trading the Whole Foods grocery haul for Aldi, swapping an expensive skin-care treatment for an Amazon Basics knockoff, or downgrading the yearly Hampton stay for a campground vacation—these downgrades aren’t just experienced as minor inconveniences; they register as a slight on our humanity. Thus, money becomes the resource that shields us from the subtle humiliations of not moving up and to the right.

And it also goes to show that the root of financial anxiety—the worry under the surface worry—is the fear of losing the sense of control it provides.

Money is what Aquinas called “artificial wealth.” It isn’t the thing that our bodies actually need (i.e., the “natural wealth” of food, clothes, shelter, drinks, etcetera).4 Money is symbolic—we trade it for the literal stuff that satisfies our desires.

Think about this in terms of salary. It’s an agreed-upon standard of artificial wealth that affords us different radiuses of potential:

So when we talk about money, we’re not so much talking about the literal paper dollar bills or numbers in our bank account, but the radius of control those numbers afford.

Mammon

Interestingly, this is almost exactly how Jesus considered money.5 He wasn’t so much concerned with physical coins as the way our imaginations use those physical coins.

Which is why He talked less about money than “mammon”—possessions, property, or just the abstract idea of gaining more of whatever resources we find valuable.6 Mammon is laced with spiritual undertones, like a siren song that leads our minds inward until we can’t think about much else besides gaining more.7

Jesus devotes four consecutive teachings in the Sermon on the Mount to mammon:

Firstly, Jesus says that we shouldn’t pile up treasures (attachments, idols, things we try to derive an ultimate sense of satisfaction from) on earth, because it will only attract trouble—along with anxiety about its eventual decay (i.e., “more money, more problems”). But if we aim toward heavenly treasures, we’ll never feel lack (i.e., “more heaven, less problems”? 10 USD to anyone who comes up with something catchier).

Secondly, Jesus tells us that our goals determine the kind of person we’ll become: “The lamp of one’s life is one’s goal; if your goal is sound, your whole life will be luminous. But if your goal is wrong, your whole life will be darkness.”8

Which makes wonderful sense considering multiple studies on money obsession. In one, researchers tracked 12,000 freshmen over the course of 19 years and found that those who listed “money-making” as their highest priority “were far less happy with their lives” than others.9 Other studies show a correlation between materialism and the likelihood of suffering from anxiety and depression.10

Thirdly, Jesus says we can’t serve two gods. If we love money more than God, we’ll end up loathing God for putting too many parameters around how we use and pursue money.

Now, we should note that Jesus doesn’t say a faithful follower can’t have money or possessions; He says we can’t serve money. And like everything Jesus said, He’s not just saying it because He doesn’t want us to sin, but because He knows what’s best for us.

As in any other addiction, the love of money can easily hijack the command center of our lives. Those who love it never get enough of it. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.”11

If we treat money like it’s a tool that can solve all our problems, it eventually starts using us as a tool.

So to boil down these three teachings, it’d look something like, “If we put our trust in money—if that’s what we cling to for a sense of control—we’re at risk of allowing money to rule our lives.”

Consider the Lilies, the Birds

Fourthly, in the breath after, “You cannot serve God and money,” Jesus says, “Therefore, do not be anxious.”

Which is the last thing moderns like being told. “Don’t be anxious” doesn’t earn a therapist many points with their patients.

He continues: “For life is more than food and the body more than clothing.” Which is a bit more practical. But then He gets to the crux:

Consider the birds of the air. They don’t do much and yet your Father feeds them all. Aren’t you more valuable than a bird? And why worry about clothes? Just look at the lilies of the field. Even rich King Solomon in all his glory wasn’t better dressed than them. If God so clothes the lilies of the field, which are only alive until the seasons change, won’t He want to clothe you even more? (Matt. 6-26-30, PAR).

Admittedly, this sounds underwhelming. Birds and flowers don’t really scream “I’m free from financial anxiety.”

But in reality, if we take a pause from fretting on finances to sit and birdwatch, or walk through a beautiful array of flowers, our anxiety literally decreases. Science shows that simply looking at nature reduces anxiety.12 But the theological reasons are more fascinating (and important).

Søren Kierkegaard was obsessed with this passage. He wrote three long works all in a row that dealt with the lilies and birds.13 After finishing the first one, he felt like he missed some crucial insights, so he wrote another, and then another.

Interestingly, if you read them in order, you witness his evolution. As he starts writing about lilies and birds, he’s a detached existential philosopher. Then he moves to thinking about them in light of God’s love. Finally, by the last one, he’s writing as a man who’s allowed God to transform his anxieties through miniature reminders of His goodness: the birds, the grass, the flowers, the rodents. All belong to God, and so do we.

The lilies of the field and the birds of the air are little teachers God places in creation to remind us that things aren’t as bad as our imaginations make them out to be. They’re like a microcosm of you and I. God created them, just like He created us. He sustains them, He sustains us.

Something about the way God designed earth literally comforts us. In a study during Covid, researchers found that people who were quarantined in homes that had a view of nature outside their windows were less anxious than those who only had urban landscapes to look at; even those in the same apartment complex reported higher levels of contentment when their apartment faced greenery than cityscapes.14

Lilies, birds, and luscious foliage teach us that many of the material things we feel like we need we could actually do very well without. Like Boethius put it, “Men who possess very many things need very many things, while men who measure their abundance by the necessities of Nature and not by the excesses of desire need very little.”15

So Jesus instructs us to turn our attention toward seeking the kingdom of God. Obviously, He wants us to act as emissaries of the kingdom; but it’s also because He knows that if we seek anything else first, it'll sooner or later push our back into a wall and eat us alive. Seeking the kingdom is essentially the diametric opposite of money addiction—the more we pursue it, the freer we become.

Giving up the felt need to control the world isn’t a harrowing sacrifice. It’s the happiest choice we could ever make. And “What blessed happiness is promised to the one who rightly chooses.”16

Resonance the Good Life

Part of why nature calms us is because it helps us experience what Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance.” It’s when our mind and body and soul connect with our experience and stitches us into a transformative harmony. It’s a sort of in-tunedness with the world.

And we only really experience resonance when we’re relating to something beyond our control—trekking an Austrian mountainside, navigating a romance that seems to be going well but isn’t a sure thing, a song that unexpectedly amazes us.17 But when we try to control too much, or dim down the parts of us that appreciate the complex strangeness of the world, resonance is ruined:

If we no longer find ourselves able to effectively respond to the multitude of voices all around us, then we feel dead inside, petrified: incapable of resonance. It is symptomatic of depression, a state in which all our axes of resonance have fallen mute and grown numb, that nothing touches or moves us anymore.18

That last bit is eerily accurate. When The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen and his best friend David Foster Wallace took a road trip, Franzen drove them down a detour to stop at a bird sanctuary. Standing over a clearing gazing through a pair of binoculars, Franzen, a notorious bird watcher, lost himself in a frenzy of excitement mentally cataloguing the birds. But when he passed off the binoculars to Wallace, he merely took a two-second glance and said “Cool.”

It was this moment that Franzen realized David was truly in a horrible place—that even though he could forget his problems through a self-forgetful hobby, his friend couldn’t.19 Horrendously, Wallace succumbed to his depression within the year and ended his own life.

Don’t forget to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.

I recently got an article accepted at The Journal of Psychology and Christianity about how feeling awe at God’s creation can do wonders for our overall well-being. One peer-reviewer suggested an addition: why not recommend therapists encourage depressed patients to spend time in nature?

If you know someone who’s struggling, you probably know their tendencies: they’re more likely to stay inside, see less of their friends, and wrap themselves in a cocoon of endless rumination. It’s a horrible cycle: we become depressed, and then the depression tells us to keep doing the activities that make us more depressed.

So maybe the best thing to tell a depressed person—though they’ll probably resist at first—is to go outside, breathe, become human. The randomness of seeing a deer, a passing couple acting goofy, a fork in a river that looks like a miniature waterfall—all of it remind us of the splendid uncontrollability of the external world, which, oddly enough, allows us more control over our inner world.20 Nothing gets us outside our own heads quite like outside.

Thankfully, for Rilke, his story didn’t end after his walk with Freud. One day, he’d even go on to write a poem about how hurry-addicted moderns wasted their opportunity to absorb nature’s beauty:

For them, no mountain is wondrous to see;

their properties border on God’s own domain.

