When I joined back in April of this year, I knew I had to focus my attention on helping it grow as an established media publisher. This meant expanding our audience, creating a community among our current audience, and developing new media projects. And to do all of this meant I had to scale back my own engagement on Substack.

But one thing I learned from writing regularly on this platform was how incredible the community is. People who are readers, deep thinkers, and want to engage with the best ideas from the brightest thinkers for the betterment of the church and culture. Those are the exact people we are trying to reach at .

Over time, it became clear to me for a number of reasons that, while our website might be designed with the perfect branding and be more customizable, there would be a lot of value in bringing to Substack for a native experience.

We would be able to go directly to our audience and even find a broader audience in a way that is currently difficult to do in today’s media environment. Social media just isn’t friendly to publications like ours and others the way it was 5-10 years ago.

So that’s exactly what we did. You can now read right here on Substack.

Mere Orthodoxy | On Substack

Thoughtful Christian media for the renewal of the Church and culture

Now, can be read directly in the Substack app or in your inbox. You’ll see us in the Notes feed. You can even become a Member here on Substack too, either through the website or through the app. Becoming a Member is the #1 way to support ’s mission of renewing the Church and the culture.

As I look ahead to the new year, my personal goal is to write more than I have over the last several months. I’ve had many thoughts brewing and I’m feeling more ready to start writing them down. We’re also looking to see what it will take to launch several new initiatives in 2026 that I’m really excited about. All of our media projects—articles, Journal, podcasts, and everything else we do in the future—is made possible by our Members. They’re the ones who keep us going.

But for now, I hope you’ll join us simply by subscribing. We at love the Substack community and we’re excited to be here.

Oh, and by the way, if you Subscribe this week, you’ll be eligible to win this stack of books (including mine!).

Mere Orthodoxy | On Substack

Thoughtful Christian media for the renewal of the Church and culture

When I was growing up, I would see my grandmother every morning or throughout the day sitting in the same chair doing a crossword puzzle. She did them religiously. Sometimes I would ask her why she was doing them, and her answer was the same every time, “To keep my brain sharp.”

This is the woman who was born in 1945, taught herself to read Greek, went to (and sometimes lead) BSF for decades, all while battling a brutally extended battle with cancer.

And yet, she did her crossword puzzles to keep her brain sharp.

Those things are specific to her. But I do think it’s instructive. She used none of the digital technology that we use today, and yet she felt the need to keep her brain sharp.

I want to propose a very simple argument.

If:

1. Constant digital exposure leads to cognitive and emotional decay (which every single study on these kinds of things shows that it does)

2. Algorithms silo us into filter bubbles that influence our perspectives (which they do)

3. AI is only going to make these issues exponentially worse (it already is)

Then:

The single most important thing we can do to resist these forces, stay cognitively sharp, and be free from the whims of algorithms and LLMS is to read for 30 minutes a day.

I really believe it’s that simple.

That could even be 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening. But the important thing is that we need to constantly be reading.

Fiction. Non-Fiction. Both, preferably.

But it really needs to be books that are more than the books that are written for BookTok. Not that you can’t read those books, but that it’s going to take more than those books to keep you sharp.

This isn’t an either/or, but we must recognize that reading books which were written in a way to be optimized to perform well on the TikTok algorithm is really only a marginal step up from scrolling through TikTok itself.

We need to be reading books that stretch us. Books that are outside of our comfort zone. Outside of our preferred genre.

Only read non-fiction? Try fiction!
Only read fiction? Try non-fiction!
Only read fantasy? Try a classic.
Only read theology? Try history!
Only read literary fiction? Try sci-fi!

I think this is important on a number of levels.

The first level is essentially what I’ve already argued for. In a world experiencing cognitive and emotional decay because of immersive digital technology, it’s absolutely imperative for us to cultivate both our intellect and our imagination, and there is simply no better way of doing that than reading books. If we fail to do this, we will struggle to form and maintain the relationships, community, institutions, and yes, spirituality, that we need in order to flourish in this life.

The second is like it: we must raise the bar for conversation and thoughtfulness.

We should not be intimidated to read books or articles. We should be able to process the story or the line of thought, think about them deeply, relate them to other things we’ve read and thought, and have a good discussion about it.

These are the conversations that enrich our lives. They allow us to get to the heart of the matter in all matters of life. This is how we grow, develop, and flourish. They don’t descend into jokes or self-deprecation or irony or intimidation or judgment or defensiveness. Being able to sustain thought and conversation on a single idea for an extended period of time is how we move beyond the surface of things and swim in the depths of life. And we will struggle to do this if we are not reading.

Earlier this year, my wife read Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry (see below). I just finished reading it as well. The fact that both of us have read this book has already provided such rich language, imagery, and vision to our marriage that I’m positive it will affect our marriage, parenting, family, and community decisions decades down the line. And that’s from both of us reading a single sub-200 page book. This is the potential that making the commitment to be a reader offers for our lives.

Augustine famously recounted his conversion in Confessions as the moment when he heard the voice of a small child saying to him, “Take up and read.” He rushed to grab the Scriptures, opened them, and read the first passage he turned to, which happened to be Romans 13. And in that moment, Augustine was converted.

In a lesser way, I wonder what conversions await those of us who dedicate ourselves to likewise take up and read?

I unintentionally included 18 articles in this newsletter.

I always include a couple of books in these newsletters.

I don’t expect everyone to read every one.

But I would also encourage you not to be intimidated. Look for one or two or three that interest you and read them. Spend time with the thoughts and mull them over a long while after you’ve closed the tab.

Nearly all of these articles left a profound impression on me. I hope they leave a similar impression on you.

I want to punctuate this by sharing a video made that makes a similar point to what I’ve made here. It’s difficult for me to think of too many things more urgent for us to recover than this.

Please consider.

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My Latest

Interviews

Walking Through Deconstruction: A Conversation with Ian Harber on Defragmenting

This is one of my favorite podcasts I’ve done. You can really tell when someone has engaged deeply with what you’ve written. Keith asks fantastic questions, and there’s just a lot about this interview that I love.

If you’d like to interview me about my book for your podcast, reach out. I’d love to talk with you.

Speaking

Xenos Summer Institute 2025 at Dwell Community Church | July 9 - 11

Amplify Conference at Wheaton College | October 21 & 22

My Book

$13.46 — Amazon

From The Bookshelf

Hannah Coulter — Wendell Berry

This is a book about nothing, and it changed my life. I don’t know how to describe it to you any more than that. It’s essentially a fictional memoir of a woman who lived through just about the whole 20th century. She lived on a farm. She married young and experienced loss. This book moved me in ways I didn’t expect it to.

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

There is a reason Stoicism is having a moment right now. In an emotionally fragile world, people are searching for stable ground. Stoicism isn’t perfect. What it lacks is perfected in Christianity (Ryan Holiday, I hope you read this). But Fortitude is a virtue. And it’s one we should all cultivate. It’s hard to think of too many books better suited to help with that than this classic. I should tell you: this is a remarkably easy read. It’s basically Pagan Proverbs without (most of) the Paganism and (all of) the divine inspiration. But there sure is a bunch of great wisdom here worth heeding.

To Read

1. Nobody Has A Personality Anymore

2. Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches

3. Churchiness Is Back

4. Faithful Doubting

5. Thoughts on thinking

6. When AI Idealism Meets Teenage Reality

7. Knowledge Work Is Dying—Here’s What Comes Next

8. Audiences Prove that the Experts Are Dead Wrong

9. Common Arts That Matter

10. A Virtue-Centric Argument for Political Liberalism

11. A Midsummer Reverie

12. What Is Covenant Theology?

13. Just Say No to Online Church

14. I’m Scared of Being Stupid

15. The Rule of St Augustine: Wisdom for our Augustinian Moment

16. What to Do with Little Children at Home

17. Young People Face a Hiring Crisis. AI Is Making It Worse.

18. The Reading Crisis We're Not Talking About

To Watch

To Listen

The Myth of Work-Life Balance: Why Your Search for It Is Destroying Both

I listened to very few podcasts this month. Spent a lot more time reading articles and when I did listen to something, it was typically on YouTube. Kind of interesting to think about my own media consumption habits.

From This Year

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I had a realization that I basically only make two kinds of decisions: 2-minute decisions and 2-year decisions.

Most things fall into the 2-minute bucket. Sometimes this gets me into trouble. I realize I made the wrong decision and I would’ve made the right one if I gave it just a little more thought. But I really don’t like spending time on little things. It’s possible this is a flaw of mine. I’m a product of my time when it comes to how much I really do care about efficiency. Or, as Winnie-the-Pooh called it, “A Fish In The Sea,” which is probably more like how I should think about it.

But the other extreme is 2-year decisions. I obsess over something for multiple years before I do anything about it. I read about it, think and reflect about it, listen to podcasts, watch videos. I want to really wrap my mind around it and develop a perspective on it before I actually need to do something about it.

That might be things involving personal finance or particular theological rabbit holes. Naturally, the place it shows up the most is in family and parenting. When my first son was born, I went down a deep rabbit hole on parenting, raising boys, masculinity, and more. I’m still not out of that rabbit hole, really. But I read Of Boys And Men, The Intentional Father, The Toxic War On Masculinity, Domestic Monastery, and more. I listened to a bunch of David Thomas podcasts and read the relevant chapters in his book Wild Things. I’m slowly working my way through Andrew Murray’s Christian Parenting, which is undoubtedly the best parenting book I have personally come across.

Right now, the 2-year decision obsession is education. My oldest has one more year before he enters kindergarten (we’re giving him an extra year per the advice of Richard Reeves in Of Boys And Men. See how this works?). And, to be frank, I’m freaked out by AI.

I’m not anti-AI, and in fact, I like a lot of things about AI. I’m not an AI-doomer.

But what freaks me out most about AI is that it’s going to radically reshape our entire world in ways that we really don’t have categories for. Like the iPhone, it will be gradually then suddenly. In 2007, we got magic glass boxes that connected us to each other and we could play some games on. In 2025, we’re all anxious out of our minds, can’t focus, and can hardly function in society without one. How did that happen? Gradually, then suddenly.

I think AI will be the same. We’re currently in the gradually phase. Which means that the world my kids will start school in will look vastly different than the world in which my kids will end school. If you watch the Google Veo 3 video below, can you honestly watch that and tell me that the world 13 years from now is not going to be an unfathomably different world than ours today?

I don’t think I can, in good conscience, educate my children toward the goal of a specific career path in mind because I have no idea which jobs will make it and what new jobs will exist. I am cautious (skeptical?) about the future of universities. Obviously, we will still have them. But what will they look like? No idea.

