How NYC Churches Guard Endangered Languages

Emily Belz in New York

New York isn’t just a haven for Christians from around the world; it’s also a sanctuary for their rare and dying dialects.

Illustration by Valero Doval

On any given Sunday in New York City, an evangelical church of Guatemalan immigrants in Brooklyn worships in the indigenous Mayan language K’iche’; a South Indian Orthodox church in Queens chants liturgies in Syriac, the first-century descendant of Aramaic; and a Mennonite church in the Bronx conducts services in Garifuna, a rare language developed from the marriages of West African slaves and Indigenous Caribbean people.

New York, a longtime haven for people fleeing persecution, has developed a staggering ecosystem of endangered languages and cultures.

Some cultural groups landed here after surviving genocide, like Armenians, the Roma, and Jews. At least half of all Yiddish speakers were killed in the Holocaust; now, enough of them live in New York that Yiddish is used in the city’s public service announcements.

The city has become the most linguistically diverse metropolis in human history, according to Columbia University linguist Ross Perlin, the author of a new book called Language City. He and his colleagues at the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) have documented nearly 700 languages in the city. (By contrast, Google Translate supports only 243.)

Churches are key in preserving these myriad dialects. Christians speak 82 percent of the world’s languages as mother tongues, according to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Todd Johnson, making Christianity by far the most linguistically diverse religion in the world. And that diversity is reflected in New York City’s churches.

Worshipers at one evangelical Chinese church in Flushing, Queens, speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese (historically related to Taiwanese), and Wenzhounese (from the Chinese city of Wenzhou). A worship leader in Manhattan recently composed new music in Coptic, an endangered language that was associated with first-century Christians but has roots in the time of the Pharaohs.

More recent refugees to the city include Liberians who fled their country’s civil war. Living in a tight-knit community on Staten Island, they form perhaps the largest Liberian diaspora outside West Africa and speak 17 languages, according to Language City. Liberians fill the borough’s evangelical churches.

One Brooklyn church gathers Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion of their country; refugees from the former Soviet Union; and Koryo-saram, ethnic Koreans from Uzbekistan whose families spoke an endangered Korean-adjacent dialect, Koryo-mar.

On a recent Sunday, the Koryo-saram pastor of All Nations Baptist Church preached in Russian, spoke to the worship leader in Korean, and peppered his lunch conversation with English.

During the service, church members lifted their hands as they sang the Fanny Crosby hymn “Blessed Assurance” in Russian. They ate lunch together in the church basement afterward: an Uzbek meat-and-potatoes dish with cucumber kimchi on paper plates.

Longtime Bible translator Harriet Hill wrote in 2006 about the importance God places on different vernacular languages, shown at Pentecost in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit enabled people from around the world to hear the gospel in their own tongues.

“That the Holy Spirit broke through the ordinary language of communication and spoke to people in their mother tongue shows the importance of people’s linguistic and ethnic identity in the plan of God,” Hill wrote. “This point is underlined again in the Book of Revelation, where the multitudes gathered around God’s throne include saints ‘from every tribe and language’ (5:9; see also 7:9). When God speaks to us in the language we learned in our mother’s arms, the message of his acceptance of our identity penetrates the very fiber of our being.”

While documenting languages used for religious liturgies in the city, Perlin and the ELA researchers found the following rare tongues: Abakuá (from the Caribbean), Avestan (from India and Iran), Church Slavonic (Russia), Coptic (Egypt), Classical Armenian, Ge`ez (Ethiopia and Eritrea), Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Israel), Koine Greek, Syro-Malankara Syriac (India), and Syriac (Middle East).

But most endangered languages are only spoken, not written. Churches like All Nations Baptist, with Koryo-saram members and other migrants, are one part of this organic preservation of cultural memory. Immigrants to New York might drop their primary languages in favor of a language spoken by the majority, but the city also has large enough minority communities that preservation is possible.

Saving endangered dialects is not a given. Global trends move toward fewer languages, a phenomenon Perlin calls a “linguistic hierarchy” that erases minority cultures less powerful than the dominant one. Conquest or political domination can remove a culture, like the Arab conquest of Egypt that almost wiped out the Coptic language. Colonists in the Caribbean are largely responsible for the disappearance of indigenous languages there.

Some linguists consider English a “killer language” of less dominant tongues, but Perlin notes that on the streets of New York, English is often a “vital lingua franca, not a linguistic overlord” between different groups.

Some researchers have argued that the precipitous decline in world languages is complex because it involves some beneficial socioeconomic changes. For example, it likely indicates more people are seeking higher education.

So why bother to protect endangered languages? One significant reason is that the loss of a language is the loss of a unique culture. Languages are “ways of seeing,” Perlin writes. Preserving these endangered languages, then, preserves the identity of a people group.

Bible translators have made preserving endangered dialects a priority too. Many languages today are only documented in writing through Scripture translations. Translation projects involve multiple community members who speak the languages, a relationship-based process that can revive flagging interest in the dialects. And working on the translations might give speakers new insights into their own tongues, translators say.

“We find that when we start to work on a language, people who were starting to shift away from it may actually come back and gain strength because people have a better self-image about speaking that language,” Andy Keener, executive vice president for global partnerships at Wycliffe Bible Translators, told CT in 2019. Because speakers of rare languages see the dominant language as the “useful” language, “some people don’t realize how rich their language is.”

One of the central arguments of church historian Andrew Walls is that the process of translating the gospel into different cultures—as Paul did starting with Greek in the first century—enriches theology too, through “radical” attempts to apply the mind of Christ within particular cultures.

Walls argued that the Christian faith is both indigenous—at home in any culture—and pilgrim—moving toward a better home. That indigenous-pilgrim identity, of being home and not at home, sounds like the experience of many New York immigrants who try to hold onto their mother languages while starting new lives in a new place.

Perlin studied endangered languages while living in the Chinese Himalayas before returning to New York about ten years ago. He now helps lead the ELA, which over the past decade has mapped the languages spoken in New York, many of which had not been documented by linguists or governments.

“In general, these are not the kinds of things that you would see while going into the middle of Manhattan and walking around, or that you can easily Google,” Perlin said. The research itself is relational: “You have to get out there and meet people and slowly get to know them.”

Speakers of these endangered languages often live in the city’s outer boroughs. Their churches are often small congregations renting storefront spaces, Perlin said.

ELA’s map of the city shows where endangered languages are concentrated and documents the history of how they arrived in the city. Guarani, for example, an indigenous language of Paraguay, is recorded on the map at a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, where speakers gather to converse.

Restaurants are one avenue of language preservation; churches are another. Freedom of religion in the US allows people to worship and engage in other cultural activities that they might not be able to do in their home regions.

“Every type of Christian in the world is represented in New York City, basically,” Perlin said. “[Church] might be the main connection they have to their culture—to bring their kids where they can show them where they are coming from.”

Garifuna speakers, for instance, are descended from West African slaves who were taken to the Caribbean and then later forcibly removed to Central America after an insurrection. Many Garifuna coming to New York now are fleeing violence in Honduras, according to the ELA.