Pay heed to my warning: now make your retreat.

The singing of things, not words, is what’s sweet.21

“The singing of things”—the idea that creation communicates sweetness—started long before Rilke. For the Psalmists, creation was the way the visible universe proclaims God’s handiwork (Ps. 19; Ps. 8:3–4), reveals His nature (Rom. 1:20) and showcases God’s creativity in such a way that it almost demands a response. “The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders…Where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of joy” (65:8).

Many early reformers saw creation was a runway for revelation. Calvin even believed we should read creation theologically.22 Some went so far as to say that God gave us two books: (1) the “divine, special” revelation of the Bible, and (2) the “general” revelation that reveals God through His creation.23

Like art aficionados studying a painting to learn more about an artist, so Christians can study nature and learn more about God.24 As one Reformation theologian put it, “All creation is the most beautiful book of the Bible; in it God has described and portrayed Himself.”25

We can’t control as much as we’d like to, and maybe God’s creation is an invitation to let us know that that’s okay.

The flowers and birds and stars don’t have 401ks or Ring doorbell security cameras, and they’re getting along just fine. So rather than encouraging more self-preservation—shoring up wealth, securing social status, grinding constantly to feel on top of our careers—creation instructs us to stop worrying so much about tomorrow and enjoy today while it’s still today.

Like Freud noted, knowing that moments, people, and things are impermanent, beyond control, and fleeting should accelerate our desire to love. Sure, we’ll feel morose when those things fade or change or move in undesirable directions; but experiencing the whole spectrum of emotions that God’s granted us makes for a much richer life than stoically muting every unpleasant one. Feeling it all, seeing it all as a gorgeous extension—an uncontrollable tapestry—of God’s goodness, is one of the best ways to be human.

Don’t forget to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.

As I was typing up this year’s list, I went back and compared it to the previous six. And I noticed that with every passing year, I read a little bit more and a little bit deeper—like each solar revolution unconsciously sketched new connections within my messy network of knowledge.

For example, six years ago, my favorite book was Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. The next year it was Renovation of the Heart, which heavily inspired Ruthless Elimination. A year later, Dynamics of Spiritual Life topped the list, which influenced Renovation. Then it was Confessions and Cur Deus Homo, each of which helped make many of the books on the previous lists possible.

Now, this progression didn’t happen naturally. Some friends think I like to read because my personality tells me to do so, but I’m not a natural born reader. I have ADHD and graduated high school with a GPA in the high 1’s. When I got back into reading as an adult, the struggle was embarrassing. It took me almost 2 months to get through Ruthless Elimination, which is 200 pages of aesthetically spaced, easily digestible prose. I’d read the same paragraph two or three times before moving on because my attention span behaved like it was recently taken off Ritalin.

But I tried to get better at reading because I noticed that many higher-eds flatly stopped reading after graduation. Their teaching and writing then seemed to fizzle out around one-dimensional platitudes about penal substitutionary atonement or predestination that they memorized for a final paper but never felt a need to revisit. And I didn’t want that.1

I also knew I was supposed to become a writer, which necessarily involved becoming a better reader. Stanley Kubrick didn’t become Stanley Kubrick from daydreaming about directing movies one day; Kubrick became Kubrick by spending all day every day reading scripts, stories, and studying the minutiae of movies that made them great. Similarly, no writer I know or admire has become a great writer by passively hoping to become a great writer. Their free time is donated toward training their brains to detect and comprehend what exactly it is about the books they love that makes them loveable.

So I’ve purposefully tried to love reading—to challenge myself to read more books for the sake of quantity and read more difficult books for the sake of difficulty. I’m still not where I should be, but it’s a start. And as I’ve read more difficult stuff, I’ve built more fluency in difficult topics, which makes even more difficult books go down easier.

Which goes to show that the art and science of reading deeper essentially boils down to practice, practice, practice.2

The social scientist Anders Ericsson’s technical term for this is “deliberate practice.”3 To date, it’s still science’s best paradigm mastering any skill.4 And while (1) practice, practice, practice is the most crucial part, mastery also requires (2) clear goals and (3) immediate feedback.

(1) practice, practice, practice

If you ever feel bad for binging a YouTube playlist rather than picking up a 600-page Tom Wolfe novel, don’t. If the world’s brightest minds gathered to invent something perfectly curated to satisfy the human brain’s need for stimulation, they could all head out early and celebrate over drinks after dreaming up social media reels. The YouTube playlist is like fast food for the brain: it’s quick, cheap, easy, but missing some essential nutrients. I still backslide once a week and end up watching some string of Tim Robinson sketches until I crash out in a guilty stupor.

Practice is hard. So I’ve tried to set up more barriers: only allow the tv on during certain times of the day, delete your apps after you’ve finished doing whatever you needed to do, and keep books within reach. Honestly, one of the best tricks I’ve found for reading more is bringing a book with me anywhere I go; I even bring one to the gym or my home treadmill and read while I walk at 3.0mph and a 12.0 incline. Sure, you look either lame or pretentious or both, but it’s worth it.

A good analogy for why practice helps is the literary principle “Chekov’s Gun”: if a loaded gun appears in the first act, the gun must go off by the final act, or else you should delete the gun from the manuscript. The more that you read, the easier it is to notice the Chekov’s Guns — you’ll realize that a parking ticket a character ignores in act one will come back to bite them in act two, that the main character’s failure in the final stretch of the movie will turn into the antagonist’s comeuppance by the credits’ roll. When my wife and I watch anything, we’re constantly calling out foreshadowing as if we’re trying to solve the mystery before the director.

Same thing goes for books — even the loosely structured non-fiction kind. The more you read, the more you pick up on tips and tricks: what works for an author’s argument, what doesn’t, what’s cliche or superfluous, when the author is dumbing down a point too much or too little, when the pacing slows to a crawl or accelerates uncomfortably. And as you consume and consciously take notes of what you like and dislike, you become a better reader. Your brain starts speaking book.

(2) clear goals

For me, my first ever reading goal was to read 100 books a year because I heard John Mark Comer and Jon Tyson read 100 books a year and they seemed cool enough to imitate. Then my next goal was to get to a place where I could feel confident that I could read anything my doctoral program might throw at me. So I read a bunch of Oliver O’Donovan and John Duns Scotus (the latter of which I plainly did not understand).

Today, my goal is to read for the sake of formation and using what I read to love and bless others in some small way (i.e., reading a lot of books, summarizing my research, sending it out to folks for free on Substack. Sure, maybe I could love you all better and more effectively in some other way, but as it is, this appears to be one of my few marketable skills).

(3) immediate feedback

As for feedback, it’s always lovely having people review your work. They can tell you whether you’ve understood what you’ve read or stumbled into heresy (obviously there’s no middle ground between these polarities). But personally, I find that the best way to get immediate feedback as a reader is to simply rewrite what you’ve read in your own language.

If you can write out something complex, read it back, and find it makes sense, you know that you’ve actually read something and not just skimmed (like I’ve admittedly done with Scotus and Kant). If you can, write out your translations by hand; it’ll cement knowledge into your brain a bit better.5

This process also helps reiterate whatever you just read, which fulfills what the novelist Vladimir Nabokov said about how rereading is the only way to really understand books:

…one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader…When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.6

But as we read the words again, we move from merely absorbing to appreciating, from trying to cross something off a checklist to taking in a book like an art connoisseur takes in a painting.

So my advice for anyone who wants to read more is the same advice anyone would give anyone interested in learning a trade: like exercising a muscle, the discipline of reading turns you into a better reader. You’ll eventually read faster without feeling hurried, understand what you read without feeling lost, and crave reading a good book over doomscrolling. We don’t just spend more time reading — we become readers.

A Note on Ratings

I used to rank books on an ascending order of worst to best. I stopped doing that last year, because it makes listmaking slightly harder — and because I’ve found it’s kind of unfair to list some classic like The Interior Castle next to some 2025 spiritual formation book, since it feels somewhat immoral to not rank the one that’s a verified classic higher than the one that’s only existed for 120 days. So there’s no hierarchy here. I enjoyed them all.