So, it seems to me like we have to change how we view the goal of education, and it probably needs to look more like recovery than innovation.

My take?

It probably looks like recovering education as virtue training.

And then aiming that virtue at the common good (even saying such a thing is a redundancy), which can be expressed in any vocation, no matter which jobs exist and what our technological outlook is.

I’m still working through this. Like I said, it’s a 2-year kind of decision. I have some ideas on what the specifics might look like, but I’m not an educator. I’m a concerned father. So it’ll take refining. But I do think this is a massive issue that isn’t ringing enough alarm bells. So, at the risk of sounding alarmist, that’s what I’m thinking about right now.

That said, June seems like a good month to be thinking about it.

Happy Summer!

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My Latest

Interviews

Walking Faithfully Through Deconstruction: Interview with Ian Harber on Mere Orthodoxy

If you’d like to interview me about my book for your podcast, reach out. I’d love to talk with you.

Speaking

Xenos Summer Institute 2025 at Dwell Community Church | July 9 - 11

Amplify Conference at Wheaton College | October 21 & 22

My Book

$13.46 — Amazon

From The Bookshelf

Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education — Louis Markos

Like I mentioned above, education is one of the things I’m obsessing over right now. I don’t think I would if it weren’t for how quickly AI is advancing and how much I believe it is going to change education. There are some links below that get at this conversation from other angles, but overall, I don’t think this conversation is being had at near the scale it needs to be. We all need to be rethinking education right now. I don’t have all the answers, but I imagine it will resemble something that this book lays out.

The Life of God in the Soul of Man — Henry Scougal

This is one of my all-time favorite books. I just finished re-reading it. Few books refresh my spirit the way this one does. Its vision of the Christian life is exactly the one I hope to embody. Bonus points for being little.

The Ten Commandments: A Guide to the Perfect Law of Liberty — Peter Leithart

I think about this one a lot. I need to revisit it. But the way Leithart lays out God’s moral vision through the ten commandments is stunning. Also, bonus points for being little.

To Read

AI Makes Me Doubt Everything — Tim Challies

The Not At All Secret History of Nicaea — Susannah Black Roberts

Is There a Future for Church Grandpas and Grandmas? — Trevin Wax

The Ruthless Elimination of Sloth: An Appeal to Young Men — Seth Troutt

Welcome to Metamodernity — Paul Anleitner and Patrick Miller

The Right Has Forgotten Feeling — Freya India

Virtue Remains — Amy Antrivandi

AI is Coming for Online Pastoral Education — Cameron Shaffer

A.I. Will Make Learning Virtuous or Obsolete — Alan Noble

To Watch

A Conversation With Jony Ive

Incredible conversation around technology. Though a little ironic that Jony went to work with Sam Altman at OpenAI right after this was released. Not sure what to make of it.

Trusting God in the Face of Death: My Last Conversation with Tim Keller — Michael Horton

Just a phenomenal conversation with Tim Keller front to back. I miss him and his voice in our times. Glad we have this.

Do This Before 2026! The Creator Survival Plan for the Changing Economy — Think Media

I’m not a Dave Ramsey fanboy or anything, but there’s good stuff here for people who work in media like I do.

The Prompt Theory: 4 Minutes Straight of Google Veo Prompts

This video is horribly unsettling but I think it’s a great example of how AI is going to scramble our epistemological sensibilities.

To Listen

Hath Pope Leo XIV Jurisdiction Here? — Mere Fidelity

Mere Fidelity is back! Really pumped to have a hand in producing this show now. It’s an incredible resource.

‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’ — Ezra Klein

This is a must-listen when it comes to the AI and education topic.

Robot Plumbers, Robot Armies, and Our Imminent A.I. Future | Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

Talk about horribly unsettling. Must-listen for thinking about AI.

From This Year

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One of the things I got to do was take my oldest son, who is four, to a coffee shop, get a cappuccino for me and a vanilla steamer for him, and play Castle Panic (the kid’s version). It was raining outside while we were sipping our drinks and sending monsters to the dungeon inside. Four years isn’t really that long a time to be a parent, but it was one of those moments that I sort of imagined happening in my mind over the course of the first three years, but those kinds of things just weren’t really possible for all kinds of reasons.

Those first few years are a grind. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but so much of parenting between birth and four is just keeping them alive. Three is sort of a transition year where they start to get their basic needs taken care of more and more and develop more of a unique personality that can relate to you. It wasn’t until my oldest turned four that I really felt like I was stepping into the phase of fatherhood that I imagined when I first found out we were having a son. That has been true in all of the best and all of the most challenging of ways.

There have been many times that have confirmed that, but there was something about the coffee shop and the drinks and the board game and the rain and even getting to talk with some old friends we haven’t seen in several years that was just one of those moments that made you stop and take it in and say, “Yes, this is it.”

This newsletter is the first in the new format that I mentioned a few weeks ago in light of my new role with Mere Orthodoxy. My hope is that this becomes a resource of helpful content for you as you journey through life and grow in your faith.

One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that parenting and technology are fairly recurring themes. Even things that are not directly related to those topics might be tangentially related just in how I’m thinking about them. There’s this quote from the old preacher Andrew Murray that rocked my world. He says, “What I am to make my child, I must first be myself.” So even when I’m thinking through things like work, finances, technology, education, theology, church, and more, there’s a large part of it that, yes, is personally edifying, but always with an eye toward how to parent my children.

I originally thought about writing a short paragraph for every link below. After I realized how many links I included, I decided not to. Sorry for my laziness here. Maybe I will get better at this in the future. I did, however, add a few notes to give some context for things.

This format is new for me, so I’d love your feedback. I really do hope this kind of roundup is beneficial for my audience in the absence of regular writing on here. I know many of these things may not seem to be related to deconstruction or spiritual formation on the surface, which are two of the main reasons people found this newsletter. But I hope you trust me that, in many ways, all of these things are related in one way or another. Sometimes, the best way to address those things is not to think of them directly, but to think about each individual thing connected to it from a million different angles. That’s what these lists will do.

With that, I hope you enjoy.

My Latest

Articles

To Go Forward, We Must Go Backward on Mere Orthodoxy

Interviews

When It Feels Like Your Faith Is Failing with Collin Hansen (Gospelbound)

The Inevitable Emptiness of Deconstruction with Paul Anleitner

Steward Your Story with What Would Jesus Tech?

Why Do Christians Deconstruct? with Liberty McArtor

Speaking

Amplify Conference at Wheaton College | October 21 & 22

My Book is On Sale

$3.99 Kindle

$13.49 Paperback

From The Bookshelf

The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life — Sahil Bloom

From what I can tell, this is the most popular new self-help book out right now, and for good reason. It’s nothing ground-breaking, but it pairs really well with something like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I know self-help books get a bad wrap in Christian circles. I have a bit of a different take on it. I think every high school senior or college student should read this book. It isn’t perfect, of course. I could critique just as much as I would recommend it. But this is the sort of stuff your dad should have taught you but probably didn’t (unless your dad is Jon Tyson or someone like that).

On The Human Condition — St Basil the Great

Sorry about the cover. Great book though. It’s always worth diving into the church fathers.

“Rule the thoughts in yourself, that you may become ruler of all beings. Thus the rule we have been given over the animals trains us to rule the things belonging to ourselves.”

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? — Seth Godin

I read this book every time I start a new job. One of the most influential books on my life in terms of my career. That’s also just true of Seth Godin generally.

To Read

Technology for the American Family — Jon Askonas

Must read. His concept of the third oikos is already becoming a concept I’m thinking about a lot.

The Case for Changing the Scorecard in Education — Bob Thune

Why Christian Men Need Friendship, Not Just "Accountability" —

Samuel James finally saying what every man has wanted to say about accountability groups.

Steered by Spectacle: Jacques Ellul and the Illusion of Online Engagement — James Wood

I Will Never Commute Again —

This is actually related to Jon Askonas’ third oikos concept, and I completely agree with Chris.

Quaker Parents Were Ahead of Their Time — Gail Cornwall

‘Dramatic growth’ in young people attending church, Bible Society research finds — Church Times

Fascinating and insanely encouraging.

To Watch

Everything I Know About Writing With Al — David Perrell

This is the most important video on AI you’ll watch in a long time. It’s definitely on the techno-optimist side of things, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think David is directionally correct, if only about where society is going with AI, even if I’d be a couple clicks more hesitant than him.

Why Modern Women Feel More Lost Than Ever — Freya India

The headline is misleading. This really isn’t just about women. is one of the most insightful voices on therapy culture and must be listened to. It boggles my mind she isn’t a Christian. Seems like only a matter of time.

Adventure as Lasting Happiness — Arthur Brookes and Jordan Peterson

My theory with Jordan Peterson is that on his own he is almost impossible to listen to, but he has some of the best conversations with others. Pair that with the fact that Arthur Brookes is one of the most interesting people to listen to and you have an incredible conversation that would change most people’s lives if they took it seriously.

To Listen

‘Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’ — Ezra Klein and Jonathan Haidt

I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with Jonathan Haidt, and this one with Ezra Klein is the best. Jaw-droppingly good. Really highlights how good of an interviewer Klein is, too.

Technology and Why Conservatism Failed — Jon Askonas and James Wood

A conversational intro to the longer Jon Askonas piece above. Might be a good idea to listen to this before you read the essay above.

The Great Novel That Almost Wasn’t — Collin Hansen and Allen Levi

My wife and I read this novel together, and it’s incredible. Stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. Highly recommend it.

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I’ve never shared a book excerpt of someone else’s book on my Substack before. So why am I sharing one now?

I’m sharing this because I think the doctrine of union with Christ could change your life.

In my book, I talk about how doctrine is the script of the story we live. I believe union with Christ is one of the most crucial plot points. Whether you’re deconstructing or walking with someone who is, union with Christ changes everything.

Kyle Worley, the author of Home With God: Our Union with Christ, is the person I heard say, “We do theology in the light so we can stand on it in the dark.” Union with Christ is one of those doctrines you stand on in the dark.

Here’s why. At some point, especially in your deconstruction, you must answer a simple question: what is salvation for?

Many of us grew up with answers to that question like the forgiveness of sins, or going to heaven when we die, or being reconciled to God. All of those things are true. But they aren’t what salvation is for.

You might have been told what you are saved from, or how you are saved, or what some of the benefits of salvation are. And while all of those are important and true, none of them are the point of salvation. What are you saved for?

In this book, you’ll learn what Kyle says it’s for and see why it’s so life-changing. And all of it is bound up in those three words: union with Christ.