The Mennonite church of Garifuna speakers in the Bronx is one community that preserves their tongue, which is part of the indigenous Arawakan group of languages. Perlin says New York may be the largest community of remaining Garifuna speakers. The city even has a Miss Garifuna contest where contestants must use the language.

Knowing Garifuna is “itaraliña lasubudiriniua katabu la”—“how it is known who you are”—one Garifuna speaker, Alex Kwabena Colon, told the ELA.

Iglesia Jovenes Cristianos, a network of NYC churches, offers church services featuring several rare indigenous Central and South American languages, such as Mam and Quechua.

More Central American languages are finding their way into the United States as people seek asylum. In 2019, half of the Guatemalan migrants apprehended at the US border were Mayan.

Translators of these languages were in high demand at the border, according to a New Yorker report. The Guatemalan descendants of Mayans typically face more discrimination in their home country than Guatemalans of other backgrounds, sometimes enough to justify an asylum claim.

At one Iglesia Jovenes Cristianos in Brooklyn, most everyone speaks K’iche’, a Mayan dialect from the Guatemalan highlands. The church is in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood known as “Little Guatemala.”

“Not many people speak that in the world,” said the church’s pastor, Erick Salgado. The K’iche’ speakers have very limited Spanish, he added—especially the women, because they often didn’t go to school.

The church usually delivers sermons in Spanish, but the worship songs are in K’iche’ and originate from churches in Guatemala. It’s mostly older people who speak K’iche’; younger people are focused on learning Spanish and English, Salgado said.

“But they keep coming; there’s always new people coming,” he added. Some people at Salgado’s church also speak Mam, another Mayan language from Guatemala.

“One of the most interesting stories is around indigenous Latin American languages being used in churches,” said Perlin. “There are so few spaces outside of people’s homes to use those languages. …It’s linguistically important.”

Church leaders told CT that preserving dialects and cultures isn’t really their goal—teaching the gospel is—but it happens organically as worship songs, recipes, and other traditions are passed down.

New York churches aren’t the only ones helping save endangered languages and cultures. More US cities are sheltering minority groups, including Kurds in Nashville and the Zomi in Tulsa. But New York has a long history as a refuge of languages and cultures. Perlin documents a report in 1643 that showed 18 different languages among 400 Manhattan settlers.

In the 1940s, a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn began using Mohawk, an Iroquois dialect, in its services. It even developed a translation of the Gospel of Luke and a hymnal in the language. Cuyler Presbyterian Church drew members from a nearby community of Iroquois who had come to New York as steel and iron workers. The pastor, David Cory, learned the language with the help of the congregation. The Iroquois churchgoers worked on the translations, and the hymnal was a hit.

“Once reprinted, the supply of the hymnal has been exhausted, and there has been demand for a new and improved edition not only from the Indians in the Brooklyn colony, but from the home reservation at Caughnawaga, from which the great majority come,” read a Brooklyn Record news article in 1957.

In present-day Brooklyn, a rare language may be found not in the pages of a hymnal but rather on the lips of worshipers chatting after a service.

“Religious spaces are very multi-lingual in New York,” Perlin said. “Sermon is in one language, hymn is in another, chatter is in another.”

All Nations Baptist, the Koryo-saram church in Brooklyn, embodies Perlin’s point. The church worships in multiple languages. (This church is not to be confused with All Nations Baptist in Queens, which has services in English, Spanish, and Bangla.)

The Baptist church in Brooklyn has its roots in a migration story from the 1800s spanning multiple countries. Koreans seeking to earn a living immigrated to Russia in the 1800s. More Koreans fled to Russia when their country came under the rule of Japan in 1905. They formed their own culture from the amalgamation of Russian and Korean identities and were known as Koryo-saram.

A few decades later, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forcibly rounded up the Koreans on trains bound for Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to work. Many Koryo-saram died during the journey.

All Nations Baptist pastor Leonid Kim, 73, is Koryo-saram. His parents and grandparents survived Stalin’s ethnic cleansing and ended up in Uzbekistan.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Texas missionaries of Korean descent came to Uzbekistan. Kim started going to their church—“not because of Jesus,” but to learn Korean.He knew Koryo-mar, the unique dialect of Koryo-saram, but not traditional Korean. Kim has since forgotten Koryo-mar; his wife still remembers a little bit.

Through the missionaries, Kim became a Christian and eventually won a green card lottery to the United States. In 2002, he founded the New York church, which became a home for surviving Koryo-saram.

Among the church members are Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Uzbek immigrants, because All Nations has a reputation for helping those seeking asylum fill out paperwork, get jobs, and find immigration lawyers.

“Jesus is my family, and whoever comes to his house is my family,” said one member, Asselya. She is a Muslim convert to Christianity who sought asylum from Kazakhstan, and she declined to share her full name for safety reasons.

Kim said he wants to preserve the Koryo-saram culture, but, he added, “My main purpose is to lead them to Jesus, not culture. Not language.”

The pastor and church members regularly go to Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn, to tell people about Jesus in Russian and to invite them to church.

Kim has also done missionary work in Ukraine, so he finds points of cultural connection with many of his congregants.

For example, everyone in the church can make the roast beef dish zharkoye (жаркое), the one they serve at lunches with kimchi. “Even me,” Kim said. “But everyone makes his own style.”

While this church has watched the Koryo-mar dialect disappear, it is preserving culture in its own way. And other churches with endangered languages have enough speakers to keep those languages going.

“There are so many challenges about maintaining a language in a new context like New York or the US, when there are new pressures to speak English,” Perlin said. “But that church or community institution might be the only place where people can use the language.”

In October, Salgado’s church of Mayans speaking K’iche’ participated in a Hispanic Heritage Day parade in Brooklyn.

A portable speaker blasted worship music sung in Spanish, and the parade ended in front of the K’iche’-speaking church.

Church members carried flags from the various countries represented in the congregation—the US, Mexico, Guatemala. Among the colorful array, one person carried a simple red flag that said in English, “Jesus is King.”

Emily Belz is a news writer for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "An Unexpected Linguistic Sanctuary".

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

AI and All Its Splendors

Jeffrey Bilbro

Long before generative AI became a reality, its false promises of ease and justice appeared in science fiction—and the desert temptation of Christ.

Illustration by Jeffrey Kam

Every few weeks, it seems, another AI achievement sets the world abuzz. It speaks! It paints! It digests a whole book and spits out a 10-
minute podcast!

This is generative AI, the large computing models that dazzle and worry us with their humanlike output. We’ve become accustomed to hearing about AI, but have we considered what it really offers us? Most simply: a promise of ease and justice.

With the proper application of AI, its enthusiasts tell us, we won’t have to work so hard. Our economy will be more equitable, our laws and their enforcement closer to impartial, the slow and faulty human element bypassed altogether. We will achieve a painless and mechanistic fairness.

Here, rather than dwell on any individual technological feat, I want to examine those two tempting offers. Long before generative AI became a reality, these temptations were offered elsewhere: by science fiction villains and by the Devil when he came to Jesus in the wilderness.