Theology/Formation

God in the Dock - C.S. Lewis

As an academic, you’re supposed to roll your eyes at least a little when people bring up C.S. Lewis. You have to signal that you know that his words aren’t authoritative. I once had a blind peer-reviewer (blind as in I didn’t know his identity; his eyes worked fine) tell me I needed to pull in another interlocutor to support a point that I quoted Lewis to support. So I found someone who said something similar, and it passed the review. Again — this other person MADE THE EXACT SAME CLAIM AS LEWIS; but since it wasn’t Lewis who said it, it passed. This is why academia is stupid.

Anyways, I’m of the persuasion that more of us need to roll our eyes at the temptation to roll our eyes at Lewis. He was an exceptional mind of a generation, and this book really reminded me why.

I love Lewis’ big titles (Narnia, Mere Christianity, Screwtape, and Great Divorce). But I always wondered what he was like in more casual writing and dialogue. This book remedied that curiosity. God in the Dock is a collection of almost 60 essays (don’t do the math, because that estimate might be way off). There couple were duds, but many of my own essays are duds — all of them could be duds, in fact. My favorite from this collection were “Some Thoughts,” “Answers to Questions on Christianity,” “Work and Prayer,” “First and Second Things,” and “The Sermon and the Lunch.”

The Scandal of Leadership - J.R. Woodward

This book was a full-on dissertation just slightly dumbed down for a wider audience. I felt much like a dog wearing a tuxedo cosplaying an aristocrat while reading this one. But honestly, if you’re looking for a project that can answer so many of the problems going on within Christian leadership today, this is the perfect resource. I also love it when an esteemed theologian can talk at length unironically about demons.

The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius

Many of the great artists throughout history go by single word names: Cher, LeBron, Zendaya, Oprah, and, of course, Boethius (he’s always included in such lists). If you’ve hung around Substack at all, you’ll know that rarely stops talking about Boethius; now I see that he has good reason for it.

My PhD advisor and I joked that there are certain classics that theologians have to say that they love or else they lose street cred. No theologian could get away with saying they don’t like City of God, for example. However, this book was thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, so much so that I’d categorize it as pleasure reading. It’s rare when something that’s 1500 years old holds up this well.

The Cost of Ambition - Miroslav Volf

Check out my review of this one here.

Everything Is Never Enough - Bobbie Jamieson

As many of you know, I’m writing a book on happiness (due Jan 15 — prayers much appreciated). Reading this book was like having my eyes grated, because with every passing page I realized that this was the book I wish I’d written. I felt a grand envy. You can tell Jamieson was indeed a professional jazz musician, because there’s a cadence and rhythm to his prose that only a musician could pull off. You can almost tap your foot to it.

Works of Love - Søren Kierkegaard

I had to get really into Kierkegaard over this past summer, and this one was definitely my favorite. Still not sold on much of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of duty, but there’s some brilliant wisdom in here about the nature of love.

Spiritual Emotions - Robert Roberts

Throughout the reading of this book, I was continuously shocked that Roberts’ parents decided to name him Robert. In fact, I could never stop thinking about it. What went through their minds as they said, “Hmm…what shall we name this boy? I do like the ring of ‘Robert.’” Were they so uncreative that they just took the nearest name that they saw and said “yup”? That’s the creative equivalent of trying to dream a new superhero and settling on “paper-plate man” because the only thing in our line of sight is a paper plate.

Why We Pray - John C. Peckham

I’ve never felt so inspired to pray as if prayer actually matters than after reading this book. I talk about it here.

Happiness and the Christian Moral Life - Paul Wadell

I made a joke earlier this year about how Catholics had much better resources on a theology of happiness than protestants. I got blocked by several people after making this remark, but it’s nonetheless accurate. Out of all the academic works on happiness, this one was probably the most exhaustive and good and true and beautiful.

Social Sciences

I didn’t read as many social science books as I would’ve liked to this year, mainly because I’m trying to get into the habit of just reading the academic articles that social science books are based on. But nevertheless:

Ritual - Dimitris Xygalatas

I adore rituals. This book gave some of the most fascinating research on the topic to date.

Good and Reasonable People - Keith Payne

Wildly helpful for mitigating political polarization — or simply just understanding where the people you disagree with are coming from.

Shift - Ethan Kross

It’s always interesting to see how secular people handle the topic of emotions. I disagreed with a good amount of what was written here, but it was nonetheless fascinating and worthwhile.

Life in Three Dimensions - Shigehiro Oishi

For most of history, people have only dealt with two ideas of happiness: the hedonic and eudaimonic. Oishi believes we’re missing a third: exploration, growth, and trying new things. It’s a phenomenal theory that’ll make you want to pick up new hobbies and book a flight somewhere you’ve never thought to go.

Validation - Caroline Fleck

I recommend males check this one out. This book helped make sense of the nearly universal male disposition to try to fix rather than listen. Men aren’t neanderthals, we just tend to think differently about how to approach problems.

Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker

May Contain Lies, discussed below, aggressively points out some of this book’s insufficiencies (i.e., skewing research, avoiding studies that disprove some of the studies he mentions, etc.). But even still, for the parts of this book that are accurate (which is about 95% of it), it’s highly didactic and wonderfully practical. As a lifelong insomniac, I can attest that this book really helped make this the best year of sleep I’ve ever gotten.

Range - David Epstein

One of those so-shockingly-well-written-books-that-you-get-a-little-sad-reading-it type of books.

May Contain Lies - Alex Edmans

This was mildly depressing because it points out so many of the ways in which research—even the peer-reviewed kind—is horribly inaccurate, flat out wrong, or irreproducible. I’m working on a whole post about this one that I’ll likely finish within the decade.

Fiction

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the more emotionally devastating but beautiful stories I’ve read.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Took me so long to understand what was happening in this novel. I heard that this is a great book to reread, but an incredibly difficult one to read. I definitely agree.

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

Sad, dark, dreamlike. We did a lot of Joseph Conrad in my undergrad but somehow skipped this one. Nice and short, too.

Exhalation - Ted Chiang

Some of the best short stories I’ve ever read.

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu

This one deserves a spot on the list just for the titular short story. Heartbreaking. Cried a lot. My wife was like “What’s wrong?” and I just said, “Can’t talk about it.”

The Sellout - Paul Beatty

So egregiously funny in the most awful way.

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

This is the epitome of an experimental novel. Most of it was enjoyable, but every once in a while, it got to be a bit much. Still think it’s a literary crowning achievement for sheer inventiveness.

Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

It’s hard to describe why a Kafka story works, it just does.

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Emotionally abusive. Alarmingly brilliant prose.

Etcetera

How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton

A perfect summation of why Proust is great even though I’d prefer to not read him.

The Extinction of Experience - Christine Rosen

Genuinely fascinating and arresting. Rosen crafts an exceptional vision for the issues of life in the digital age.

Happiness and Contemplation - Josef Pieper

I enjoy Thomistic thinkers, and I personally found this to be my favorite work in that field that I’ve encountered so far.

The Rigor of Angels - William Eggington

A sprawling story of Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg. Absolutely riveting from start to finish. This is the kind of creativity more philosophical writers and historians need.

The World-Ending Fire - Wendell Berry

This was my first ever Berry book, recommended by Substack’s resident Wendell Berry scholar . A perfect place to start with Berry’s work.

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

It’s astounding how much of Aristotle’s philosophy holds up to modern intellectual and even scientific standards.

Nurturing Happiness - Robert Wuthnow

It was extremely fascinating to read a sociological account of how happiness is involved in church culture from an outsider’s perspective. Some of it was a bit cynical and there were a few beats that Wuthnow missed, but in general, it was immensely enjoyable.

Podcasts:

History of the Christian Church

This podcast is technically a decade old, but I just found it this year. It lived in my airpods for a month and a half straight while I was polishing up my curriculum for Church History. The host is a Pentecostal protestant, so many of the episodes skew in that direction, but it’s a surprisingly engaging introduction to church history in bite-sized audio chunks.

Reconstructing Faith with Trevin Wax

Trevin emailed me out of the blue in response to my post on the Beatitudes and recommended his podcast episode on the Beatitudes. It was the most hyper-direct form of marketing I’ve ever experienced. But perhaps this was ingenuous on Trevin’s part, because he created a faithful new fan.