Home With God is the kind of book for those who feel spiritually homeless. For the spiritual nomads wandering between places, wondering if they will ever rest, Kyle reminds us that there is rest at home with God. Our union with Christ is the fountain out of which all of our spiritual blessings flow.

Some of the most beautiful things in life come from the most basic truths. Union with Christ is one of the greatest examples of that. I hope you enjoy this excerpt from Kyle’s book and pick it up to read the rest.

Created for Home with God

An excerpt from Home with God: Our Union with Christ

It’s easy to forget the original audience of Genesis 1–2 is a homeless people. Having been rescued by God from hundreds of years under the tyranny of Pharaoh, Israel is gathered around Mount Sinai. Tents and plunder from the Egyptians were better than making bricks for Pharoah’s buildings, but I don’t think any of them would have turned to their neighbor and said “home is where the heart is.” They longed for a home they had forgotten.

In Genesis 1–2, God reminds His newly rescued people: you were created to live in My presence. Deep within all image-bearers of God is a faint remembrance: We once walked with God in Eden’s abundance. Lurking beneath all desires and duties, beneath all stories, beneath all songs, every hand held, every kiss given, every satisfying sip, beautiful bite, and beauty beheld there is a whisper of a desire for a home for which we have always longed. If you scratch beneath the surface of any longing, you will find a deep desire to be at home with God. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (3:11).

We were created for home with God, not because God was lonely or bored, but because of the delighting love of God. And this is important to remember about creation: God didn’t create out of mercy, God didn’t create out of pity, God didn’t create out of forgiveness. God created the world out of delighting love.

When we consider the love of God, we often think of it primarily in terms of forgiving love. Grace is often considered to be less than what it is. Don’t get me wrong, God’s forgiveness is rooted in God’s love. Forgiveness is a gracious gift from God. I don’t want you to minimize His gracious forgiving love, for we are sinners in need of forgiveness. But this wasn’t where we started. We are not creatures made of forgiving love; we are creatures made by delighting love who are in need of forgiving love that we may once again enjoy the delight of fellowship with God.

The garden home was not supposed to come to an end. Eden, as a temple home with God in delighting love, was meant to be stretched over the whole world. Adam and Eve were called to multiply, cultivate, and subdue in the presence of God. The last day of creation was to be an unending Sabbath, an unending seventh day marked by God’s people living their whole lives in His presence to reflect His purposes in His place.

But by the time the words of Genesis are heard by an audience, something has gone terribly wrong. The garden home has been lost. How did we get here? And how do we get back home with God?

Beloved Before the Beginning

Before we were created, we were chosen. We were beloved before the beginning. How do we know this and why does it matter? In Romans 8:29–30 we hear, “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” This echoes in Ephesians 1 where we are told God “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing . . . even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (vv. 3–4).

Before there was anything, before there was a garden home, before there was a world at all: God’s people were destined to live at home with God in Christ Jesus forever. Before our fellowship with God was ever experienced or disrupted, we were already chosen for union with Christ. We were beloved before the beginning.

The very same God who eternally enjoyed delighting love in Himself, who created all that is out of the overflow of this trinitarian delight, made a covenant for the salvation of His people. Theologians call this the pactum salutis. The fancy Latin phrase means “agreement of salvation.” We use it to describe God’s eternal plan to save His people. It is the first covenant, and it stands as the foundation for all the covenants we read in Scripture. This “agreement of salvation,” like all covenant promises, finds its perfect fulfillment in Christ Jesus. As the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.”

I am an organized guy. When I travel, I have backup plan after backup plan. If I am hopping on a flight, I don’t only bring my driver’s license, I bring my passport. I make multiple dinner reservations for each night of a vacation, at different times, in case we miss the first one. But it is crucially important to understand this: living in covenant love with God was never a “backup plan.” Before there was a problem that needed fixing for humanity, there was a promise for the future of God’s people: we would dwell with God in Christ forever.

I’ve been a fan of Mere Orthodoxy for years. Some of the most influential articles on the way I think have come from Mere Orthodoxy. As a long-time reader and some-times contributor, I’m beyond excited to get to not just read and support, but to be a part of building a media institution that I believe in.

When you survey the evangelical media landscape, a place like Mere Orthodoxy is crucial. One of my favorite pieces that I’ve returned to often is Constructing Toward Catholicity by Jake Meador. Not only is his description of his personal faith journey familiar to mine, but the vision Jake lays out of catholicity, of being deeply rooted in the things that unite Christians across time and tradition, is exactly what I hope to build too.

I love this section in particular.

Whether people leave and go to another church or leave and deconstruct before ultimately apostatizing, the thing that virtually never happens is a reconstruction ending with a more catholic Christianity.

Those who stayed Christian would found or find other churches that were usually just nicer, tamer versions of what they'd left. Those who left dismissed Christianity altogether, while still maintaining the rather bizarre and ahistorical idea that "Christianity" is synonymous with the thing they encountered in that church and, quite understandably, rejected.

What's odd, in other words, is that for all the thousands of people who have at one time attended this church and then left, very few found their way to a Christianity that isn't all those things mentioned above. They didn't find something historically rooted in the creeds and confessions of the church, something marked by traditional Christian piety, something that self-consciously saw itself as belonging to that thing C. S. Lewis described once as "terrible as an army with banners," the church catholic as she sprawls across time and space.

If you’ve read Walking Through Deconstruction, then you understand why I find this so appealing. You also understand how important I believe media to be. For most of my working career, I’ve worked in media. What this new role with Mere Orthodoxy does is it combines my passion for helping a particular vision for the church flourish through media.

What does this mean for Back Again?

To be honest, I’m still working this out. But for now, it means a few things.

1. My primary writing outlet will now be Mere Orthodoxy. It makes sense that if I want to write, I write for the publication I work for first. So I expect to be contributing more there soon, including a longer piece on beauty, media, and formation I’m finishing up that I imagine will be published before the end of the month.

2. For now, I’ll be using this newsletter for a monthly resource round-up. If I write for Mere Orthodoxy, I’ll include a link to it along with other resources that month that I found particularly helpful. I find what has created over at inspiring. While I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do something to the same caliber, maybe I’ll be able to attain that level of intentionality over time. Next week, I’m going to be running an excerpt from a recent book that I love and I hope you read from . After that, I’ll be moving to the new format.

3. In light of this, I’m pausing paid subscriptions and opening up my archives for free. I’m so thankful for everyone who has supported me financially. It honestly blows me away that anyone has at all. Those who have supported me have done so not because I’ve been able to provide any extra value to them, but because they believe in the vision of what I’ve been trying to write about here. But I don’t feel like I can keep paid subscriptions alive with the direction the newsletter is going. Maybe it’ll make sense again in the future. But not today. To everyone who has supported me: thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you want to continue to support me, the best way to do so is to become a Member at Mere Orthodoxy. It’s the same amount but you get much more, including the three incredible print Journals we put out each year.

I believe in what we’re building at Mere Orthodoxy. Even though it’s been around for 20 years at this point, it honestly feels like we’re only just beginning. Along with Jake Meador and our new Executive Director Mark Kremer, we have what we need to build on the remarkable foundation that has been laid over the last two decades.

So, Back Again isn’t going away, but it is changing. But it’s because I believe in building institutions that will outlast you and that’s what I hope to help with at Mere Orthodoxy. I love Substack and I’m staying here. I think it might be the best platform on the internet. I’ll still be over on Notes engaging with the incredible community that is here. I’ll just be using my effort on building Mere Orthodoxy instead of my own platform (ugh, I hate that word).

I’m really excited for this next adventure. I hope you stick around and join me on it.

Let’s build something beautiful.

— Ian Harber

Today is the day.

Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith is officially published and available wherever you buy books.

Almost exactly five years ago, I told God in prayer that if he wanted to use my story, I was ready to tell it. Two months later, I had the opportunity to share some of my story for The Gospel Coalition. The response was beyond anything I ever imagined. I don’t claim that this is a normal experience, but it’s just what happened.

Fast forward to today, and the prayer that turned into an article has grown up into a book.

From the outset, it was important to me that I not write a memoir. I wasn’t interested in writing an angry tell-all that aired all of my dirty laundry. It’d be impossible to write about this topic without telling some of my story. That’s inevitable. But I didn’t want it to just be a venting session with all of my grievances. I genuinely want to serve the church and those who are going through this painful process of deconstruction.

So this book isn’t a memoir, but it is deeply personal.

I wrote the book I wish the people around me could have read when I was deconstructing. I wonder how much of my life would look different if the pastors, friends, and loved ones in my life had this book when I was deep in the process.

In one sense, it doesn’t matter. God has been faithful in my life regardless. On the other hand, how much hurt would I have been spared? God only knows.

I’m not afraid to be brutally honest, but I also will always be defiantly hopeful. These lessons were won the hard way. I hope you are able to glean some of those lessons the easy way.

I’m under no illusion that this is a perfect book. It’s my first one and I’m hardly the smartest person to write on the topic. I’m sure I might’ve gotten some things wrong. Maybe I overemphasized some things or underemphasized others. A friend of mine told me, “You don’t finish a book. Books escape.” I already feel that in the year since I finished it.

But I hope my experience, reflection, and study come through and bring a new perspective on a topic that is confusing for many and painful for many more. My hope is that this book, far from being the last word on deconstruction, becomes a meaningful contribution to the larger conversation.

To everyone who pre-ordered this book, thank you.

It’s no secret in the publishing industry that pre-orders help make or break a book. I’ve been told the pre-orders have been strong—especially for a first-time, unknown author like myself—and that’s because of you. You took a chance on this before anyone had read it, before any reviews were out, and with almost no idea what was in it. I don’t take that for granted at all.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you haven’t ordered it yet, would you consider it? I’ve already heard from parents who bought it thinking about their kids, folks who want to better love their friends who are deconstructing, and pastors who have told me they’re buying multiple copies to put on the church bookshelf. All of these are exactly the uses I had hoped for.

Buy The Book

If you want to start reading while you wait for your copy, here is the Introduction and Chapter 1. You can read them here.

Here is the table of contents.

I want to say a huge thank you to Gavin Ortlund for writing the Foreward. He’s an inspiration and I wish someone like him was doing the work he’s doing when I was deconstructing. One of the reasons I wanted Gavin to write the foreward is that I hope people who read my book go watch his content and read his books after. I believe his work is the perfect companion to my book.

There are many, many more thank you’s I could give. This book didn’t happen because of me, but because of many people who believed in me, took a chance, and made this happen.

If this is the only book I ever get to write, it’s the one I wanted to write. I’ll keep writing on this here Substack and, if this book does well enough, maybe I’ll have the chance to write more. But I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to write this one. And if it’s all I get to write, I’m happy.