That fiction can be an illuminating warning, and Jesus’ response to temptation—and the manner of his ministry—can help us respond to AI in ways befitting our vocation as creatures made in the image of God.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen may be the most prominent advocate for AI’s disruptive potential. In 2023, he published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” beginning with an epigraph from Catholic novelist Walker Percy: “You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

Andreessen is right that questions about human nature and purpose are central here. Yet his manifesto quickly made clear how much he differs from Percy’s Christian anthropology.

“I am here to bring the good news,” Andreessen wrote in downright messianic terms, announcing “that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” With enough tech, he insisted, we’ll make “everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.”

That’s the ease. Then there’s the justice. Technology, Andreessen said, is inherently liberatory: “of human potential”; “of the human soul”; and of “what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.”

By this logic, slowing technological progress would be unjust. Andreessen acknowledges there may be hiccups along the way, but in his view, our only moral option is to proceed at maximum speed to the prosperous, free, and just future that AI and its attendant technologies will provide.

“It is easy for me to imagine,” wrote the farmer-poet Wendell Berry in 2001, “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The vision of humanity behind Andreessen-style paeans to AI belongs to the latter camp. It sees humans not as creatures called to participate in God’s restoration of the world but machines to be optimized and regulated by other, better machines.

Science fiction authors have long warned readers about the risks of the machine world, many sketching its temptations from the same pattern I’ve traced in Andreessen’s manifesto: ease and justice.

Consider, for example, Paul Kingsnorth’s 2020 novel Alexandria, set in the distant future. Civilization has collapsed after humans made the world uninhabitable. In a last-ditch effort to save the world—or, perhaps, to avoid the work required to live differently—humans have created an AI called Wayland to take over and preserve the planet’s dwindling resources.

But it’s not clear what they’ve really made. By the time the novel takes place, most humans have “ascended” into a disembodied state of existence hosted by Wayland, leaving the Earth to slowly recover. Only a few humans remain in remnant communities, holding out against Wayland’s tempting offer to free them from the sorrows of embodied, primitive life.

The father of this remnant characterizes Wayland as the latest iteration of the primordial temptation: “We made Him so we could live forever. Oldest dream. To be gods.”

The character K is a retainer, a kind of artificial human whom Wayland uses to persuade these few remaining people to leave their bodies behind. K’s proposition to potential customers (or victims) relies on the familiar twofold appeal: Ascending to Wayland’s grid will provide both ease and justice.

One member of the still-human order summarizes K’s appeal as offering “escape from grief, from pain.” K puts it this way: “If your life on Earth is going to be a hardscrabble in dying soil, or a struggle to survive in a lawless megacity slum, why continue it any longer than necessary?” This is the promise of ease.

More subtly, though, K also describes Wayland’s offer as the path of necessary “relinquishment.” Humans destroy the earth through their insatiable appetites, so to save the ecosystem, people must give up their bodies and shift their consciousness to a less energy-intensive medium. This is the promise of justice.

Wayland offers to restore balance to the cosmos, to eliminate suffering and violence, to bring about a rational order. And if violence, as K claims, “is bred into [human] flesh,” then the only way to eliminate it is to liberate humans from their bodies.

Many other sci-fi stories frame the temptations of technology in similar terms. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric short story “The Celestial Railroad,” preachers like Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine offer “erudition without the trouble of even learning to read” while a steam train ostensibly speeds everyone to heaven.

In Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, precogs—mutated humans who can foresee future crimes—are plugged into a computer to do the police’s work for them. In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, a whole host of imagined technologies offer a wraparound utopia. And in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a disembodied brain promises to “assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burdens of thought and decision,” if only the heroes will let it.

What’s fascinating to me about these literary examples is that regardless of the technology they imagine, the appeal is consistent: The means are deemed morally insignificant, and the only relevant consideration is whether the tech makes just and comfortable outcomes easier to obtain.

All of these stories predate ChatGPT, but the temptations in them are far older than computers or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, they eerily recall the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13.

Satan had no app to dangle in front of the Messiah, but he too offered justice without effort or pain. He offered Jesus victory without the Cross.

The Devil begins by questioning Jesus’ identity: “If you are the Son of God …” The reality of Jesus’ divinity, the Devil insinuates, hinges on the efficacy of his acts: his ability to turn stones into bread or jump off the top of the temple without being hurt. These are the temptations of ease.

Later in the Gospels, Jesus goes on to perform miracles as impressive as these, but he refuses to accept the Devil’s premise. He refuses to link his divine nature to his ability to do a magic trick. As he reminds the Devil, the highest human good is not merely physical life preserved. It is life sustained by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

The final temptation—to rule over all the kingdoms of the world at the price of worshiping Satan—is the temptation to justice. It reveals the deadly division the Devil is trying to introduce between means and ends: He offers Jesus the proper and just end without the difficult means.

Yet as Christ’s ministry and passion make clear, the difficult means are inextricable from the kingdom he comes to inaugurate. Much to the frustration of the crowds who flocked to him, Jesus insisted that his rule must come via his slow, personal ministry and painful death. This pattern repeats throughout his life.

As was made clear when he healed the centurion’s servant from afar or fed the 5,000, Jesus could have performed miracles at scale during his earthly ministry. He could have eliminated all suffering, oppression, and every other effect of the Fall. He could’ve more than fulfilled each promise Andreessen and his ilk now make on behalf of AI, transforming the cosmos into a perfectly functioning machine.

But he didn’t. Instead, the ministry of Jesus was reliably marked by an inefficiency and partiality that can be maddening to those of us who dwell in a machine age.

It was maddening even to many who witnessed it. After Jesus fed the 5,000, the people wanted to make him king by force (John 6:15). They wanted a magical ruler who’d feed the nation and, presumably, trounce the Romans.

But the feeding was the exception that proved the rule. It’s the only miracle included in all four Gospels and the only mass miracle (apart from the very similar feeding of the 4,000). In Luke, Jesus followed it by telling his disciples that he “must suffer many things” and be killed, and that “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:21–23).

God’s redemptive presence in a broken creation is not typically an easy poof of justice magically imposed. For us as for Jesus, it is the painful, messy work of personal attention and care.

Why must the kingdom of God come through sacrifice and suffering? Because it is not a matter of equal outcomes and hedonistic plenty; it is God’s presence with us.

As Jesus tells the befuddled Pharisees, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed . . . because the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20–21). Or, as he prays in John 17:3, “This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

Such an encounter with God and his kingdom is necessarily slow and inefficient. The means of the Incarnation are its ends, and divine presence can’t be automated any more than human presence can be. Jesus must heal person by person, touch by touch.

It is significant, I think, that Jesus never tells us to love the world. God so loves the world, but Jesus tells us to love our neighbor. And the parable of the Good Samaritan, which he tells to identify our neighbors, reminds us how tempting it is to avoid the personal work of love (Luke 10:25–37).