Mere Fidelity

Anything Brad East-related is always a treat. I’m so happy they brought him on to guest host this past season. This podcast is about the highest brow Christian podcast that still remains orthodox and relatable, and I love every episode.

Not Just Sunday

I miss Truth Over Tribe so much. I enjoy Not Just Sunday because the hosts have a great rapport and do their research. But I do wish they had more guests on though.

The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast

I still remember the day one of my elementary friends told me to go on this new platform called “YouTube” and watch something called “Lazy Sunday.” This podcast is full of so much nostalgia from my childhood. Whenever I need to relax and just laugh, this podcast is the perfect choice.

Movies/Shows

I don’t watch enough TV or movies to say what this year’s best movies or TV was. But if I had to make a list:

TV: Task, The Runarounds (don’t ask me why; I just loved something about this show despite how obviously ridiculous, cliche, and corny it was. My wife would literally bully me if she walked in while I had it playing), Pluribus, The Chair Company.

Movies: One Battle After Another, Eternity, Weapons, Good Fortune, Sinners.

Music

I honestly thought my love for music would sort of decline after my teens and early 20s. Apparently, the age of 19 is the apex of music enjoyment.

But personally, I love music more than ever right now. All of my Apple’s Top 25 Most Played songs (which has been keeping track of my plays since I was 10 and got an iPod Nano) are songs that came out in the past three years. I’m consistently impressed with what’s going on in the world of music; it feels like artists are reaching new heights of creativity every year.

Alex G - Headlights

Alex G’s music is the closest thing to transcendence you’ll find outside of the sacraments. If you’re unfamiliar with his music, the best place to start is probably God Save the Animals or House of Sugar. But you’ll probably find “Afterlife” from this album to be a verified bop regardless of your prior exposure to Alex G.

Tyler, the Creator - Don’t Tap the Glass

One thing that I figured would eventually go away after I stopped being an atheist was my love for Tyler, the Creator. It surprisingly hasn’t changed at all — though his morals definitely leave me much more alienated than they did as a hardened 14-year-old religious skeptic. I really enjoyed the overall theme of this album: telling kids to stop “tapping the glass” (i.e., phone screens) and just let loose and dance.

Royel Otis - Hickey

Moody songs about unrequited romance. My only romance in this day and age is heavily requited, thanks to the married-ness of it. But this album still hit.

Dijon - Baby

There is almost no song structure to Dijon’s music; it’s not verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. And maybe that’s what makes it so compelling.

Favorite songs of the year:

Reflections on a Year

I saw a picture of myself six years ago and shortly afterward saw my current face in a mirror. I looked like an “after” picture that some eye cream that prevents gray bags from growing under your eye sockets would use as a warning to people who don’t believe in their product’s effectiveness. I’m not old, but I’m also the oldest I’ve ever been. I could use more rest. I work two jobs while I’m in my Ph.D. program and do a lot of freelance writing on top of it. I got by for the first few years of this schedule, but it’s definitely getting tiring.

I have a change in my day job coming up in the early summer, which I think will help a lot. But if you could remember to keep me in your prayers, I’d be enormously grateful.

It’s also been an incredibly difficult year emotionally and personally. Lots of deaths, both literally and figuratively. But even in the midst of a year with some extreme pain and letdown, God’s been so incredibly gracious that it’s consistently mind-blowing. We are so thankful.

I love life, thank you.

Audio voiceover and printable pdf of this article available here for paid subs!

I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with friends — people from all walks and stripes: young, old, well-respected, male or female, educated or un-, vocal fans of C.S. Lewis and those who pretend they’re too erudite to enjoy him — where I’ve heard the phrase, “I would never say this in public, but…” followed by some opinion that shouldn’t be controversial but is.

If you’re reading this, you can relate. Not because you’re a controversy-loving provocateur, but because you have a brain and a heart and a soul.

The fear of saying or doing something that might jeopardize our likability is preposterously normal. Housing social concerns is one way to tell you’re human. In fact, never worrying about how you’re perceived by others is a symptom of psychopathy.1

This is why almost everyone behaves a bit differently behind closed doors than with an audience.2 In a study at an Ivy League that was left intentionally unnamed, a female research assistant waited in the women’s restroom at the university library to tally how many washed their hands (and yes, a little creepy, but it was 1989 so I’m assuming it was slightly less creepy then?). When the research assistant made herself visible, 77% of the college girls washed their hands. But when she hid, only 39% washed their hands.3

It’s a silly example, but it displays a basic truth about human nature — one that Jesus found particularly frustrating: a lot of the stuff we do is influenced by how others might perceive us.

And according to Professor Raj Raghunathan, this status anxiety is one of humanity’s primary joy-drainers.4 When asking a group of MBAs whether they’d prefer a shallow, high paying job that would make them stressed, isolated, and worn out, or a meaningful job that paid less but provided healthy margin and good friendships, 97% said they’d prefer the latter. However, when professors staged a real-life scenario where they had to choose, only 55% chose the lower paying job.

Raghunathan argues that social concern explains the discrepancy between the hypothetical and real-life results. When under surveillance, we’re more pressured to say or do the right thing. When no one’s paying attention, that same pressure just isn’t there.5

But Raghunathan’s more interesting takeaway was how this goes to show that the person that causes us the most unhappiness is usually us. The students realized that the job wouldn’t make them happy. But they chose it anyway. Apparently, many would prefer to be rich and sad than happy if the price for happiness is sacrificing impressiveness.6

We often forfeit the stuff that would make us truly happy — meaningful work, social connections, practicing gratitude — for the sake of social status. Yet, like philosophers and theologians have pointed out again and again throughout history,7 organizing our hopes and dreams around things like status can’t make us happy. In fact, pursuing status often makes us more unhappy because it ends up creating paranoia about losing status, which lands us back in the same insecurities that drove us to sacrifice happiness for status in the first place.8

I know it’s gimmicky for me to mention this in every article I’ve ever written, but Jesus offered this diagnosis thousands of years before modern psychologists. If we don’t stop obsessing over how other people perceive us, we will never flourish. It’s why a performative culture — inundated by social media posturing, achievement anxiety, and social striving — can’t be happy.

The Woe-itudes

Jesus starts His Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes (Matt 5:3-12). Titled directly after the Latin word for happiness, the Beatitudes are paradoxical qualities that answer the human longing for the good life — bringing us into “life that is truly life” (1 Tim. 6:19).

Interestingly, the Beatitudes have an overlooked counterpart that pops up way later in Matthew’s Gospel.9 In one of Jesus’ final teachings (Matt. 23), He lists a bunch of “woes” (“woe-itudes” is what we should call them, but it hasn’t taken off yet).

Essentially, a “woe” is the opposite of a beatitude. So to say “woe” to someone is to say they’re unfortunate, unhappy, or failing (or “flopping,” as my students would say). And the primary qualities that Jesus calls unfortunate or unhappy are those related to social concern:

• The opposite of happy is the one who postures their outside to look impressive while their inside remains unimpressive (Matt. 23:25-26).

• Unhappy are the people who don’t know how to do anything unless they can show it off to others (Matt. 23:5).

• If everyone talks highly of you, that’s a bad sign (Luke 6:24).

• Those who only pursue virtue so they can signal it will never flourish (Matt. 23:6).

• Why fight for a seat of honor in the temple when the temple honors humans and not God? (Luke 6:24)

• There’s trouble ahead if you live only for the approval of others, only surrounding yourself with people who flatter you. Popularity contests never have a winner — and entering the contest costs precisely yourself (Luke 6:26).

In one sense, Jesus criticizes hypocrisy, pandering to groupthink, and posturing behavior to secure popularity because it’s wrong to hoard praise that should belong to God and God alone. But at the same time, it’s also because Jesus knew that striving for superiority, status anxiety, and ruminating on social comparisons all land us in the opposite of His beatitude – the ultimate flop.

Thankfully, Jesus provides some

solutions.

Jesus starts the longest section of His Sermon by saying, “Beware of practicing righteousness in front of others in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.” He then gives four calls to action that I paraphrased for the sake of attention spans (my own)10:

1. When you give to the needy, don’t flaunt or post it. If you do, you’ll impress others, but not God.

2. When you pray, don’t be showboaty about it; just pray as if you’re in your room alone, because that’s where God rewards you.