After you read it, make sure to leave a rating (and review!) on Amazon. Every author says it, but those things really move the needle. But even more importantly, tell someone you know in real life about it.

And even more importantly than that, I hope it helps you faithfully walk with those who are deconstructing. And even more fundamentally than that, I hope it strengthens and encourages you in your own faith, and that strength overflows in your love for God and others.

That’s what it’s all about.

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The smallest Unit of Life is the second. Not to get too granular, but sometimes what you do with your seconds is the most important part of your life.

Your seconds are your reactions. The infinitesimal moment of choice between calm and chaos, resilience and fragility, courage and cowardliness, values and vile. How we respond in the narrow window between stimulus and response is who we ultimately are. Training in virtue is training to become the kind of people who can respond with our better angels in the moments when we are least prepared.

From there, the Units of Life get larger. Our minutes, hours, days, etc all the way up the largest Unit of Life which is your Whole Life. We have little to no control over the circumstances of our Whole Life. Even our choices are conditioned upon the circumstances we were born into, the opportunities afforded us, the messages spoken over or withheld from our lives.

The larger the Unit of Life, the less control we have over it.
The smaller the Unit of Life, the more control we have.

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I don’t have much control over the next decade, but I have more control than not over today. Annie Dillard famously reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I’m a big believer in closely examining and being intentional about both the small and large Units of Life alike. We need to cultivate good habits day to day and reverse engineer our lives as we patiently await our death.

But there is another and oft-overlooked Unit of Life that rests between our seconds and our Whole Lives. It’s less clear-cut, more arbitrary, and not as time-bound as the others, but it’s just as necessary to consider. It’s also different from the other Units in that there can be multiple at a time. Instead of a chronological sequence of time, this Unit multiplies and overlaps, it layers and adds complexity to our lives.

This Unit is, of course,

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I’ve come to realize that there are at least four layers to patience.

The first layer is ordinary patience.

Waiting in line or in traffic. Waiting for the Amazon package to come tomorrow or the next day (or the Christmas Eve feeling of 10 stops away).

Some of these circumstances aren’t so much mundane as they are circumstantial. Waiting to graduate college, or get married. Waiting for your child to be born, waiting for the year-end bonus, etc etc. This kind of patience is anticipatory. It’s waiting for something to happen. Whether that’s waiting for your food to come out or the sale on your house to go through.

Even if the circumstances are big deals, the stakes are relatively low if only because they are moments. You’ll get to the end of the line, the wedding day will come and go, and the plane will land after its final descent.

Learning how to be patient in these circumstances, whether ordinary or extraordinary, is how we cultivate the virtue of patience in our lives. If we can’t be patient in a restaurant, how can we be patient in any other area of our lives? These circumstances are the training ground of patience. They prepare us for the other three layers.

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The second layer is relational patience.

We have to learn to be patient with others in order to live with them well. The difficulty level between the first and second layers jumps exponentially. Certainly, I’m still learning how to be relationally patient, sometimes the hard way. I’ve started to wonder if I’m becoming worse at it as I get older.

We might just be waiting for someone to respond to us or to make this decision or that decision, but we also might be waiting for someone to change. To stop harming themselves or others and to do what is right. We might struggle to be patient with someone’s actions or a specific character trait of theirs. You find yourself irritable with them and causing further harm to your relationship because you can’t simply be patient with them.

When it comes to the topic of deconstruction, I imagine this is where a lot of people are at. Parents impatient with their children’s choices or beliefs, wanting them to come back to Jesus. Children impatient with their parent’s rules or idiosyncracies or political persuasion, wishing they would simply stop being weird and actually have a real conversation with them and tell them they’re loved.

People do not change overnight.

This might also mean being impatient with yourself. How much of our negative self-talk happens because we simply aren’t patient with ourselves? We give slack to others but we beat ourselves up over every little mistake. We think if we are to get anywhere in life we have to have it all figured out tomorrow and don’t give ourselves permission to take our time and be a beginner again.

I think that, for many people, the concept of patience stops after these two layers. They know what it means to be patient in their circumstances or the mundanity of life and to be patient with others. And certainly, we never leave this layer. I’m learning lessons in this layer today.

But, for many, that is as far as the concept of patience goes. What else is there to be patient about?

Well, as it turns out, a lot.

The third layer is existential patience.

By existential patience, I mean adopting a long time horizon for every single thing in your life. You shift your default from instant gratification to playing the long game. You stop thinking in terms of days, weeks, and months, and start thinking in terms of years, decades, and a lifetime.

There are two ways this plays out.

The first is looking forward. Beginning with the end in mind. You imagine your life in reverse chronological order. You imagine what you want the end of your life to be like and reverse engineer it in order to aim your life in that direction.

What feeling do you want to have on your deathbed?
Who do you want to be around you?
What do you hope they say to you?

What has to happen in your life between now and then for that to happen?
What kind of person do you need to be?
What words do you need to say and to whom?
What habits do you need to kick?
What prayers do you need to pray?

We are patiently awaiting our death.

momento mori.

The second is looking backward. This is the one that I think is really tough.

Being patient with the things that have happened to you. All of us have Things that have happened to us. Things that to tell another person would be a courageous act of vulnerability. Things that regularly pop into our minds and consciously or unconsciously direct our lives. Things that we really don’t have any explanation for. Sometimes Layer 1 circumstances become Layer 3 Things. What do we do with those?

The answer: You’ll have to be patient.

These Things create an unbelievable amount of tension in our lives. The temptation to relieve that tension is all too strong. We rush to stuff them down or make the pain go away through unhealthy coping mechanisms (and even sometimes unhealthy therapy). We rush to change our minds or beliefs or friends or jobs or cities or churches or whatever. We just want to see it resolved as soon as possible.

I’ve been reflecting on this lately. I have a book coming out in less than two weeks that is the result of more than 15 years of dealing with doubt, death, discouragement, and disillusionment. The only reason I was able to write this book is because of the mistakes I made in trying to relieve tension in my life. Of trying to be “ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it” as G.K. Chesterton said about himself. In my attempt to deal with my Things, I was impatient with the Truth.

I’ve spent almost my entire life wondering what is the purpose of these Things that have happened to me. It’s only now, in two weeks, that I see this specific arc of my life come to a close. It’s not the only Thing. And certainly, that doesn’t mean I don’t deal with any Thing I’ve written in the book anymore. I do. But Things that were in the foreground my whole life are now fading to the background and I sense this chapter of my life closing.

More than 15 years later.

It’s not even all bad Things. Sometimes it’s good Things. A good thing happens, and then nothing. For years. But then the thread picks back up and moves forward. Then nothing, for a few more years. And then it picks up again. Who knows when it will finally pay off?

You thought that Bad Thing or New Skill or Big Opportunity would play itself out next month? Try 7 years from now. Maybe more.

The lesson I’m taking away from this is that some things take a decade or more to come to their conclusion. I wish I had more patience over the past decade.

But now I know.

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The fourth layer is eternal patience.

We forget that the entire Christian life is a life of waiting.

Scripture leaves us with the words, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Some things won’t resolve in a decade or more. Some things won’t ever resolve on this side of eternity. There is nothing for us to do but to wait upon the Lord.

Hope—along with Faith and Love—is one of the keystone Christian virtues. Patience and Hope go hand in hand. Only hopeful people can be patient and only patient people can have hope. That’s why patience is a fruit of the Spirit. The Spirit molds us into patient people as we hope in the Lord and wait for him to return and make all things right.

And while it’s true what I said at the beginning—that the ordinary patience of life trains us to be patient relationally, existentially, and eternally—it is equally true that Hope produces patience in us that filters down into the rest of our life.

When we are truly Hopeful, we can be patient existentially, relationally, and in every other aspect of our lives. Because we know that, underneath everything, we are waiting on God. So we can wait on him in the Things of our lives. We can wait on him to move in our lives and the lives of others. We can wait on our ordinary circumstances because they pail in comparison to what we are waiting on from him.

In all of these ways, patience is a key ingredient in love. Because “Love is patient.” In waiting on God—in hoping in him—we cultivate a life of love. For the ways we are impatient, we repent and put our Hope back in the only one who is perfectly patient with us.

Come, Lord Jesus.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

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Habits are all the rage right now and I believe rightfully so. I keep going back to this line from Augustine in Confessions:

It is a disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.

If Augustine is right, then one reason we don’t live in line with the truths we believe is that we don’t habituate them into our lives through our mundane, routine, everyday actions. If we want to be a certain kind of person then we must act like a certain kind of person. And our willpower simply isn’t strong enough to sustain actions that go against the grain of our natural wills. To consistently act like a certain kind of person, we need to establish small routines that aim us in the direction of becoming that kind of person.

The habits I’m going to talk about are not, except for one, the typical spiritual disciplines you hear about in spiritual formation circles. These habits are simply practical things that I’ve started doing to be the kind of person who can bear life. But being able to bear life means having the capacity to love others, to be a person of love, and to obey the commandments of loving God and neighbor with heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s the goal of these small habits.

None of these are groundbreaking so I’m sure some readers will shrug their shoulders and think, “So what?” But I’ve also come to realize that I shouldn’t take these simple habits for granted either.

Everyone is different, but if you find yourself struggling under the weight of life, I hope these habits are something you’ll consider as we move into the new year. They won’t solve every problem, but I’ve found that they have helped me bear life and increase my capacity for love.

I don’t aim for perfection on any of these. I aim for a greater than 75% success rate. I try to give myself grace for days and weeks that don’t go according to plan and also just times when I straight up fail and have no one to blame but myself. But the most important thing isn’t that I do all of these habits with 100% accuracy, but to aim my life in the direction I want it to go. These are a few ways I attempt to do that.

#1. Rise Before Responsibilities

Yes, this is essentially “become a morning person.” But I’m the kind of person who needs a reason for almost everything I do and just “being a morning person” never cut it for me. I was always the person who slept through my early classes in college and stayed up past midnight most nights. I never thought I could be a morning person.

Until I had kids. All of a sudden I realized how degraded I felt as a person every time I shot out of bed to a screaming baby and had to rush right into my responsibilities for the day. Whatever “me time” I had before kids was gone. I was lucky if I had 30 minutes at the end of the day; hardly enough to hear my own thoughts let alone actually rest or develop any other part of my life. The constant movement of life and bearing responsibilities was keeping me from fully investing in the things that matter most.

So instead of just “becoming a morning person,” I realized I needed to rise before my responsibilities. I need to beat my obligations to the punch. I need to be with myself and God before I need to be with anyone else. I need to be in quiet before I’m in noise. I need to receive before I can give. I need to cast my cares before I can carry burdens.