The priest and the Levite could rationalize their lack of concern for the wounded man in terms of efficiency and abstract justice. They had more important work to do, work that would make a bigger impact than helping one man. But our obligation isn’t to maximize our efficacy; it is to care for the sufferer who lies before us, just as the Samaritan did.

When Jesus concluded the parable by telling his hearers to “go and do likewise,” he was commanding us to love our neighbors in the slow, difficult, sacrificial manner of his own earthly ministry.

Our vocation as Christ followers, then, is to follow the path that Jesus trod, to walk slowly with others, to suffer, and—ultimately—to become capable of embodying God’s presence to others. The means are essential to this calling. As Berry reminds us, “Hope lives in the means, not the ends.”

Jesus did good things slowly, and so must we. As the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama writes in Three Mile an Hour God, “God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster.” Jesus didn’t jet around the world; he walked around Judea. He didn’t proclaim his message instantly across continents; he slowly discipled fishermen and tax collectors. As tempting as ease may be, we must refuse technologies that promise to automate our relationships with the world and with one another.

There’s no economic justification for boiling the sap from the maple trees in my backyard, playing dolls with my daughter, or listening to my first-year students read their essays and engaging with them about their writing. These things are slow, inefficient, and—in some ways—difficult. But they constitute relationships of attention and care between me and those I’m called to love. If I choose ease instead, I forgo the opportunity to have the God who is love abide in me.

Jesus also did good things inefficiently. This may seem blasphemous, but think of the time he spat on the blind man’s eyes, laid his hands on him, and asked him if he could see. The man said people “look like trees walking around” (Mark 8:24). Jesus laid his hands on the man’s eyes again, and then he could see clearly.

Mark placed this faltering healing amid conversations Jesus had with his disciples in which he asked them why, despite all they’d seen, they still understood so little. Then, as if to illustrate the disciples’ flickering recognition of Jesus’ identity, Mark tells in quick succession the stories in which Peter confesses his belief that Jesus is the Christ then rebukes Jesus for saying he’ll die.

Even Jesus’ own disciples—even his right-hand man, Peter—often only dimly perceived who he was. Was Jesus a mediocre teacher, unable to explain himself? Perhaps the point is rather that the disciples—and we—have the opportunity to participate in Jesus’ life and ministry.

The work of the church will be faltering too. We are not precise computers, and that shows when we pray and make music to God, when we do theology, when we try to serve our needy neighbors. But such means are essential to our vocation as divine image bearers. We cannot offload these tasks to ChatGPT. If we try, we’ll fail, no matter how brilliantly the AI performs.

This is not an excuse to be careless or to callously ignore suffering that might be alleviated by judicious use of technology. Still, we should remember that trying to optimize ease and justice often has unintended consequences. Many technologies are useful, but we should be suspicious of any glowing claim that we can use them to magically help others with no effort or virtue on our part.

Finally, Jesus did good things gratuitously. In one of his parables about the kingdom of God, those who begin working in the fields at dawn and those who come at the close of the day receive the same reward (Matt. 20:1–16). That doesn’t seem just. But divine grace—thankfully—flouts human standards. We receive what we could never deserve.

No algorithm can make sense of such incalculable grace. Similarly, when a woman poured a jar of perfume over Jesus, his disciples were indignant at the waste (Matt. 26:6–13). Shouldn’t this perfume have been sold to benefit the poor? Wouldn’t that be more effective altruism? Yet Jesus praised her gesture of love and honor, telling the grumbling disciples that her gratuitous act would be remembered wherever the gospel is proclaimed.

In our age of efficiency, opportunities for gratuity abound. Cook lovely meals for your family even if the kids will scarf it down. Write poems even if no one else will ever read them. As the writer Kurt Vonnegut advised high school students, “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming … to make your soul grow.”

If we follow in Jesus’ steps—if we live slowly, do good things however inefficiently, and share the extravagant grace we’ve been given—the temptations of AI, like all false promises and demonic temptations, will grow dim and unconvincing.

The Devil will leave us, and we’ll see the absurdity of his lies. We’ll shake our heads in disbelief that anyone could believe AI will make it easier to discern and enact the truth. And then we can set about the arduous but rewarding work of living as creatures made in the image of God in a world increasingly built for machines.

Jesus resisted the Devil’s temptations of easy justice rather than patient, painful, gracious presence. If we want to participate in his kingdom, we will have to follow his example.

Jeffrey Bilbro is associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

- More from Jeffrey Bilbro

News

The Good Book for Baby Names

Daniel Silliman

Americans are less religious than ever. But we’re still a nation of Noahs and Elizabeths.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

The influence of Christianity has declined in the United States. Yet in maternity wards across the country, when newborns scrunch up their tiny faces and fill their lungs with their first breaths of air, parents regularly turn to Scripture. They give their children biblical names.

Some Bible names are more popular than ever. One hundred years ago, for example, Noah was the 400th most common newborn name in America. But in the early 1990s, the number of babies named after the ark-building patriarch rose rapidly. By 1996, Noah was the 50th most popular baby name for boys, and by 2009, it was in the top 10. For the past decade, Noah has been the No. 1 or No. 2 name for boys.

A few names, such as Mary and Martha, have become less popular, but other Bible names appear resistant to cultural change. A girl born in America today is about as likely to be named Elizabeth as she would have been a century ago. David was the 28th most popular boy name in 1920. It was 25th in 2020.

America has changed a lot in 100 years. But when it comes to naming babies, plenty of people still go back to the Bible.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Review

The Best Books for Christian Men Aren’t Always About Being Men

Matt Reynolds

Some should tiptoe onto gender-role battlegrounds. But most should stay on safer scriptural turf.

Illustration by E S Kibele Yarman

In some ways, all eras of evangelical journalism are remarkably alike. It’s too cynical to conclude, with Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun, but similar issues and challenges continually bob up to the surface.

This lesson hit home a few months ago as I combed through bound archives of Christianity Today spanning decades. The names and faces change (to say nothing of fashions in graphic design and hairstyles). But the headlines signal persistent worries about religious liberty, political division, church scandal, missions, and biblical literacy, among other hardy perennials.

My research in the archives was born of our plans for this issue, with its focus on books and reading. After considering (and mercifully rejecting) a proposal to retroactively bestow a slate of CT Book Awards upon books published before these annual honors existed, we landed on a less fanciful alternative: I would identify a single significant book that CT had undercovered or neglected entirely. And this column—already devoted to my own leisure-reading sweet spot of old but not too old books—would try to give that book its due.

Thus began a circuitous investigation, full of false starts and dead ends. But eventually, it led to a book I’ve been curious to read for years: R. Kent Hughes’s Disciplines of a Godly Man.

In 19 briskly paced chapters, Hughes offers biblical counsel on matters of sexual purity, family rhythms, devotional diligence, moral character, and church fellowship. First published in 1991, the book had updated editions in 2006 and 2019, which testifies to its enduring appeal—especially within Reformed circles, where Hughes labored for decades as a pastor and seminary professor.