3. While we’re on the topic of prayer, don’t pile on extra words to try to get some effect or look “spiritual”; just pray the Lord’s Prayer.

4. When you fast, don’t brag about it to show others how radical you are. In fact, to downplay the severity of your fasting, you should glow up (sorry, I’ve been hanging around too many Gen Z’s) so people don’t even notice you’re fasting.

Now, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever do a single righteous thing in front of another person. Earlier in the Sermon, Jesus told us to let our “good works” shine before others (5:16). What Jesus is getting at is that practicing spiritual disciplines, generosity, and good works for the sake of being noticed by others defeats the purpose.

Like the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued, the moment we intentionally make a good work public, the work loses its goodness.11 But if we pursue righteousness without caring who knows or sees it, we’ll slowly train ourselves to love goodness for goodness’ sake — which is itself the reward God was talking about.

This is how we imbibe the “greater righteousness” of the Kingdom: by becoming so used to praying, fasting, and generosity that consciously choosing to do righteous things barely crosses our mind. In philosophical terms, we’d call this

“Habituation.”

There’s no way to tell whether Jesus read Aristotle,12 but it’s hard to ignore how strange their similarities are.

Over 2,000 years before Atomic Habits or The Power of Habit, Aristotle drafted a system of habit formation that holds up shockingly well to modern science.13 He believed that human happiness was about becoming more virtuous, and we become more virtuous through a “habituation” of the virtues: when we become so used to doing good and noble things that they become an automatic reflex.14

But Aristotle had a big caveat: habits can only make us virtuous when we have the right motives.15 And the biggest desire that distorts proper motives is what he called honor and what we today call status.16 So if someone makes a habit of doing good just so others will think they’re a good person, they’ll never become a truly good person. And if they can’t become truly good, they’ll never become truly happy — another reason why a generation documenting everything on smartphones will struggle to find happiness.

Yet Aristotle never came up with any good solutions; he just said that even though we all want honor, we should try to make sure we don’t want honor as much as virtue —highly impractical, for anyone who’s tried to let go of jealousy over another’s successes on willpower alone.17

Now, think back to Jesus’ words about generosity: “When you give to the needy, don’t show it off; in fact, don’t even let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” The only way we wouldn’t notice something our body is doing is because it’s something that we’ve habituated (like brushing our teeth, accelerating a car, and so on). At one point, we consciously had to learn how to use our bodies and minds to ride a bike; now it’s just a reflex.

So if we habituate something like giving to the poor without caring who sees, it’ll become so natural that it doesn’t even cross our minds; it’s no longer performative – we’re just acting generously because we’ve become generous.

This goes to show why even though Aristotle’s ethics are brilliant, Jesus’ are perfect. He trains us to value His beatitude more than the knockoff beatitude that status affords.

Best part is, we don’t have to annihilate the parts of us that want to feel rewarded for doing the right thing, as if we’re only allowed to give to the poor, pray, or fast out of a cold sense of duty. In fact, we get the best reward of all:

God’s Reward

Protestants get a little skittish around the word “reward” because it sounds a bit like an incentive to start racking up good works to earn God’s merit. That concern is real – I’ve definitely had phases where I’ve pushed myself to do Christian-sounding stuff so I could feel like I’d earned God’s approval. But just because the idea of reward can be abused doesn’t nullify the fact that Jesus uses it as an incentive to encourage Christian maturity.

Also, when we think “reward,” we often think material or social blessing – as if God might reward us by magically granting us the corner office or influencing our crush to requite the affections that’ve been heretofore unrequited.

But the NT scholar Frederick Dale Bruner notes that the word “reward” basically just means “impressed.”18 Which is frankly a shocking concept to think about; the idea that we can impress a God who’s parted seas and raised the dead with our groggy morning prayers can feel a bit ridiculous.

But if we think of God less like a distant deity than a lovingly involved Father, it makes more sense. What father isn’t impressed with their child’s magic tricks or piano recitals? The child constantly searches for approval because knowing their father’s radiant face is shining toward them is the greatest reward of all. In G.K. Chesterton’s infamous words:

Because children have abounding vitality, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.19

Building off that thought, maybe God delights in our attempts to do things that delight Him and Him alone simply by virtue of our childish desire to please Him (Matt. 18:3). He knows what we pray before we ask Him, but He delights in it anyway, just like an uncynical parent feels genuinely proud when their child shows off their Lego creation.

Other worldviews like Buddhism or Stoicism teach its followers to eliminate the desire to be noticed, the craving for status, the drive to feel adored. Which is both sad and somewhat impossible. Human beings are made in God’s image, and part that design involves the desire to feel noticed and loved.20

So in a passionate contrast, Jesus doesn’t ask us to suppress our desire for recognition, but to redirect it toward something that can actually fulfill us: in being noticed and loved by God.21

Secrecy Is Good for Your Soul

Maimonides, a 12^th century Rabbi, argued that there were eight levels of charity in an ascending order of importance. The tippy top of generosity is offering someone a job or investment (i.e., teaching a man to fish rather than just giving him one). Just under that rung is what’s called “double-blind charity,”22 which is when you give to someone you don’t know and doesn’t know you. For Maimonides and many of the great ethicists throughout history, secret giving was considered a greater virtue than public giving. And since Maimonides wrote this in an era that believed virtue led to happiness, you might say that he believed secret philanthropy maximizes joy.

And yes, academic research caught up with Maimonides almost 1,000 years after his theory (and 2,000 after Jesus’). In a study literally titled after the Sermon on the Mount (“Hide a Light or Let It Shine?”), it was found that people who gave a donation anonymously were 16% happier than those who gave a donation publicly.23

Which is yet another way that the practice of praying, giving, or fasting without paying any attention to who sees it — the discipline of secrecy — is just plain good for our souls. Through it we come to realize that Jesus’ way grants us a self-reinforcing joy — a gift that keeps on giving.

Boethius described this self-rewarding process, “Virtue itself becomes the reward of the virtuous man, and wickedness the punishment of the evil one.”24 Jesus’ virtue allows us the freedom from social concern that amounts to true beatitude.

This is why those who follow Jesus—the perfect model of virtue—become fully alive. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “To be conformed with Jesus is to have the right to be the man one really is. Now there is no more pretense, no more hypocrisy or self-violence, no more compulsion to be something other, better and more ideal than what one is.”25

In general, the less attention we pay to how much better or worse we are than others — in terms of morality, sure, but in terms of every other status metric as well: money, followers, clothing, etc. — the happier we’ll be.26 As such, the person who can pursue God’s will completely unconcerned with how other people might perceive them really is the freest person alive.

Everytime I teach on this text, I always challenge the listeners to leave their phones at home and go out in the world and do something generous within a week: buy the homeless person a meal, pay a stranger’s tab at a restaurant, volunteer without telling a soul, and then just keep it between you and God, forever.

So, I’ll leave the same challenge for you.

Audio voiceover and a printable pdf of this article available here for paid subs!

The Jungle Explorer

Imagine you’re an explorer doing cartography (cartographing?) in an unfamiliar country. You walk out of a jungle into a clearing and stumble upon a group of natives — 20 of whom are about to get executed by a military captain. But rather than make you the 21^st, the captain decides to honor the new guest by allowing you to execute one of the 20. And if you do so, he’ll spare the remaining 19’s lives.

What would you do?

If you’ve ever taken a philosophy class, you’re probably familiar with this dilemma.1 It’s often used to contrast utilitarian ethics with deontological ethics.

Which probably sounds like I’m ramping up to something nerdy with no universal appeal that will leave non-nerds feeling alienated and/or isolated, but I promise it won’t be that bad.

Philosophers have debated ethics ever since they started philosophizing. One big ethical school is

1. Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is essentially “doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.”2 It’s like taking the pleasure principle (i.e., “Maximize Pleasure, Minimize Pain”) and trying to live in such a way that applies it for everyone around us. So in the jungle dilemma, the utilitarian would obviously execute the one, since this would cause more net good for the many.

Next, there’s

2. Deontology

My undergrad philosophy professor commented, “Don’t worry; no one does,” anytime a student admitted they were struggling to understand Immanuel Kant. So keep that in mind as I offer this incredibly abbreviated explanation of Kant’s ethics.