The times I’ve gotten up have varied slightly, but I try to shoot for around 5:45 am. I know people who get up at 4:30 am or earlier and so this sounds like sleeping in to them. I also know some people’s jobs start earlier or they have long commutes, so you’re really pushing into the early hours of the morning at that point. I’m lucky that I get to work from home in this season of life so my commute is a few steps to my back office. But no matter my circumstances, I can’t imagine ever going back to getting out of bed at the last possible minute. The amount of capacity I’ve gained just from this one simple habit is impossible to overestimate.

If this isn’t something you do yet but want to start doing, consider moving your alarm back 15-30 minutes one week, and then again the next week, and again the next week, until you get to a time where you have the margin you really need. Give yourself a month or so to get there and practice getting up. Put your phone on the other side of the room and make a promise to yourself that you won’t go back to bed once you turn the alarm off. Head straight for the coffee maker instead. The first 10-15 minutes will be pretty rough, but you’ll settle in. By the time your responsibilities start up, you’ll feel far more rested than if you slept for that last hour. It’s paradoxical, but it’s how it works.

Once you’re up, what do you do? The next couple of habits will essentially be part of my morning routine.

#2. Morning Office

I’m way too tired right after I wake up to pray. I have no idea what’s going on. I finally realized that I needed help praying. That’s how I got into prayer books.

I used to think prayer had to be extemporaneous. If it wasn’t an original prayer straight from the heart each time, it didn’t count. But that is a relatively recent idea in Christianity. Christians have always prayed prayers. Prayers that were written by the church and for the church. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he gave them a prayer to pray. And the church has written other prayers for other circumstances.

My gateway to this world was Crossway’s Be Thou My Vision. It didn’t take long before I got a 1979 Book Of Common Prayer and fell in love with it. I’ve also loved Trevin Wax’s 30 Days trilogy for lots of reasons. All of these resources are wonderful. The great thing about the 30 Days trilogy is that the scripture reading is built into the books. My plan in the new year is to be a little more methodical about how I use these various resources and try to get through more of the Bible than I typically do in a given year.

At the risk of sounding weird (I hope I don’t), there are two more things I use during morning office that round things out for me. The first are these candles that remind me that my prayers rise to God like the smoke from the candle and that he is pleased with them like the pleasing aroma of the candle. I like the wood wick too, just as an aesthetic choice. I also throw this playlist on Alexa quietly in the background. The background music helps calm me and, honestly, stay focused. I don’t know if that’s an ADHD thing or not, but I know it helps.

I wish I could find the quote—alas, I can’t—but I started doing this after I read Ronald Rolheiser say something about praying with our senses. Not just with our minds and words, but with all of our senses, including our sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Being able to see the flame, smell the fragrance, taste the coffee, and hear the beautiful music has genuinely added more than I can describe to my prayer life.

The prayer books create a ritual of praying that sustains me even when I don’t feel like praying. Instead of wondering, “What am I praying for today?” I simply open up the prayer book and pray what’s in front of me. I’ve found that these prayers often “prime the pump” so to speak, and more extemporaneous or contemplative prayer is easier after. To quote Rolheiser (a quote I could actually could find):

What clear, simple, and brief rituals do is carry us: they carry our tiredness, our lack of energy, our inattentiveness, our indifference, and even our occassional distaste. They keep us praying even when we are too tired to muster up our own energy.

#3. Life School

I wish I had a better name for this, but I don’t. Once I finish the morning office, I take myself to Life School.

I find myself inspired by Proverbs 4:

Wisdom is supreme—so get wisdom.
And whatever else you get, get understanding.
Cherish her, and she will exalt you;
if you embrace her, she will honor you.
She will place a garland of favor on your head;
she will give you a crown of beauty.

Simply put, this means I read. A lot of times it’s theology or Christian living books but lately I’ve been trying to expand my reading. I realized how much that was limiting my ability to actually gain wisdom and understanding because the scope of knowledge was so limited. I’m currently having the same realization with only reading non-fiction and trying to read more fiction (but primarily at night).

I read a history of Rome this year that I loved so much that it inspired me to make a project out of surveying all of Western history. I’m currently reading a book on the Middle Ages as the next step of that. I also spent a month reading through a few finance books to sharpen my understanding of economics and personal finance. Those books became almost immediately applicable in my life. I did the same with philosophy and, no exaggeration, that month was life-changing. I plan on doing this in the new year with a host of different topics and will probably write more on it in the future. But the idea is simple. I identify something I don’t know that I should probably know or I’m at least curious about and I read a book or a few books on it. That’s it.

The crazy thing about this practice is that the more I read, the less “well read” I feel. I’m constantly discovering new trails I’ve never been down or have only take a step or two. It has a paradoxical double effect of making me both more confident and (hopefully) more humble with each book I read.

This is my primary way of combatting brain rot. As part of my job, I spend a lot of time on the internet. As a millennial, I spend even more. I consider this a serious mental health threat. Reading exercises my brain and helps me think clearer than just endlessly scrolling through barely-chuckle-worthy videos for hours.

I want to “get wisdom” and “get understanding.” I want to “cherish and embrace” wisdom. The best way I know to do that is to take myself to Life School almost every morning. I firmly believe that one of the best things someone can do is commit themselves to being a life-long learner. Make it part of your identity. Never be satisfied with the knowledge you have. Cultivate an insatiable curiosity and chase the rabbit trails as far as they go.

Cherish Wisdom and she will exalt you. Embrace her and she will honor you. She will place a garland of favor on your head and she will give you a crown of beauty.

Who wouldn’t want that?

#4. Quit Netflix

And by Netflix, I really just mean TV in general, but I wanted to give a nod to ’s (famous? infamous?) article, which is barely preserved thanks to the internet archive. Here is Brett McCracken’s engagement with it that tries to balance it out a little.

I have no idea how good the latest show is. I don’t even know what’s popular right now. I just don’t watch TV. I also have exactly 2% FOMO about it. Maybe twice a year I’ll wish I was caught up on the latest show, but then I think about the time that would take away from other things like chatting with my wife after our chores, going to bed earlier, reading, etc and it simply doesn’t seem worth it to me.

If the Cowboys are on, I might have the game on (but the worse they do, the less incentive there is to watch). But that’s just about it. My life feels full enough as it is. I don’t know why I’d fill it even more with TV.

I’m not anti-entertainment. A couple of years ago, I bought a Nintendo Switch and then about a year after that I bought a physical Gameboy emulator. What I like about video games is that if I want to play for just a little bit, I can. And then I can turn it off. And I can pick it back up tomorrow or a month from now and not miss a thing. It’s low commitment and only takes up the time I give it. I’m not committing to twelve 45-minute episodes.

The problem isn’t entertainment, it’s when entertainment gets in the way of me being able to live my life well. I want to have all my other boxes checked before I seek out entertainment. Sometimes that happens and that’s great! But it’s way too easy to entertain myself as a way of avoiding life’s responsibilities. Even then, I’m trying to find my entertainment in novels more than in screens as a way of even further de-digitalizing. I’m currently loving Golden Son. It’s fast paced and I just can’t put it down.

The only downside of this is that there are a few conversations I’m left out of. But who cares? If that’s the only thing I lose, then I lose nothing at all. If I’m only as interesting as the shows I watch, well, then that’s all the argument needed for quitting TV right there.

For the record, I don’t think watching TV is bad and I don’t judge people who do. Everyone has their thing. Some people love film and it’s worth making time for. But for me, it’s been one of the best things I’ve done and, honestly, I believe more people could do without it than think they can. I can’t think of an easier thing to do that would have a significant impact than to simply get your time back by stop caring about TV.

#5. Meet With My Pastors

I’ll just go to lunch with one of my pastors. They’ll check on me. I’ll check on them. I’ll ask them questions. We’ll bounce thoughts off each other. We develop a relationship.

Granted, it took many, many years (most of my 20’s) to find pastors I could actually do this with. So take that for what it is. But there’s something about just getting lunch or coffee with my pastors with no agenda, just to talk and get to know them that is so life-giving. They’re usually asking either nothing or very little of me and I’m usually asking nothing or very little of them. We’re just getting to know each other.

We don’t have a weekly coffee meeting. We usually don’t have a project we’re working on (though sometimes we do). We’re usually just hanging out and talking about whatever is on our minds. I find just getting to know my pastors as people, not just as Pastor, and letting them get to know me, not just as someone who goes to the church but as a friend, is humanizing in ways that are hard to describe.

In a world where pastors and congregants have seemingly never-ending expectations for each other and are constantly at odds because of it (or awkwardly avoidant), simply meeting with your pastors with no agenda either way seems to me to be one of the healthiest ways to be involved at your church.

I come with a lot of church baggage. I’ve been hurt by multiple churches in multiple ways. But being able to process that with pastors who care for me, both directly and indirectly, has done more to heal my relationship with the church than any book, podcast, or sermon ever could.

I’m sure there are a lot more than these five things that I could mention, but doing these five things over the past few years has moved the needle in my life in more ways than I can count. It’s often not immediately noticeable, but only as you look back do you see how much your life has actually changed.

What about you?

What are some of your habits that have helped you bear life?

Are you going to try any of these in the new year?

We become the sum of the little things we do every day. I don’t want to leave my character up to the whims of my willpower and I don’t ever want to put my life on autopilot. Going back to Proverbs 4, I want to,

Guard [my] heart above all else,
for it is the source of life.

Don’t let [my] mouth speak dishonestly,
and don’t let [my] lips talk deviously.

Let [my] eyes look forward;
fix [my] gaze straight ahead.

Carefully consider the path for [my] feet,
and all [my] ways will be established.

Don’t turn to the right or to the left;
keep [my] feet away from evil.

That’s not going to happen on accident.

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

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Three stories caught my attention over the past week.

The first is Oxford’s word of the year for 2024. Ready for it?

Brain Rot

Oxford defines Brain Rot as:

(n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration."

If you would like something a little more concrete than that, well, here you go. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

If you look back at the most recent Oxford words of the year, you’ll notice that they tend to name a word of the year when its trendiness is moving just beyond its peak. No one is saying “goblin mode” anymore, which was the word of the year just two years ago. If that’s right, that a word being selected as word of the year should be generally seen as the beginning of the end of a trend, then “brain rot” being chosen should be surprisingly comforting. It’s discouraging that it’s reached the cultural saturation point to be chosen, but it’s encouraging to think that this might mean there is a collective exhaustion of brain rot content. People feel as though their brains are thoroughly rotted. I’m hoping this signals a generational gasping for air in a media environment that has been suffocating them.