From what I can gather, CT never commissioned a review. Why? Even with long personal experience overseeing our books coverage, I can only hazard wild guesses.

Review decisions are hardly an exact science. Editors bring a bundle of instincts and hunches to our deliberations. Judgments of quality and relevance reflect differing backgrounds, convictions, and temperaments. And as I’m painfully aware, our ambitions to cover every worthwhile book bump up against scarcities of magazine space and hours in the day. My own coverage plans have embarrassing omissions every year.

Thinking back to the early ’90s, one possible reason for skipping Disciplines was a publishing market already saturated with kindred titles. Christian books, like Christian magazines, revisit the same topics from generation to generation, and there are always lots of Christian men telling other Christian men how to become better Christian men.

Some of these authors, like Man in the Mirror founder Patrick Morley, emphasize practical guidance rooted in Scripture. Others, like John Eldredge in Wild at Heart, probe for some swashbuckling spirit of masculinity. The genres, approaches, and author spokesmen are legion, so a book like Disciplines may seem undistinctive, even if everything it says is resoundingly true.

Another factor that influences my review decisions is whether a book fulfills the promise of its title, and that’s an open question with Disciplines of a Godly Man. With a few inconsequential tweaks, it might easily bear the title Disciplines of a Godly Christian in General. The great bulk of Hughes’s advice to believing men applies with equal force to believing women.

Yes, some of his language and illustrations lean on men’s-retreat motifs. There are anecdotes from professional sports, allusions to Winston Churchill, and scattered exhortations to “man up” in some area of Christian obedience. The book’s dominant picture of discipline evokes 1 Timothy 4:7, where Paul admonishes his protégé to train himself in godliness. Hughes revels in images of vigorous, sweat-drenched workouts.

By and large, however, the book keeps a polite distance from gender specifics. Long stretches pass without any mention of men, women, or anything authentically (or even stereotypically) male or female. Chapters on godly fathers and husbands contain wisdom equally suited to godly mothers and wives.

In a typical section, Hughes might unfold several pages of straightforward biblical instruction on prayer, Bible study, worship, or fellowship before inserting a pithy, pointed gut check: Men, are you serious about this? By the time the question arrives, you’ve forgotten that men were being addressed in the first place.

Hughes does occasionally single out domains of discipline, like sustaining deep friendships and cultivating rich devotional lives, where he sees godliness gaps between men and women. But the comparisons rely on underdeveloped throwaway lines. “We all know,” to quote one example, “that men, by nature, are not as relational as women.” And “they are not as spiritually sensitive and open as women,” to quote another. Perhaps he’s right. If so, it’s worth unpacking why.

By now, it might sound like Disciplines of a Godly Man disappointed me. But in fact, it gradually won me over. For all my frustrations with its commingling of guidance for Christ-ian men and guidance for Christians in general, it sidesteps a more serious pitfall: commingling biblical teaching with cultural dross.

Sometimes this error takes fairly innocuous (or mildly amusing) forms, as when books marketed to men play up themes of getting fit, grilling meat, and grooming beards. Sometimes it veers off in nastier directions, as with recent polemics like The Manliness of Christ: How the Masculinity of Jesus Eradicates Effeminate Christianity. In hewing closely to Scripture, even at the cost of forsaking more man-centered entreaties, Hughes stays on sure ground.

I do believe some authors are called to tiptoe onto riskier territory. In an era when men are often confused about our roles and responsibilities—and beguiled by vulgar (or worse) “influencers” online—it behooves us to have comprehensive portraits of biblical manhood in the family, church, and workplace. Hopefully we can draw these portraits with nuance and sensitivity instead of sketching bizarre or demeaning caricatures.

But Disciplines of a Godly Man holds a counterintuitive lesson: Perhaps the books that best serve men do so precisely by serving the whole body of Christ.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Christian Men Are Christians First".

The Beckoning Nightstand

- More from Matt Reynolds

Ideas

The Bestseller that Made Church Cool—and Optional

Ashley Hales

‘Blue Like Jazz’ spoke for a generation and left disillusioned evangelicals more dissatisfied.

Illustration by John Lee

In summer 2003, American evangelicals’ book-buying habits appeared to be fueled by fear around political destabilization from the 9/11 attacks, war in the Middle East, and potential financial fallout around Y2K. The fictional series Left Behind sold over 80 million copies, and Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover sold 1 million copies around that time.

The idea of church was being reimagined: Gone were the lights, smoke machines, and conservative politics of megachurch practice; in their stead came icons, meeting in the round, and a decentering of the sermon in favor of liturgical elements, offering a sort of artsy smorgasbord for the spiritually curious.

This was the world in which Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality became a sensation, sitting on The New York Times bestseller list for weeks and selling a million copies by 2008. The spiritual memoir captured “the emerging momentum of the Christian hipster set,” Brett McCracken wrote in Christianity Today in 2009 about those reacting against slick marketing in favor of liturgical practices.

In the two decades since, white American evangelical subcultures of the ’90s and ’00s have been scrutinized, reevaluated, and deconstructed in books, pulpits, and counseling offices, especially around purity culture, gender hierarchies, and abuse of power. But few evangelical writers have looked closely at Blue Like Jazz.

What was it about this memoir that captured an evangelical imagination for a whole generation? How did it speak to the hopes and fears of American evangelicals around the turn of the century? Blue Like Jazz attempted to correct a Christianity conflated with conservativism, but it has not offered a satisfying alternative. Both solutions—of legalism or license—ultimately are remnants of evangelical individualism. Both have left our pews empty.

Miller’s memoir joins a long line of confessional testimonial narratives, from Augustine’s Confessions to early American conversion narratives—with an important difference. This 21st-century testimony is not a rite of passage for entrance into a community but the record of an individual standing outside it, or at least alongside it—an observer reckoning with the evangelical experience while still longing to know Jesus.

The book’s “gritty” style—which CT described at the time as “Anne Lamott with testosterone”—was its appeal: a bit bloggy and conversational, slightly irreverent, more at ease with dissonance than tidy answers. And it resonated with disillusioned evangelicals.

Bookstore owner, publisher at InterVarsity Press, and current Evangelical Christian Publishers Association president Jeff Crosby watched Miller’s rise. He noted in an email interview with me that Miller’s titles “tapped into those early days of the ‘emerging church’ and ‘spiritual but not religious’ ideas being bandied about.”

He said Miller’s first two hits—Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years—“scratched the itch we readers felt (but weren’t sure we could talk about) regarding the paradoxes of faith.” Jazz’s conversational familiarity was its success, and in 2012, it was made into a film.

While this “spiritual but not religious” tone was often associated with the emergent church movement, Miller never identified himself with emergent leaders like Brian McLaren or Rob Bell. But the tone and style of Miller’s prose resonates with what philosopher James K. A. Smith then wrote of the emergent church: Rather than a movement, “it’s better understood as a growing sensibility in the contemporary church.”

Readers bought Blue Like Jazz because of this sensibility. As Dale Huntington, lead pastor of City Life Church in San Diego, told me, “Miller didn’t preach at you. He sat you down to dinner, made a self-deprecating joke, and poured you a glass of wine.”