Deontology is all about duty — having a responsibility to act according to choices that we could happily apply universally.3 So if we don’t think killing someone is an ethical choice that we could apply to any and every situation, the deontologist would have a duty to not kill the one person to save the 19.

But both of these views come with

problems.

Philosopher Bernard Williams criticized utilitarianism because it turns the jungle explorer into a cog in a machine. The act of killing another human isn’t ineffectual; the explorer would still have to deal with the mental collateral of executing a person — even if it does spare 19 lives.

When Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, was in college, he heard a group of freshmen arguing about the death penalty outside his dorm room. After they ruled in its favor, Serling swung the door and said, “You’re missing a key. It’s not just the prisoner who dies. A small part of the executioner dies everytime they pull the switch.”4

Now, “a small part of person dying with every execution” isn’t something we could scientifically (or theologically) measure (probably), but it’s a fair illustration of the way actions do have unforeseen consequences – even if we really do move toward the greater good.5

Further, it’s also impossible to know the results of our actions. No one knows the future, and we’re generally awful at predicting it. Everyday, stockbrokers make decisions based on future predictions and only a handful of a handful pan out. If we kill the one to save the 19, it could set off a butterfly effect full of unforeseen consequences.

On the other hand, deontology requires a bit of cold, unfeelingness. It doesn’t think about outcomes; it can only act in the moment. So regardless of how enormously beneficial an outcome could be (i.e., refusing to tell a Nazi that you have Jews hidden in your crawl space), it has to ignore that so it can maintain ethical duty.

Deontology also usually ends up contradicting itself, since real life rarely plays out smoothly enough for us to make consistent ethical choices 100% of the time. A friend tells you a secret that you promise to keep, but what if keeping that promise then requires you to tell a lie to someone else?

I could spend the whole word count talking about this, but I’ll segue into the thesis:

Any ethic that doesn’t imbibe the teachings, Spirit, and lifestyle of Jesus inevitably fails — and even has the potential to make you a horrible person.

The Sermon on the Mount Describes the Best Way to Live

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) is the most philosophically, ethically, and spiritually profound collection of teachings in human history.

After running through the Beatitudes and the talk about salt & light, Jesus says that He came to fulfill the law and the prophets.

Now, the crowds He preached to held “the law and the prophets” as their sacred text, straight from the mouth of God. The Pharisees in particular believed that meticulously obeying this law would hasten the arrival of the new heaven and new earth.

And yet Jesus says He’s the fulfillment of these sacred teachings.

i.e., it’s not surprising that they killed Him.

Yet, Jesus isn’t undoing the law. He doesn’t remove a single dot from an “i” or a cross from a “t.” Instead, He’s showing them the purpose that was always embedded in the law but got lost in translation.

The purpose of the law isn’t to just keep the law, but to become the kind of person for whom obeying the law comes naturally (i.e., becoming holy, righteous, and more like God).

The law is intended to produce the kind of person who adheres to the law joyfully — it sets the “course of righteousness.”6 But sadly, Israel witnessed 42 generations’ worth of evidence that even though the law set up good guardrails, it rarely produced genuine righteousness.

To explain why, let’s talk

Perversity.

In one of the most famous stories in Christian history, the young Saint Augustine and friends stole pears from a neighbor’s tree. They didn’t steal them because they were hungry; they only wanted to throw them at pigs. As he later reflected in Confessions, he didn’t really want the pears – he just wanted to do something he wasn’t supposed to.7

In social science terms, this temptation is called “perversity.”8 It’s the idea that things become more tempting simply because they’re off limits – because we’re told “no.”

It isn’t like a James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause, kind of anarchy. Perversity is more so the desire to cross lines for the sake of crossing lines. The philosopher David Sussman defines it as the things we do when our normal desires for the good are reversed.9 Basically, the more fixated we become on what we shouldn’t do, the more we’ll want to do what we shouldn’t do.

We do it in all sorts of odd ways, too. We lie about our age. We cheat on our diets even though we’re the main person holding us accountable. We walk on the grass because there’s a sign that says not to. In studies from the psychologist Paul Bloom, he found that 19% of high schoolers who told researchers they were adopted weren’t; in another case, 99% of students who said they used an artificial limb didn’t.10

We’re easily infatuated by taboo. Sometimes things become tempting simply because we see them as temptations. Or as that one saying goes, “I wasn’t aware of my sin until I became religious.”11

This is why too much emphasis on keeping laws, rules, and guidelines doesn’t make us moral – in fact, it often does the opposite: it turns up the dial on our fantasies about breaking the rules until we become more susceptible to breaking them.

This applies especially to sin. As the medieval theological writer Thomas Traherne suggested, too much attention on sin and fallenness doesn’t lead us into sinlessness, but usually its the opposite. Or in William Blake’s words, those overly preoccupied with sin are prone to “become what they behold.”12

We shouldn’t fight sin by trying really hard to not sin; we fight sin with virtue.13 We “overcome evil by doing good” (Rom. 12:21). When I’ve talked younger guys through porn addictions, I’ve found that suggesting that they invest their attention toward the good—God, others, using their Spirit-driven potential to create beauty in places that lack it—goes a whole lot farther than just telling them that what they did was bad.

As theologian Lanta Davis put it, “The Gospels do not tell us how Jesus went about his day avoiding sinning; they tell us what his love and virtue led him to do. We learn to say ‘no’ to the vices by saying ‘yes’ to what is good for us.”14

Which brings us back to the Sermon. In it, Jesus is describing a “greater righteousness” — a practical lifestyle of ethics that leads us straight into the flourishing life with God.15

It’s not just a set of rules and commands — though there are both rules and commands. Human perversity makes rules too tempting to not break. As Dallas Willard writes, Jesus “knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow out of.”16

So rather than turn our attention to laws, He turns our attention toward a way of life.

How to Do Righteousness

Jesus offers six ways to actualize a life of “greater righteousness” called the “Antitheses”:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgement, whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council, and whoever says ‘Raca!’17 will be liable to the hell of fire.

The law and the prophets outlawed murder — a great law, in my subjective opinion. But Jesus puts an asterisk on this law by assigning anger the same severity.

Obviously, cold-blooded murder isn’t literally as bad as a grudge. It’s more so saying that if we control our anger, we’ll get the source of the murder impulse under control, and we’ll thus naturally become the kind of people who don’t murder. Jesus is basically telling us how to get the pot off the stove before it boils.

Now, Jesus isn’t saying that Christians can’t be angry — just check out Paul’s “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26). It’s not a lofty, high-ideal that we’ll never reach; it’s “a diagnosis of a sinful pattern that we often get stuck in: being angry, and then insulting one another, with escalating hatefulness.”18

Jesus then provides some “transforming initiatives” to channel our anger: if we know someone has something against us, it’s better to make peace than take the Eucharist with a guilty conscious; if we’re on our way to a trial, we may as well solve our disputes before getting a court involved. These suggestions provide a way of escape; we don’t have to just sit around and focus really hard on not being angry. We can take our anger and extinguish it by actively confronting the source; and once confronted, we’ll often realize the source was inside us all along.

The problem is rarely our circumstance or environment. Rather than instructing women to stop dressing provocatively, Jesus tells men to stop using their image for the purpose of lust (5:27-30). Rather than introduce complex contracts and bylaws, He tells people to just be so truthful that they won’t feel the need to manipulate others to get them to do what they want (5:33-37).

William Mattison notes that in the Sermon, “attention to moral obligations is important, but not primary. Jesus’ central question is how to live a good and flourishing life. This of course entails living according to moral rules, rules which at times are experienced as obligations. Yet the rules are ideally understood not simply as obligations to be obeyed, but as prescribing activity that leads to real happiness.”19

In other words, Jesus is showing us that “doing the right thing” doesn’t cure our souls; allowing Him to cure our souls is what cures our souls.

Kingdom Ethics

Jesus isn’t much of a utilitarian or a deontologist. He’s a kingdom ethicist.20

It’s a way of being in the world that focuses on who you are, not what you do. Rather than basing our decisions around rules, laws, or duties (deontology), or choosing ethics based around consequences or outcomes (utilitarianism), kingdom ethics are more about cultivating justice, temperance, courage, wisdom, and compassion on the inside, and then letting that naturally flow outside into the world around us.