I’ve been saying for a long time now that social media is a distortion zone. No matter how you feel about the recent election, it seems to have proven that point. I consistently noticed that the narrative in most corners of social media was that the race was going to be close and/or Harris was going to win. And yet that obviously is nowhere near what happened in real life. There were signs pointing that way the entire time, but if you got most of your information from social media, you would have missed them.

It seems that the massive swing-and-miss of predicting this election on social media has served, at least for some, as a wake-up call to social media’s distorted reality. It’s a rude awakening for lots of Millennials and Gen Zers to find out that the online world is minuscule compared to the offline world. But there is a real opportunity here. There are people to the left and right of Christianity who are starting to bonk their rotted brains on the imminent frame and wonder if there is something more to all of this. The actual Good News is that there is. I’ll come back to that.

Books

The second data point is that Barnes & Noble, which was on the road to bankruptcy just six years ago, is about to finish opening sixty new stores this year. But it’s not just them. Indie bookstores are also on the rise again with 290 stores opening last year. Part of the reason for this, ironically, is BookTok, which is sort of a weird snake-eating-its-tale phenomenon where social media ends up driving rising book sales which leads to demand for more bookstores. There’s plenty of debate about whether BookTok is actually good for reading or not (the points made in the video linked are incredibly valid and worth considering), but the point stands that demand for books and the activity of reading is trending up, even if the quality of books isn’t what some would hope for. If social media can push people to read Bad Books, can Bad Books eventually lead people to read Good Books?

In fact, in the Morning Brew article I linked in that paragraph, they make a connection—even if just tongue in cheek—between rising book sales, new book stores, BookTok, and people’s desire to stop rotting their brains.

And while Americans are reading less than they did a generation ago, instead choosing to stare at brain rot on their phones immerse themselves in digital activities, indie bookstores have found an unlikely ally: TikTok.

Even if Morning Brew was joking, I think they’re right. BookTok is an organic example of the rare phenomenon where social media trends actually push people off of social media and into the physical world in a healthy way. People are taking up reading again to escape brain rot and it’s creating demand for more books and bookstores. Even though it might be a minority, and we still have to deal with the problem of kids barely being able to read at all, it might not be a stretch to say that we could be seeing a reading revival. I can only think that’s a good thing in the long run, if for no other reason than a collective return to reality, and how it opens up the doors for people to recover many cultural artifacts and ideas that seem to be on the verge of being lost.

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Bibles

Which brings me to my third, final, and probably most exciting data point: Bible sales rose by 22% this year. Here is a line from the Wall Street Journal report on this trend:

Cely Vazquez, a 28-year-old artist and influencer who has appeared on the reality TV show “Love Island USA,” recently bought her first Bible—one from the “She Reads Truth” line—at Barnes & Noble.

That line was written last week. A 28-year-old influencer and contestant on Love Island bought her first Bible, a CSB, from Barnes & Noble and documented it on her TikTok. Does anybody else read that and feel like we stepped into a weird time machine or is it just me?

This is my favorite line from the article:

The demand for Bibles is rising despite evidence that the country is growing increasingly secularized.

I’m getting shadows of the election here. Look on social media and people seem to be secularizing. But look under the hood a little bit and you’ll find a completely different story.

They go on to share the actual numbers:

The Pew Research Center found that about 28% of adults in the U.S. now consider themselves religiously unaffiliated. Yet Bible sales rose to 14.2 million in 2023 from 9.7 million in 2019, and hit 13.7 million in the first 10 months of this year. Readers are also stocking up on related titles that provide guidance, insights and context—even sets of stickers to flag particularly meaningful passages.

What happens a few years from now after roughly 14-15 million people bought Bibles, many of them for the first time, for two years in a row? Reading might not be the only revival we’re on the cusp of.

Now, as Alan Noble recently pointed out, there are reasons to temper some of our hopes. Maybe people are being more attracted to the vibe of Christianity than to the substance of Christianity. Some people might be looking more for a counter-cultural lifestyle to add to their curated identity and for some, being a Christian is a way to rebel against the excesses of our woke culture. Fair enough.

That said, I’m still hopeful. I have no problem with people being attracted to the vibe of Christianity if we have healthy churches that are willing and able to move them from the shadow to the substance, from the image to the reality. I readily admit that is a big If. It seems like finding a good, healthy church is like finding a needle in a haystack. Lord, help us. There is always the chance (and current reality) that a lot of churches just red-pill themselves and become seeker-sensitive for tradwives or whatever. They capitulate to the New Vibe instead of being “like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom treasures new and old” (Matthew 13:52). That would be a shame. But if these new seekers can find themselves in good churches that are ready to shepherd them well, and if churches can bring themselves to resist (or repent and abandon) the performative temptations and actually care for and disciple them, good things are ahead.

When you combine these three data points, you’re looking at people who are tired of their brains being rotted by social media, deciding to pick up books and read, and some of them are deciding to pick up the Bible for the very first time. It’s like they bumped their head on the glass imminent frame in their pockets one time too many and it finally cracked, letting a little bit of God’s transcendent light in for the first time, or at least for the first time in a long time. I’m always looking for a reason to be hopeful, and this gives me hope.

Bewilderment

I want to add one more, and slightly more specific reflection on this, and it is about progressive Christians and the deconstruction conversation.

As I lay out in my forthcoming book, there are many reasons why deconstruction happens. But bound up with all of it is the church, Christian culture, and of course, the Bible itself. Deconstruction essentially begins to occur when there is enough cognitive dissonance between the stated beliefs of one’s environment and the person’s lived experience and observations in that environment. Their “world” starts to fall apart. A lot of this has to do with culture adopting some of the virtues of Christianity but divorcing them from the reality of Christianity so that, as Chesterton wrote, you end up with the “old Christian virtues gone mad.” So when the church abandons it’s virtues and the culture adopts but distorts its values, there is a significant amount of confusion that happens that basically breaks someone’s categories and they have no idea what to do.

So what a lot of people do is leave the church they view as compromised and join the culture that appears to be virtuous but actually is “gone mad.” This is why some people talk about “leaving the church to find Jesus” even though that’s categorically impossible.

But if these trends hold (which isn’t guaranteed by any means) what you’re going to see is the culture going back to church. Which means that the people who left the church to join the culture will be left by the culture when it goes back to church.

And it will be very, very—I have no other word for it—weird.

It will be weird when the exvangelicals who left the church for the culture in the name of justice are left by the culture for the church in the name of righteousness.

Those who spent all of their energies deconstructing with no intention of reconstruction and who set themselves on abandoning orthodoxy are going to find themselves in a tight squeeze. Even if it is nothing more than a vibe shift, it will be a vibe shift away from the progressive transgressiveness they left the church for and back toward more religious attitudes. How much more so if there is any substance at all that comes from this vibe shift?

It’s possible none of this plays out. But this is something I have my eyes on. Will the tarot cards and the witchcraft books on the Barnes & Noble shelves be slowly phased out and replaced with devotional books over the next 5 years?

I have no idea.

But I’ll be watching.

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

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I recently had an essay published in Mere Orthodoxy’s print journal. Today, they released it online. I’m sharing a preview of it here. If you’ve been keeping up with my writing, you know this is a topic I’ve grown more passionate about. This is the longest treatment I’ve given it. I’m excited to share it here. I hope you find it helpful. I’m eager to hear your thoughts on it. Thanks.

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There have been numerous pieces published by secular media outlets and influencers lately warning of the rise of “therapy speak.” While hard to define, you could loosely say that it is the prescriptive use of psychological and therapeutic terms in everyday language to describe one’s experience, identity, and the various situations in life. You hear it most in the overuse of words like “trauma,” but it shows up in many other places. Shame, attachment, inner child, trigger, holding space, gaslight, anxious, depressed, narcissism, boundaries, vulnerability, PTSD, OCD, self-care. The list of these words and phrases seems nearly endless and, more importantly, suddenly ubiquitous in the lexicon of the average Millennial and Gen Z person today. 

The important thing to say immediately is that all of these mental ailments are real, which is why it’s almost impossible to write a critique of a therapeutic culture without sounding like you’re diminishing the reality of these experiences. In no way do I wish to say that these things aren’t legitimate. They are. But the fact that these things are real is almost the point. The “prevalence inflation,” as Derek Thompson at The Atlantic called it, leads to people who don’t actually suffer from clinical mental health disorders seeking help they don’t need and drains resources from those who actually do.

Take one example that was reported by The Verge—the rise of self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID; previously known as multiple personality disorder) on TikTok. Doctors across the country realized that they were beginning to see patients who were seeking confirmation for a self-diagnosis regarding the disorder after they had learned about it on TikTok. Many of them didn’t have it. One doctor said, “I’ve had people cry in my office because I told them that they do not have the diagnosis that they think they have.” The patients were sad when they realized that they didn’t have dissociative identity disorder. You would think it would be the other way around.

Keep Reading at Mere Orthodoxy

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

Pre-Order Today

I’ve recently become obsessed with Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. C.S. Lewis listed it in his top 10 books and I completely understand why. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter, you will certainly be seeing Boethius pop up more and more in the future.

While I read it, one section stood out to me where Lady Philosophy talks to Boethius about “the dignities of high office and the exercise of power." Maybe it’s just because we’re in an election season, but I couldn’t help but see it as a 1,500-year-old word for our day.

Boethius was killed in prison for saying these kinds of things. These are not popular things to say. But I believe they are wise. And if we would heed the words of Lady Philosophy in our day, it seems to me that we would all find more consolation for many of our political anxieties.

With that said, I’ve decided to share the full section from The Consolation of Philosophy here. But please, if you find this compelling, consider reading the whole book.

VI

I should like to say something about the dignities of high office and the exercise of power, but I am at a loss because in your ignorance of the true nature of power and dignities people like you exalt themselves to high heaven in virtue of the offices they hold. Now, whenever high office has fallen into the hands of wicked men, the disaster has been greater than flood or volcanic eruption. You remember, I am sure, how (principle of freedom though it had been) your ancestors wanted to abolish the consulship because of the arrogance of the consuls, just as before that the same arrogance had led them to abolish the title of king. If, on the other hand, the very rare case arises when these offices fall to honest men, surely the only aspect of them which finds favour is the honesty of the men who hold the offices. It follows, if this is so, that honour is not accorded to virtue because of the office held, but to the office because of the virtue of the holder.