This connection resonated for religious and irreligious people alike and even led to conversions. Huntington’s father raised him in the Baha’i faith, but Huntington became a Christian at age 16. At age 20, his father was hospitalized from Parkinson’s disease. During the stay, Huntington read Blue Like Jazz to him aloud, and years later his father came to faith, largely through the influence of the book. Miller’s prose invited in those who lived on evangelicalism’s edges.

In the early 2000s, I had a different view of the American evangelical landscape. Newly married, my husband and I embarked on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean for seminary (him) and a PhD (me) in Edinburgh. In our years there, we were connected to both a small Scottish denominational seminary and a large research university; we joined a Church of Scotland parish church, yet we also looked with interest at the conversations happening back home.

While I knew of Blue Like Jazz in 2003, I read it only recently. Its punch and grit don’t quite land the same way 20 years later. The book is of its time and genre—more blog than memoir, oversharing in places (“I feel like a complete loser when I don’t have money”) yet trying just a bit too hard to be profound (“You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic”).

At the time, Blue Like Jazz offered a compelling story for American evangelicals to have Jesus without his bride. Jesus was presented as sensitive to the issues Miller and his fellow Christians faced in places like urban Portland. But the book’s style and message increasingly center the individual. In that way, it simply dresses the seeker-sensitive movement in a beanie and skinny jeans. In one passage, Miller prioritizes human decision over the cosmic work of Christ—he writes that there must be “something inside [him]” that earned Jesus’ redemptive work.

Miller recounts how he never really liked church and although he realized institutions were necessary, he didn’t like them. Yet his experience at one particular church, Imago Dei in Portland, was different. In 2005, Miller commented that this experience of a local church made him “feel parented and not alone.”

But by 2014, things had changed. Miller shared with his followers on social media that “church is not a huge part of my life. … Part of it [not attending church] was I’d disagree with what was taught. … I can’t get with the certainty.”

Christian outlets wrote with consternation about Miller’s shift away from the church, but it should not have come as a surprise. The signs were there. In Blue Like Jazz, Miller recounted, “The beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.”

Paul himself calls the gospel to Jews and Gentiles a mystery (Eph. 3:8–9; 5:32), and the good news of Jesus is personal and experiential, but Miller’s language is abstract and, over time, made it easy for him to distance himself from church. The sort of faith Miller pursued fails to mention Jesus, God’s Word, or Jesus’ church (as well as Paul’s many metaphors of the church as foundation, temple, or bride).

Where does one go to find this “nonpolitical mysterious system”? In what sorts of activities would one participate? Does it require others, or can I continually redefine through my own experience what is “experienced but not explained”? The language Miller uses about his Christian spirituality could equally be applied to psychedelics or witchcraft.

Some critics recognized this loose theological wordplay at the time, and others later. Tim Challies said, “Big box Christianity spawned…a rebellion” about which Miller and others wrote. Author Rachel Joy Welcher told me, “There wasn’t a category for what Miller was doing, but we knew we liked it. It felt edgy.” More recently, when writing on purity culture, she asked,

How do the ideas in these books I grew up reading hold up next to Scripture? What I found were so many extrabiblical rules and ideas that had no foundation in Bible truth, and yet were blindly followed by an entire generation of church kids like me.

Disaffected evangelicals found a home in Miller’s book and reached for new expressions of church. But a generation later, these disaffected evangelicals (and their children) aren’t moving from one tradition into another, from megachurch to hipster church. If Blue Like Jazz gave its readers permission to leave their parents’ Christianity, these same readers—like Miller himself—are now more likely to leave church altogether.

Given the amount and breadth of impact from church scandals in recent years, it makes sense that Miller and his original readers would desire to leave a broken institution. But in 2003, Miller named several Christian leaders to whom he looked with optimism because of their expressions of a relevant church in the 21st century. “The Cussing Pastor” Mark Driscoll, apologist Ravi Zacharias, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye author Joshua Harris were just a few.

Miller credited now-scandal-ridden Driscoll with encouraging him to attend Imago Dei church in Portland. He mentioned the late Ravi Zacharias’s teaching on the good of community—all while, we know today, Zacharias was abusing his power and sexually assaulting women. And he described Harris as “a vibrant kid who read a lot of the Bible,” “good-looking and obsessed with dating.” Today, Harris (once a part of C. J. Mahaney’s Sovereign Grace Church movement) and his wife are divorced and have walked away from Christian faith.

If the type of Christian spirituality that Blue Like Jazz enacts is detached from institutional guardrails and accountability and is not lived out in a spirit of communal renewal, repentance, and reliance on Christ, perhaps it’s not surprising to see the wreckage of the leaders Miller holds up.

We must be clear: No single commitment to theological or ecclesiastical tradition will insulate us from moral failure, abuse, suffering, doubt, or loss of faith. Following a sort of “nonpolitical mysterious system” did not insulate Miller or the leaders to whom he looked for guidance from falling into the trap of sin—through either abuse or sloth. However, this does not mean we need to end up where Miller or the tens of millions who have dechurched have landed.

In a passage near the end of the book (and from whence comes his title), Miller writes, “I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music,” a “music birthed out of freedom.” The phrase music birthed out of freedom requires us to ask: What is the end or goal of such freedom? For the generation coming out of the evils of chattel slavery in the US, freedom was thoroughly social, economic, political, and spiritual.

The freedom Miller explores in Blue Like Jazz is of an infinitely lesser variety: less potent; more platform-oriented and individualized; and ultimately untethered from place, accountability, and the unchanging Word of God.

Works of art shake us from our complacency even when they are of this lesser variety of freedom. We need new forms of art to awaken us. Especially when our institutions are healthy, we are afforded space to critique them and try out new, energizing forms—the sort of thing Miller does in Blue Like Jazz.

But when our institutions are weak and frayed, as many say they are now, the mature response is to root out bureaucratic rot while also strengthening our common bonds—the approach of a spade in one hand and sword in the other we see in Nehemiah 4:17. We defend and build simultaneously. We cannot simply critique church without seeking its peace and purity. We cannot tear down without also building up. We cannot sever spiritual growth from the manner and place in which Jesus says it takes place: the church.

Yuval Levin recently reminded us in the journal The New Atlantis that such institutional building is others-centered. We must take attention away from self to build for other (future) people. Levin’s criticism is sharp: “The inability to value those other people and judge them worthy of our work and sacrifice is a characteristic failing of a decadent society.” When we focus exclusively on our self-experience to the detriment of others, in the present or future, our cultural artifacts resemble a stagnant pond. There is no life there.

In 2020, Ross Douthat identified American society as being in a period of decadence, “something that comes on civilizations when they’ve reached a certain stage, and it’s not clear where they go next.” Decadence, Douthat believes, happens after the ladder of success has been climbed: a sort of stalemate of cultural production and dialogue. Movies rehash the same stories, and sequels rule the day. We often see this stagnation in form before we see it play out in content.