To see why this is superior, consider a police officer who obeys the law and follows procedures to a tee because he knows he has to. Now, many ethical systems would stop there and conclude that this officer a good person. But let’s say, deep down, if the officer were honest with himself, he knows that if no one were around to punish him, he would happily accept bribes, extort criminals, and abuse the people that he arrests.

Would we call that person “good”? No, of course not – he’s not doing good things because he’s a good person; he’s just following rules because he’s afraid of getting caught.21

Many systems of ethics leave us terrible people because they only polish up the exterior while leaving the interior unrenovated. In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words,

Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but He loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the “universally valid,” but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried Him was not, like Kant, whether “the maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation,” but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor to become a man before God.22

Yet sadly, Christians are pros at minimizing Jesus’ moral vision to just doing various right things at right moments: tithing for a yearly fundraiser, showing up to x number of church events each month, refusing to watch the new Netflix show with nudity, and so on. For how passionately “anti-works” many sects of American Protestantism are, we sure do spend a lot of time and energy trying to maintain a list of arbitrary rules that signal that we’re among the “righteous” Christians.

Those kinds of moral guidelines can help us get our bearings, but they can’t make us righteous.

Take Rahab, the Canaanite woman in Jesus’ lineage, for example. If Rahab was more concerned with moral guidelines than honoring God, she would’ve never ended up in Hebrews’ hall of faith with the other greats: “By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had given a friendly welcome to the spies” (Heb. 11:11).

What’s so odd about this is that Rahab is honored because she lied. Now, if she had worked with an understanding of righteousness that thought that not lying was more important than the salvation history that God was orchestrating, she would’ve missed the point.23 What’s sin in one context apparently makes someone a saint in another.

So maybe honoring God’s will is less a matter of keeping rules than it is adapting to wherever His will directs us in life’s complicated circumstances.24 As theologian Olivier O’Donovan argues, “Christian freedom, given by the Holy Spirit, allows man to make moral responses creatively.”25 Kingdom ethics are about growing in discernment through the Holy Spirit to creatively, lovingly, and righteously respond to any and every situation.

And thankfully, Christians have the leg up in pursuing genuine righteousness because we have a roadmap that’s paved with more than human effort alone. Kingdom ethics will always supersede other ethics because through it we step into a moral vision that was demonstrated by Jesus, illustrated by God, and is now perpetually woven together through the Holy Spirit.

Back to the Jungle

So how would Jesus respond to the jungle explorer dilemma?

I have absolutely no idea. But I doubt He’d happily settle for either the utilitarian or deontological approach.

Anytime someone tried to trap Jesus in an ethical conundrum, He always turned the situation on its head by offering a creative alternative.26

• When asked if they should stone the woman caught in adultery, He said sure — but only if the one who casts the first stone is without sin (John 7:53-8:11).

• When the scribes try to catch Him in a superfluous, abstract, metaphorical question about marriage, He simply says there won’t be marriage in the resurrection (Matt. 22:23-33).

• The Pharisees call Him out for allowing his disciples to pluck grain on the Sabbath and healing a man’s withered hand, and He basically scolds them for valuing superfluous rules over the needs of the body (Matt. 12:1-8; Luke 6:6-11).

• Asked about paying taxes, He said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matt. 22:15-22).

• Rather than responding with violence toward Judas and the soldiers, He tells his disciples to stand down and reattaches a soldier’s severed ear (John 18:10-11).

It seems like the response Jesus chooses for any and every situation where there’s a moral dilemma is a creative alternative-ism laced with a side of “kenosis” (i.e., self-emptying, self-sacrifice, complete service).

In a real-life jungle dilemma, we don’t have just two options — there are literally hundreds of creative ways to reassess the situation. Kingdom ethics help us brainstorm alternatives: bartering with the military captain, working out some kind of deal, finding a loophole, and so on.

But all that said, if Jesus was ever locked in a situation where He was forced to either take a life or give His own, I imagine He’d give His own everytime.27

The following is an addition to this article on rituals. This article will still make sense if you haven’t read that one, but you might like this one better if you’ve read that one first.

Read more

Audio voiceover available here for paid subscribers!

Awhile back, psychologist David DeSteno researched the effects of the Vatican II Council (1962-1965) on church gatherings.

For those who don’t know, Vatican II (and the New Order Mass) revamped the average church service. Whereas the priest and the congregation used to face in the same direction, symbolically turning themselves toward God, the priest would now face the people. Though the traditional service was conducted almost entirely in Latin, churches were now allowed to use the congregation’s mother tongue. And while the liturgical song was once in Gregorian-style chant, churches now had permission to integrate influence from pop-music.

On the surface, these changes seemed great—especially considering that congregations could now hear Scripture and liturgy in a language they understood.

But DeSteno noted something interesting:

While such changes brought Catholic ritual up-to-date, the abandonment of practices that had been honed over centuries reduced some of their psychological power. With less chanting, less incense, and less separation between the pulpit and parishioners, many Catholics felt that the Mass’s ‘magic’ had disappeared.1

Humans have a complex relationship with rituals; like friends that move away, sometimes it seems like we only come to appreciate them once we miss them.

But regardless, we need rituals—even the ones that feel like dead routine. They’re not a magical panacea for all our problems, but they’re critical for living the good life.

Discipline Burnout and The New Spiritual Formation Movement

I recently got interviewed by a journalist for an article she’s working on about John Mark Comer. She wanted to know of any downsides I’ve seen to Comer’s “Rule of Life” paradigm of spiritual disciplines.

As someone who works with a lot of young adults, the issue that immediately came to mind is “discipline burnout.”2

The trajectory is: a 20-something picks up a book or podcast from someone in the “New Spiritual Formation Movement”3 (unofficially but ostensibly, John Mark Comer, Jon Tyson, Mark Sayers, Josh Porter, Rich Villodas, Tyler Staton, Strahan Coleman, and others), they’ll feel rightly inspired to build a rhythm or schedule of spiritual disciplines (fasting, prayer, Scripture memorization, etc.), and then they hit some resistance and drop the schedule within 1-4 weeks like a New Year’s resolution.

Now, I’m not interested in criticizing Gen Z’s work ethic; I’d much rather criticize the felt need for everything we do to feel “authentic” or “unforced.”

These ideals are a byproduct of living in an “age of authenticity”4—an era where our moral purpose in life is aimed toward being true to ourselves.

It’s a flawed but pathologically normalized worldview. And it’s more or less the basis for why many moderns find disciplines tough to stick with.

Since many rituals don’t provide immediate returns (either internally, as in a dopamine boost, or externally, as in a boost of social media followers), it’s depressingly easy for a schedule of disciplines to eventually feel forced, perfunctory, and inauthentic.

Which is sad, because the commitment to stick with rituals—especially when we don’t feel like doing them—is partly what makes them worth doing. To explain, let’s discuss

The Science of Rituals

The social scientist Dimitris Xygalatas calls ritual the

true human universal. Without a single exception, all known human societies—whether past or present—have a range of traditions that involve highly choreographed, formalized and precisely executed behaviors that mark threshold moments in people’s lives.5

Most rituals are intertwined with sacred sets of beliefs; but believing in God isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for practicing rituals. We might not pray a Psalm each morning, but we might meditate, make the kids breakfast, do the morning crossword, or follow the ancient liturgical practice of starting the coffeemaker.

These patterns are soothing because they provide predictability; for a brief moment, they make the strange, mercurial, impulsiveness of life feel manageable. Rituals impose “order on the chaos of everyday life, which provides us with a sense of control over uncontrollable situations.”6

As such, even though we only have something like 5% of control over our lives, rituals allow us to make the most of that 5%. To show why, let’s bring in the West’s most popular reason for picking up new habits: weight loss.

In college, I ran marathons, so I never really had to think about not gaining weight since a deleterious weight loss method was already embedded in my schedule. After college, I got a job where I was either sitting at a desk or sitting in a car from 9-5. But I didn’t change my eating habits from my marathon days, which created a surplus of calories, fast.

So I started trying some diets—paleo, keto, Adkins, etc. But sadly, these methods are built to fail. They’re trendy quick fixes that prove successful for a couple months, but soon after breaking the habit, we’re usually reintroduced to whatever weight we lost.