'However, let us examine this much lauded and much sought after power of yours. You creatures of earth, don't you stop to consider the people over whom you think you exercise authority? You would laugh if you saw a community of mice and one mouse arrogating to himself power and jurisdiction over the others. Again, think of the human body: could you discover anything more feeble than man, when often even a tiny fly can kill him either by its bite or by creeping into some inward part of him? The only way one man can exercise power over another is over his body and what is inferior to it, his possessions. You cannot impose anything on a free mind, and you cannot move from its state of inner tranquillity a mind at peace with itself and firmly founded on reason. The tyrant Nearchus thought he would be able to torture the philosopher Zeno into betraying his fellow conspirators in a plot against his person, but Zeno bit off his tongue and threw it in the face of the enraged tyrant. Nearchus had thought the tortures an occasion for barbarity, but Zeno made them an opportunity for heroism. There is nothing, in fact, which one man can do to another, which he cannot himself suffer at the hands of someone else. We have the story of how the Egyptian king Busiris used to put strangers to death until he himself was killed by a stranger in the person of Hercules. And in the first Punic War your general Regulus put fetters on many a Carthaginian prisoner of war, but not long afterwards was himself holding out his hands to receive a conqueror's chains. Can you, then, consider it power at all, when a man cannot ensure that someone does not inflict on him what he can inflict on others?

If, furthermore, in these dignities and powers there was some natural and intrinsic good, they would never fall into the hands of evil men, since incompatible things do not usually associate, and nature rejects the combination of opposites. There is no doubt, then, that for the most part it is evil men who hold the offices, and it is therefore clear that these are not intrinsically good, since they admit of being associated with evil men. And the same may be properly concluded in the case of all fortune's gifts, since they fall in greater abundance on all the most wicked people. There is another point to be considered about them. No one doubts that a man in whom he has seen evidence of bravery is brave: a man endowed with speed is manifestly speedy. In the same way music makes a man a musician, medicine makes him a doctor, and rhetoric makes him an orator; for it is the nature of anything to perform the office proper to it. It does not become mixed up in the operations of contrary things and actually repels opposites. But riches are unable to quench insatiable greed; power does not make a man master of himself if he is imprisoned by the indissoluble chains of wicked lusts; and when high office is bestowed on unworthy men, so far from making them worthy, it only betrays them and reveals their unworthiness. The reason for this is that you are accustomed to using the wrong words to refer to things which are by nature otherwise, and are easily proved to be so by their very operation.  So neither riches, power nor high office can properly be called by these words. And lastly we may reach the same conclusion about Fortune as a whole. She has nothing worth pursuing, and no trace of intrinsic good; she never associates with good men and does not turn into good men those with whom she does associate.

'We know the ruin Nero wrought
When Rome was fired and great men killed;
By brother's hand his brother slain,
He dripped with blood from his mother spilled
A practised eye o'er the corpse he rolled
With never a tear to wet his cheek,
Cool connoisseur of beauty cold.
The empire that he held in sway
Extended then from eastern dawn
To where sun sinks at close of day.
Its northern march where the two Bears stand,
Its southern bounds where the parched south wind
Burns and bakes the arid sand.
Could this high power stretched east and west
Check Nero's frenzied lunacy?
Too often Fate, by all abhorred,
To savage poison adds the sword.'

...

Whoever wants to wield high power
Must tame his passions fierce;
His heart to evil must not cower
Or bow to lust's fell yoke.

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

Pre-Order Today

The Sunday Pages is a weekly newsletter for paid subscribers that rounds up five interesting links for the week, recommends a book with highlights of about a dozen meaningful quotes from the book, and includes occasional updates on personal projects.

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C.S. Lewis had this book on his top 10 list, and once you read it, it’s easy to understand why.

Reading this 1,500 year old book sort of felt like reading the cheat codes. Obviously, it’s from an entirely different historical context, but it reads like it’s speaking to our day. Specifically in about three ways.

The first is our therapeutic culture. More and more we’re turning to psychiatry and medication to find therapeutic relief in a world that is increasingly difficult to live in. These things aren’t inherently bad. But this book points you to something deep than your mind. It points you to your nature.

The second is power. With an election this week, the kind of people we decide to give power matters. The author of this book was killed in jail for pointing out the moral bankruptcy of the politicians of his day.

The third is the meaning crisis. People are struggling to find meaning in their lives. This book points us to God, wisdom, and our ability to suffer well the difficulties of life to find meaning.

Links Included: a couple of brilliant, long-form conversations, a couple of articles on masculinity, and a reconstruction story.

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This is a guest post from my friend Luke Simon. Luke is a fantastic up-and-coming Gen Z writer who has written some of my favorite pieces lately. I’m excited to publish this guest post from him. He’s going to be writing more, so make sure you subscribe to his Substack, Simon Says.

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The church isn’t supposed to hurt you, but sometimes it does. Stories of abuse, scandal, and corruption have become common in the American evangelical church, causing many Christians to question not only the church, but their faith in Jesus.

But I don’t think it has to. In fact, I think church scandals can strengthen your faith. Nancy French’s story is a powerful example of why. In her recent memoir, Ghosted: An American Story, French exposes the cover-ups, complicity, and corruption she has experienced in the American evangelical church.

When she was sexually abused by her youth Bible teacher, her church knowingly turned a blind eye. When her and her husband condemned President Trump’s immoral behavior, she was ostracized by her conservative Christian colleagues. When she led an investigation into Kanakuk’s history of sexual misconduct, revealing several stories of abuse, she was met with hostility from Christians who doubled-down and supported the camp.

Her abuser? Still roaming the streets of Tennessee. Her Christian colleagues? Still avoiding her.

Kanakuk? No one in leadership has resigned to this day.

Her story of sex scandals, abuse, and tribalism may seem like the perfect recipe for a deconstruction cocktail – but French remains sober in her faith. Why?

Near the end of her book, French recalls a conversation she had with a friend who reminded her that although her work seemed to be accomplishing no change, she shouldn’t lose hope:

“[He] called to remind me that my job was never to exact justice in either the Kanakuk case or [her abuser’s] case. I didn’t have the power to do that – only God does. He reminded me that one day everything would be made right. Justice would reign. And every tear would be dried. But today wasn’t that day. Today my only job was to remind people – and myself – that justice is coming. And that everything that has been lost will, ultimately, be restored.”

So why hasn’t French abandoned her faith? I think it’s because she recognizes an important truth: If I give up on Jesus, I’m giving up on justice.

If I give up on Jesus, I’m accepting that there is no happy ending. If I give up on Jesus, I’m accepting that oppressors won’t be held accountable. If I give up on Jesus, I’m accepting that abused and abusers will always meet the same fate. I can empathize with the desire to give up on the church with its brokenness, but is it worth giving up on Jesus? In the words of Peter, “...to whom shall we go?” (John 6:68)

While my mind could entertain the thought that life is meaningless; that the world is atoms randomly floating in space, my heart refuses to give it attention. In fact, the anger I feel when I hear of abuse, the disgust I feel towards tragedy, and the contempt I feel for injustice, are the most compelling arguments I’ve encountered for a cosmic Judge. Why would my heart protest oppression when history shows it’s more common than freedom? Why would my heart cry out for tragedy when it’s a constant? Why would my heart hate abuse when it happens all the time?

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My best conclusion is this: my longing for justice is a result of being made in the image of a just God (Gen. 1:27). And – unexpectedly – when I witness injustice in our world, God’s justice shifts from an obstacle to an oasis.

Yes, I believe in a wrathful God; One who will humble the exalted and exalt the humble (Luke 14:11).

Yes, I believe in a vengeful God; One who will protect the innocent and condemn the guilty (Psalm 37:28).

Yes, I believe in an angry God; One who will heal the abused and destroy the abuser (Psalm 9:9).

This is the same Father that Jesus placed his trust in; the Chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4), the Weed Picker (Matt. 13:24-30), the Thief in the Night (1 Thes. 5:2), the Vineyard Owner (Matt. 20:1-16), the Wedding Host (Matt. 22:1-14) – the God who will come to judge (2 Tim. 4:1).

Church scandals, as devastating as they are, can strengthen our faith if they draw us closer to Jesus—the one who embodies God’s justice. In his life, he didn’t shy away from confronting corruption. He flipped the tables in the temple, standing against hypocrisy and greed, showing us that injustice, even within religious institutions, angers the heart of God. But Jesus didn’t stop at flipping tables. His death and resurrection remind us that he has turned them. And one day, he will set all things right.

This is why church scandals can ultimately strengthen our faith. They remind us that we need Jesus. Where else could we go? Only Jesus offers the promise of a future where every wrong will be made right. Only Jesus assures us that every tear will be wiped away. Only Jesus assures us that every wound will be healed, and every oppressor held accountable.

Church scandals don’t have to lead us away from Jesus. They can lead us to him. They can remind us that the world’s brokenness, even in the church, cannot be fixed by human efforts. Only his return will bring perfect justice. So until that day, let's keep trusting in him—because to give up on Jesus is to give up on the only hope for a just world.

And I don’t think you want to give up on that.

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

Pre-Order Today

The Sunday Pages is a weekly newsletter for paid subscribers that rounds up five interesting links for the week, recommends a book with highlights of about a dozen meaningful quotes from the book, and includes occasional updates on personal projects.

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One thing that was a huge stumbling block for me when I was growing up was the way that all doctrines were presented as equal. Equal in importance, certainty, and necessity. This made discipleship difficult when I started having questions around, say, creation or predestination or whatever else and my salvation would be called into question every time I asked a question.

I’ll never forget working through my beliefs around creation and suggesting in a Bible class that Genesis 1 might be more poetic than something like video camera footage of the first moments of creation and a fellow classmate and my Bible teacher just flatly told me that if I believed that I couldn’t be a Christian.

It didn’t seem right to me, but I also didn’t have any other categories. That’s one of the reasons I’m incredibly grateful for this book (not to mention my gratitude to the author more generally).

Links Included: why people deconstruct, why “being on the right side of history” misses the mark, Jake Meador’s brilliant train of thought, the cultural fallout of divorce, C.S. Lewis on emotions.

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The Sunday Pages is a weekly newsletter for paid subscribers that rounds up five interesting links for the week, recommends a book with highlights of about a dozen meaningful quotes from the book, and includes occasional updates on personal projects.

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This book is having a moment right now. Lots of people from all across the ideological spectrum are turning to it as a source of explanation and attempting to interpret it for their context. I have, too. It’s the backbone for much of my book on deconstruction.

It’s also a book that speaks directly into our therapeutic culture… and cuts hard against its grain. For many people, the message of this book wouldn’t be welcome or would at least be a hard pill to swallow. In the wrong hands, there are parts of this book that could be misused. But I believe when it’s rightly understood and applied, it can bring tremendous healing to those who are burned out in our self-expressive age.