Blue Like Jazz’s form felt new and edgy for young millennials and Gen Xers in 2003. In hindsight, the fruit it bore is that of a decadent society where the self is ultimately authoritative, where individuals self-select into churches that feed their values (rather than sharpen like iron on iron), and where our Christian message is no different from the world’s—if we stay in the church at all.

There are other paths to take, however. When my husband and I moved to Edinburgh, the parish church we joined was evangelical in its history and sentiments. We sang weekly with organ accompaniment, drank tea with octogenarians, and worshiped with more than 27 other nationalities in a historic stone church building. This multicultural, multigenerational, and rather traditional church became the touchtone of my husband’s and my ministry and thinking then, and its tone still resonates with us today.

Because of that church, we value prayer for the global church, remembering we are a part of a diverse body across space and time. We remember in word and deed that our identity takes shape as we are built together into Christ’s body. In our 20s, we dreamed of church planting in a cosmopolitan city center, deeply motivated by Tim Keller’s rise to public prominence as we considered our future in terms of pluralism, contextualization, and gospel-centeredness.

These same values permeated our ministry wherever we’ve lived and served: in campus ministry, in the suburbs, and now at a church in a college town. For all the wounds we have received from the church and all the ways we have unintentionally wounded others, the church still provides us more than a provocative form or tone of spirituality. The church is the radiant bride of Christ himself.

Like Donald Miller’s own story, the books we write and the legacies they bequeath to future generations are complicated. Miller correctly concludes in his book, “I think the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.”

But we must remember too that Jesus loves his bride. She is not perfect, but Jesus cleanses her of unrighteousness—in part now and fully at the fullness of time. We, as members of Christ’s body, must love her too.

Ashley Hales is editorial director of print at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Overplaying 'Blue Like Jazz'".

- More from Ashley Hales

Ideas

At My Mother’s Deathbed, I Discovered the Symmetry of a Long Life

Jen Wilkin

The chiastic pattern I’d come to love in Scripture also shows up in God’s design for aging.

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

As a self-professed Bible nerd and a lover of symmetry, no discovery has made me happier than that of the chiasm, a literary structure beloved by writers in the ancient Near East.

Chiasms are a kind of mirror-image parallelism, using repetition to trace an idea. They litter the Old Testament and the New; once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.

A modern example of a short chiasm would be If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Jesus makes a pithy chiastic statement in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

But most chiastic structures are longer than one line, sometimes stretching across entire chapters, with a hinge point in the middle. Westerners are accustomed to a conclusion landing at the end, like the moral of the story or the punchline of a joke, but the ancient Near Eastern mind liked to embed the main idea dead center.

If we don’t recognize this structure as we read Scripture, from the Psalms to the words of Jesus, we risk placing the emphasis on the wrong point. As a Bible teacher, I see how chiasms honor the truism that repetition is the mother of learning. Chiasms are memory aids, God’s kindness to past generations of worshipers who likely never held Scripture in their hands as well as to modern Christians in our distracted age. They are meant to help us remember.

Modern readers may wonder why this particular form of parallelism appealed so heavily to the ancient Near Eastern mind. I certainly did—that is, until my mother died.

“I’m so sorry you have to take me to this appointment.” I looked over at my diminutive 79-year-old mother, perched in the passenger seat, eyes apologetic, fretting with her purse.

Like many in her generation, my mom found it difficult to accept even help that was easy to supply. “You are a person to love, not a problem to solve” had become my mantra to her each time she expressed dismay at having interrupted my life in any way.

Before you begin to assume that my mother and I had an enviable relationship, let me say we did not—but through much hard work, we found a real sweetness together in her final years. In December of 2021, her kids and grandkids moved her into an apartment five minutes from my home. We set up her antique furniture, hung her favorite pictures, and put out her favorite vase, the one with wisteria around the rim. I was excited to be able to drop in or run errands for her so easily.

I planned a family dinner for her 80th birthday that January. Three days before it, she texted that she had a stomach bug and wasn’t sure she would make it. She assured me she was fine. Please don’t come over. But she was sicker than she thought.

Her birthday passed in the ICU, and a week later she was placed on palliative care, coming home to my house for hospice. No more beeping monitors and sterile overhead lights. No more masks and visitor restrictions. Instead, a room flooded with sunshine, warm with color, and filled with loved ones.

She was, at this point, no longer communicative. But I knew if she could have spoken, she would have repeated the words she had strained to say again and again during her brief hospital stay: “I’m so sorry to be a burden.”

My brothers and I took our place at her bedside to keep a vigil familiar to many reading this. We listened as her breathing became more and more labored with each passing day. We witnessed the hard work of dying.

On the second day, the hospice nurse told me, “You know, you can coach her. Give her encouragement. Tell her she’s doing well.” I played her favorite hymns. I held her hand. I helped keep her clean and comfortable. I whispered a thousand times, “I’m so glad you’re home. You’re a person to love, not a problem to solve.”

At last, she reached the end of her travail. A final deep exhale, a crashing silence.

And it hit me: the marvelous and terrible symmetry of a long human life.

Eighty years earlier, hadn’t she entered this world in a similar way—through a great labor, with a deep inhale and a piercing wail? Had she not received much the same care in the hours after her birth that we provided in the hours before her death?

I suspect the reason the ancients loved a chiasm was because it is the recognizable shape of the sweep of life. Perhaps God, in his kindness, designed it to be such. Bookends. Repetition. Symmetry.

I reasoned that the other concentric layers of a human life could be mapped as well. Every human life is unique, but what might be the general pattern? I sketched out my thoughts.

The chiasm of a human life. The idea is not unique to me. I recall the saying that we are first children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, and finally children to our children.

If life is a chiasm, and if chiasms teach, what does the chiasm of life seek to teach us? If we become students of it, I believe it can “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

Remembering that seasons of life follow a patterned order helps us inhabit the season we are in and prioritize how to use the time we are given. Since death announced its presence in Genesis 3, our days have been numbered. Perhaps God, in his infinite kindness, gave us a chiasm, a patterned measuring rod, to number those days rightly.

Knowing that aging means the relinquishing of freedoms and abilities helps us embrace that process rather than hold onto self-reliance. It helps us to anticipate the next season, to savor the one we are in, and to be grateful for the ones we have already left behind.

Recognizing that in some seasons we give care and in some we receive care helps us accept care when it’s our turn to receive. We are not problems to solve in our extreme age any more than we were in our infancy. We are simply people to love, in a stage when others repay a debt of care they themselves received in their time.

The chiastic structure of life explains why we feel such shock when a life is cut short. We expect intuitively that human life should make a full arc. The asymmetry of a young or untimely death creates dissonance. No bookend. No parallel. No full circle. My mother’s death was a good one by many measures, not least because of its blessed symmetry.

But if a chiasm puts the main point at the middle, how are our middle years noteworthy? Midlife offers a unique opportunity, a moment of perspective at the crossroads. If we have paid close attention to how we entered the chiasm, we will be better able to exit it with grace and submission. Looking back over the first half of life can help us anticipate the second half—in both its losses and its gains.