Now sub out weight loss for spiritual practices and you’ll find a similar trajectory. We feel convicted after a sermon, so we start a prayer rhythm or Scripture reading plan. And since spiritual disciplines, like diets, actually yield results, we’ll soon notice that we feel more confident and at home in the world. Then once we arrive at whatever blend of joy and non-anxiousness we were hoping for, we assume our progress is etched into stone.

But then one day our prayer rhythm feels a little stale or we hit the wall of Leviticus, and so we get a little lax with our ritual. Eventually, we drop the habit altogether, which inevitably winds us back in that origin of conviction that inspired us toward change in the first place.

It’s a pattern we’ve all seen a million times.

Yet, surprisingly, the best method for sustaining spiritual rituals has a lot in common with the best methods for weight loss: rather than committing ourselves to radical, over-the-top diets, we should instead simply integrate long-term, sustainable changes.

For example, cutting off all carbs and sugars is neither fun nor easy, so we could instead start by cutting off junk food incrementally. Similarly, when trying to integrate a rhythm of fasting, it’s smarter to start skipping breakfast a few days a week than jump into a full week of consuming nothing other than water.

Yet, unfortunately, even these small habits will still feel tough at times. So the perennial issue for our authenticity-focused generation is figuring out how to stick with rituals despite how inauthentic they might feel.

To explain why a sense of stick-to-it-iveness really will help, let’s look at

a coupla studies.

In one study, researchers rounded up a group of subjects who were trying to lose weight and split them into two groups. Before eating a meal, the first group was told to think about their food in a thoughtful way before taking a bite. The second group was instructed to cut all the food into several pieces, rearrange all of it into a symmetrical pattern, and then tap their fork on each bite three times before eating it. Over the five days of the experiment, the second group consumed 224 less calories per day than the first.7

Next, one group was asked whether they’d prefer carrots or chocolate and given only a few seconds to respond. The other group was told to take deep breaths, close their eyes, and knock on a table a few times before responding. The latter group was 25% more likely to choose the carrot than the no-ritual group.

Plenty other studies show that small, superfluous rituals can boost self-control, gratitude, and productivity.8 Point is: even when rituals feel like a drag—or even when we don’t consciously understand them—going through the motions still yields results.

Now, any kind of ritual can lend an extra boost of self-control. But when it comes to big character changes, like turning from a cranky grump into a warm presence, rituals aren’t enough on their own.

For example, in another study, researchers tried to see if prayer would influence whether someone would cheat on a test.

Each subject was left in isolation and took the test on a computer with easy access to a web browser. However, the researchers were secretly monitoring their screens to check if they googled any answers. And to up the incentive for pursuing the best grade possible, they promised a $100 gift to the highest scorer.

As the results showed, prayer didn’t seem to change much—lots of people still cheated.

But there was one noteworthy finding: the prayer didn’t affect subjects who didn’t believe in God; but the prayer greatly affected the subjects that did believe in God. They were by far the least likely to cheat.9

Now, one study doesn’t prove much. But it’s a decent anecdote for how prayer has a stronger effect when the pray-er believes in the God they’re praying to.

This is why, even though I’m a huge fan of rituals and habits, I don’t think they’re all that special when detached from a sacred set of beliefs. Which brings us to

“The Godfather problem.”

Even though rituals are a crucial part of transformation, the sad reality is that many people can carry out church rituals their whole lives and never change.

James K.A. Smith calls this “The Godfather problem.” Throughout the runtime of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, the viewer witnesses mafiosos participating in a variety of rituals. The film starts with a wedding ritual, shows the family attending church, and then ends with a baptism interspliced with scenes of their family slaying a rival gang. But not once is the cognitive dissonance between cutting off a horse’s head to plant it in an opponent’s bed and receiving the Eucharist discussed.

As Smith put it, “You can liturgically renounce the works of the devil and carry them out at the same time.”10

All of us know people who’ve gone through the motions of church but still seem just as malformed as someone who’s never taken the bread and the cup. Outward worship doesn’t guarantee inward worship. Without the Spirit, rituals easily become just another instrument for refining project self.

And yet, like Smith also says, “Ritual is the way we learn to believe with our bodies.”11 God doesn’t just want us to worship with our minds. We’re not brains on a stick. As much as we might like, we can’t tiptoe around the need to offer up our whole bodies into our rhythms of worship (Rom. 12:1-2).

Which brings us to why it’s easier to

Become a Saint by Acting Like a Saint.

C.S. Lewis once said that if you want to become a Christian, but find its doctrines impossible to believe, the best thing to do is simply begin acting like a Christian. Start singing to God, reciting Scripture, and caring for the poor and powerless. You’ll eventually start seeing the world like a Christian, feeling compassion like a Christian, noticing breath enter your God-given lungs like a Christian. One day, you might find that you’ve stumbled upon believing in the God of the Christians.12

This is great example of the power of one the more under-appreciated Christian disciplines: repetition. Despite how burnt out we might feel about hearing John 3:16 again and again, a growing body of research might suggest that simple repetition helps us believe things at a deeper level.13

We’re more likely to think something is true when we hear it repeated. As tiring as often-posted, verse-of-the-day Scripture can feel, it does influence our pattern recognition; we carry it with us throughout our days, which allows us to apply it to present situations quicker because it’s grazing on top of our short-term memory.14

It’s not astrophysics; it’s easier to become a saint if you live a saint’s schedule.

How to Keep Going

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han warned that society’s loss of rituals would dissolve our experience of the world into bland cycles of nothingness.15 Rituals give our days, weeks, hours, and calendars a sense of meaning. They give occasions purpose. With no sense of ritual, our personal and communal lives get increasingly disordered.

The early church, coming out of Judaism’s strict Hebrew calendar, maintained a much higher view of rituals than most Protestants today. Now, there’s endless debate about how the early church prayed and worshipped. But out of all my research, I’ve found one point that’s rarely contested: early Christians stopped to pray and worship three times a day (morning, noon, and night).16

Regardless of the way the church prayed or worshiped, the sheer repetition of rituals was undeniably baked into their weekly, daily, hourly communal schedule. Going off of this, we might say that even though how we worship is crucial, perhaps the most crucial part of our worship is that we worship repeatedly, rhythmically, and sustainably.

It makes sense. No matter how much we love God or others, repeatedly reminding ourselves of that love through practices (i.e., intentional prayer, date nights, coffee hangs) helps rekindle that love.

While giving a homily at a young couple’s wedding, Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave this advice: “Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.”17

Ronald Rolheiser comments on this quote:

Love and prayer work the same. The novice’s mistake is to think that they can be sustained simply through good feelings and good intentions, without the help of a ritual container and a sustaining rhythm. That’s naive, however sincere. Love and prayer can only be sustained through ritual, routine, and rhythm.18

He’s right. Love is certainly more important than the rhythms supporting that love; but like a plant without a trellis, it’s easier to let love flourish when we place strategic barriers that strengthen its roots and encourage it to bloom. We don’t earn God’s love by following through on rituals; they don’t increase God’s love for us, they merely make God’s love feel present and tangible to our perceptions.

Even if I don’t feel emotionally enthralled by morning prayer, the song choices on Sunday morning, reading Obadiah, or sharing the bread of the cup, I know these rituals are worth fighting for. They place me in a narrative grander than my desire to fulfill my authentic self.

Like those pre-Vatican II parishioners from the intro, there’s something inexplicably comforting about ornate rituals, even if we don’t necessarily comprehend why. Rituals carry history that connect to our souls in a way that transcends conscious thoughts. When we pray, fast, memorize Scripture, we participate in the tried-and-true methods of every generation that came before us. They’re like inter-generational communal glue.

No ritual, no orthopraxy, is truly dead. Despite how it might feel at times, the Holy Spirit really dwells in you; prayer works; God meets us in our fasting; generosity really is the best way to use our money—even when no one sticks around to say, “thank you.” Rituals always affect how we live, even if they feel pointless, confusing, or strenuous.

So when I get discouraged—and I get discouraged a lot—the best advice I’ve tried to internalize for any given day is simply this:

Christian spirituality is essentially figuring out how to keep moving in God’s direction. If we keep going, we’ll inevitably stumble onto the wisdom that every past generation has already found: that life with God is simply better than any other kind of life.