Links Included: dropping out of spiritual formation, the crisis of evangelical leadership scandals, why Gen Z men are coming back to church, how John Mark Comer is not Rob Bell, novels are going away

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The needle I’ve been attempting to thread lately has been the space between what Trevin Wax recently called the third and fourth waves of evangelicalism: gospel-centrality and spiritual formation. You can read my first article wading into these waters here.

One of the keys to this discussion is, in my opinion, regarding the role of doctrine in the Christian life. What is someone to do with doctrine? It seems to me that there are at least four postures someone could take toward doctrine. We could be ignorant of doctrine, master of doctrine, negotiator of doctrine, or formed by doctrine.

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Ignorant of Doctrine

This is most likely the largest group. Most people simply aren’t familiar with the beliefs of the church in any meaningful way. They couldn’t articulate the Trinity and why it’s important, or the two natures of Christ, or the authority of scripture, and are probably more confused than not about anything regarding “end times.”

It’s tragic when people are simply ignorant of doctrine because people miss out on contemplating the most good, true, and beautiful person there is: God himself.

This is part of the problem with much of the discussion around doctrine. Doctrine is far too often framed as believing when it should be framed as beholding. Yes, we believe doctrines. But doctrine, at its most basic, is just a way of putting to words the mysteries of God revealed in Christ. Without doctrine, our love for God is directed in whichever way our mind, consciously or unconsciously, decides God is instead of the way God actually is according to how he has revealed himself to us.

As Jen Wilkin has often said (paraphrasing Augustine), “The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.” How can you claim to love your spouse if you know nothing about them? If you knew nothing about them, you might love their vibes, but you don’t love them because you don’t know them. Doctrine isn’t passing a test to get into heaven; it’s knowing, beholding, and loving the very source and sustenance of your life and of all things visible and invisible. To learn doctrine is to “steward the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1).

Master of Doctrine

On the other end of the spectrum, there are some who see the goal of the Christian life as mastering doctrine. They want to have every theological i dotted and t crossed and they will police and guard every doctrine with the ferocity of a pitbull. These are your TheoBros.

To be sure, it’s important for us to watch our doctrine closely and to align our thoughts about God as closely to reality as it has been revealed as possible. And yet, while the Christian life certainly involves doctrine, it does not end at doctrine.

The trouble with people who take the posture of attempting to master doctrine is that they often lose the scriptural imperatives about how Christians are supposed to act. Because they want to guard doctrine so ferociously, they lose the heart of Christianity. They are angry, quarrelsome, hateful, demeaning, and they elevate tradition over God’s commandments. This amount of loveless quarreling, according to 1 Timothy 3, would disqualify someone from eldership.

We have to understand that we will never master doctrine. God is infinite. That doesn’t mean he is unknowable or that truth will always elude us. But it does mean that we must stand with humility before a God who will never be entirely grasped by our rational human capacities and show respect to others who are also standing before the greatness of God, trying to know him through faith.

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Negotiator of Doctrine

In lots of exvangelical circles, you’ll hear talk about “renegotiating the text.” Being charitable, this could simply be called “interpretation.” But I don’t think that’s all it typically means.

Renegotiating doctrine, as it’s typically understood, starts with the presupposition that the text does not have any intrinsic meaning; it only has the meaning that we give to it. Because the text doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning, we have to decide which texts to elevate and which ones to “renegotiate” in light of the ones we have elevated. It assumes that there is no unifying interpretative grid for us to read the Bible through, so every reader has to do the work of figuring out what the Bible means for themselves and shouldn’t trust any traditional readings of scripture since those, too, were negotiated by someone in the past and can be renegotiated today.

What this does, of course, is relegate truth to the eye of the beholder. There can’t be any authoritative interpretation of the text or unifying interpretative method for understanding the Bible, it has to be understood afresh by each reader. It also individualizes biblical interpretation by discounting the voice of the church in favor of the individual’s interpretation. An individual might appeal to scholarship to help them understand the text, but any appeal to scripture’s divine authorship is not accepted. The Bible must be understood only using naturalistic means.

There are lots of problems with this. It dismisses Jesus’ claim that all scripture points to him (Luke 24:27), that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, meaning that the words of the Spirit contain intrinsic meaning and that meaning is the truth, and that the Spirit would lead the Church into that truth (John 16:13). It also ignores that the Church has always accepted scripture as God’s word, spoken by the Spirit, through the apostles (1 Thess. 2:13, 2 Peter 1:21, 3:15-16).

The point in saying all of this is that to become negotiators of doctrine is to not be receivers of doctrine. Negotiating doctrine and the Bible is to do more than negotiate a text; it’s to negotiate the nature of God. Instead of negotiating the nature of God, we should receive from God his revelation. While not all doctrines are equally important (1 Corinthians 15:3), all attempts at understanding doctrine should not be seen first and foremost as an intellectual exercise to “figure out” God through negotiation but to behold God and know him, in willing and humble submission to what he has revealed, in awe and reverence of his holiness.

Doctrine As Formation

All of this brings me to the last and, in my opinion, the correct posture. Doctrine isn’t something to ignore, master, or negotiate but something to be formed by.

My first exposure to even thinking about doctrine in this way was when doctrine was framed as the script of God’s story. Instead of a test we have to pass, it’s a script that we live out to participate in God’s story. Every story, every narrative universe, has a set of rules that the story plays by. Think about the difference in magic between Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings. They all have magic, but the magic in each plays by different rules. Expecto Patronum is very different than The Force.

Doctrine functions in a similar way. It tells us what story we’re in and how to live rightly in that story. We start to feel disoriented and disconnected from reality when we’re living in the wrong story and living out the wrong script. It wouldn’t make any sense for Darth Vader to show up in Middle Earth. The reality of Middle Earth and Darth Vader’s identity would be entirely discombobulated by such a thing. They belong in different stories.

And so we belong in God’s story. Doctrine is simply understanding the script of God’s story and aligning our lives to that reality. The story we believe is the life we will live. So we are formed by the story we live out. All doctrine will be embodied somehow. Our beliefs will play out in our lives. So getting our doctrine right is the first step in ordering our lives around God and his Real Reality.

What this means, then, is that doctrine is not first and foremost intellectual but formative.

In much of the spiritual formation conversation, doctrine often (though not always) takes a backseat. In many doctrinal conversations, formation often (though not always) takes a backseat. And yet they go hand in hand.

John Calvin, considered by some to be the arch-TheoBro, wrote in On The Christian Life,

The gospel… is not a doctrine of tongue but of life. It is not grasped merely by the intellect and memory like other disciplines, but it is taken in only when it possess the entire soul and when it finds a seat and place of refuge in the most intimate affection of the heart.

…

We have given the leading role to doctrine, in which our religion is contained, because our salvation begins there, but this teaching must flow into our heart and permeate our conduct of life and even transform us into itself so that it will be productive for us.

Right there in the heart of the Reformed tradition is the link between doctrine and formation. Doctrine contains our religion—false doctrine constitutes a false religion—but that doctrine is only the beginning of our salvation. It must transform our hearts and lives.

Turning to the spiritual formation side of things, Dallas Willard has this to say in Renovation of the Heart,

To bring the mind to dwell intelligently upon God as he is presented in his Word will have the effect of causing us to love God passionately, and this love will in turn bring us to think of God steadily. Thus he will always be before our minds.

…

The intention to be formed is to have the great God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ a constant presence in our mind, crowding out every false idea or destructive image, all misinformation about God, and every crooked inference or belief.

In The Great Omission, Willard says,

A bad theology will kill any prospects of a spirituality that comes from the life of Christ.

…

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling out inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

Right there in the heart of the spiritual formation tradition is the place of scripture and right belief to crowd out false beliefs and misinformation about God for the purpose of loving God and being formed into the image of Christ.

Finally, all of this is summed up perfectly by Henry Scougal in The Life of God in the Soul of Man.

Let us therefore endeavor to lift our minds up to the clearest possible understanding of the divine nature.

…

And when we have formed in our minds the clearest notion that we can have of God’s being, infinite in power, in wisdom, and in goodness, the author and fountain of all perfection, let us fix the eyes of our souls upon him so that what we see inwardly mat affect our hearts. And while we are musing thus, let the holy fire burn within us.

Doctrine shapes our imagination. How we view God will affect everything about our lives. Doctrine isn’t something to know once and check off the box. It’s something to contemplate day and night, like the man in Psalm 1. It shapes and reshapes our categories of reality until we see the kingdom of God all around us.

When rightly understood, doctrine is an essential part of our formation into Christlikeness. Without right belief, we will be formed into a false image, more closely resembling an idol than God. With the right vision of who God actually is, we will slowly and steadily be formed in his image.

I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church; to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.

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I read this book and realized I needed to add a whole chapter to my book. It occurred to me that the topic of this book had everything to do with deconstruction, even while it didn’t directly address the topic.

It’s not that it explains everything about deconstruction, but I realized that if you don’t at least have this piece of the puzzle, you’ll be missing something significant. This book created a category in my brian for human beings, what we are, why we exist, and how we form our identities that in some ways didn’t exist and in other ways was just too fuzzy to be helpful. This clarified a lot and put words to things I hadn’t been able to.

Links Included: My very first video, over-parenting, virtue in education, a theology of failure, trapped by autonomy, and a review of the new Hays and Hays book.

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The Sunday Pages is a weekly newsletter for paid subscribers that rounds up five interesting links for the week, recommends a book with highlights of about a dozen meaningful quotes from the book, and includes occasional updates on personal projects.

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One thing that has become a bit of an obsession for me lately is reading old “devotional” books. I’m not even sure that’s the right word for them because it seems a little anachronistic to call them that. But old books that are just generally about the Christian life.

If you read this Substack, you know I write about spiritual formation. It’s probably the most important topic to me. I really don’t have too terribly much to to say about the culture wars or politics—I’m just not that interested in it. Maybe I should be. But what I want to learn and write about is how to be formed into the image of Christ, how to grow in strength wisdom, and God’s grace like it says Jesus did as a boy in Luke 2.

What I’ve been starting to find is that these older, usually smaller books about living the Christian life have been teaching me more about spiritual formation than many other books. I’m not sure I’m able to articulate why that is yet, but just something I’ve noticed.

This is a new translation of an old book. It’s also by someone that I feel pretty conflicted about. And yet, when I finished it, I knew this book would make it in my top 10. And it’s short. You know I love a great, short book.

Links Included: More rule of life, Wesley's comeback, ignoring kids (the right way?), CEO Pastors, and a writing tip

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