If we focus just on our abilities and responsibilities, we see only gains in the first half of the chiasm of life and only parallel losses in the second. In a culture that values youth and vigor, we risk losing sight of what we learn over the years: wisdom. The wisdom of aging means that even as our bodies increasingly fail us, our internal lives grow richer and steadier. Bodies decline, but people develop.

At 55, I can already track the decline in my physical abilities. I am still in a stage where I am the supplier of help to others, but if the Lord grants me length of years, I will one day be only a recipient—fed and clothed and cared for by someone else’s hands and feet.

The days in which my body can yield help to others are numbered, and I want to number them rightly. My parents have helped me with the math. Watching them pass into old age has brought into focus for me the preciousness of the years I have left. My earliest caregivers have moved to receiving care. Their physical abilities grow more limited, but their insights are deepening.

They are the evidence to me that, while failing joints and heart valves and eyesight and hearing may increasingly unsteady our bodies, wisdom increasingly steadies our souls. Bodies decline, people develop. The lamp of wisdom burns brighter as the oil of life experience grows in supply.

For the believer, old age is an invitation toward burgeoning luminosity.

In my attic is a relic of days gone by: a cassette player my husband owned as a teen. In the living room is another relic—the vase with wisteria trim. My mother’s, passed on to me. It’s not of enormous value, but unlike its electronic upstairs neighbor, its value is steadily growing with age.

Here is where we bump into the problem with the way our culture views not just aging but also the elderly. My husband, Jeff, and I are affectionately called “the Olds” by our kids, who thankfully still seek our advice and who regard us as a source of wisdom obtained through length of years. But our children are increasingly the exception.

So many cultural shifts have happened in so little time that many parents and children are estranged by their differing views. Whereas one’s elders used to be seen as those increasing in wisdom with every passing year, they are now likely to be seen as increasingly obsolete (“Okay, boomer”). Less like a vase, more like a cassette player.

When I listen to my 84-year-old father’s advice, it occurs to me that he always waits patiently for me to end my question before responding. At 55, I often sit with a younger person to hear about their difficulty in marriage, parenting, or ministry; recognize a familiar pattern a few minutes into the telling; and, at the right moment, offer the same advice I have given on similar occasions.

We have a way of hitting the same roadblocks. If I have acquired a modest level of wisdom in middle age, how much more does my father hold at 84? There is godly wisdom, a gift God grants, but there is also the wisdom of age—gained by sheer length of years and attention to those around us.

The wisdom of age is the basis for the fifth commandment’s requirement to honor father and mother, a command given not to children, as we often assume, but to adults. (Note that the commands following it deal with the very adult sins of murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness, and covetousness.)

The fifth commandment is intended to instruct adult children to show honor to elderly parents. The Puritans interpret correctly its greater implications in the Westminster Catechism, noting that it included showing honor to all who are our superiors in age and experience.

Put succinctly: Honor the Olds. They know some things you don’t. Their bodies are declining, but their personhood is ever developing. We can miss this so easily. I once heard a woman in her 30s gently reminding an audience of younger women that “older Christian women are still valuable in the church.” In accordance with the fifth commandment, I would offer a slightly altered wording. Those older than us are not still valuable. They are, rather, increasingly valuable.

In a culture that fetishizes youth and views aging as a journey into irrelevance and uselessness, God’s family takes the view that people possess an ever-developing value, one that renders their contributions essential and indispensable.

Our elders have much to offer us—until they reach the stage in the chiasm of life when they don’t. At some point, old age will take from them even the ability to think or communicate. And yet, they will still teach us. Aging requires a fortitude like nothing else. Caring for the aged grants unforeseen blessings to the younger generation. Those who hold the hand of the dying learn secrets to make them wise. They learn that the elderly are not an obligation but a sacred trust. My mother was luminous in her dying.

The grand symmetry of the human life can yield wisdom if we give it our attention. We move from the helplessness of birth to seasons of growth and possibility under the watchful care of our parents. We become caregivers to our children, then to our parents. We watch growth and possibility turn to decline and limited ability in our own lives. We return to helplessness. And we leave this life much as we entered. How kind of the Lord to give us a roadmap for aging until our last enemy, death, is defeated.

Don’t believe the lie that the first half of life is to be clung to. When we behold the arc from beginning to end, we learn to value all of it. We learn not just to number our days but to cherish them—the days of our youth, the days of our twilight, and all the days in between.

Don’t let a youth-obsessed culture rob you of your sense of the value of all parts of life. We need our aging faces and slowing bodies to tell us the truth: that time is passing, and that it is exceedingly precious. Each season yields its own exquisite fruit. No need to cling to what was never meant to last. God is faithful in every season.

Jen Wilkin is an author, Bible teacher, and cohost of the Knowing Faith podcast.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "A Life’s Faithful Symmetry".

Ideas

War Changes Everything—and Nothing

Mark Meynell

A WWII-era C.S. Lewis sermon makes the case for “business as usual,” even when violence rages, as in Ukraine.

(Left) 1940, London: Residents sleep on stationary escalators in a London Underground station during Nazi all-night bombing raids. (Right) 2023, Kyiv: People sit on an escalator as they shelter in a subway station during a Russian missile attack.

Edits by CT / Source Images: AP Images, Getty Images

When my friend Dima is kept awake at night, he goes out onto his eighth-floor apartment balcony in Kyiv’s eastern suburbs to pray. In the skies above, wave upon wave of Iranian-made Shahed drones pass overhead—Kyiv’s eastern flank is the most vulnerable to air attacks. With panoramic views of the city, Dima silently watches and prays.

The roar of the drones is considerable. They are nothing like the flimsy, pocket-sized photographers’ gadgets I had envisaged before my visit last September. Shahed drones come in various models, but perhaps the most feared are the large, triangular ones: They are the height of a tall man and resemble miniaturized stealth bombers. Each is packed with explosives, and they arrive in overwhelming numbers. The Ukrainian people must endure aerial bombardment night after night.

Dima works for his local church in outreach and youth ministry and naturally has much there to pray about. But as drones tear across the sky, it is impossible not to pray for equally pressing concerns: for lives to be spared and for drones to be shot down. Surely such aims must take precedence in both life and prayer.

Eighty-six years ago, C. S. Lewis wrestled with similar questions. After Germany refused to back down from its invasion of Poland, Great Britain and France declared war in September 1939. The following month, Lewis, the Oxford literary scholar, found himself preaching a sermon he titled “Learning in War-Time” on the first Sunday of the academic year. He chose to tackle a question that would have troubled everyone present in the congregation that day: How could they continue academic pursuits now that there was “a war on”? Lewis’s response offers wisdom that is remarkably relevant still, not only for the likes of Dima in Ukraine but for us all.

When I first saw the images of hundreds of Russian tanks bearing down on Kyiv in February 2022, the many Ukrainian friends I had come to respect and love quickly came to mind. I had visited the country several times, beginning in 2016, as part of my work for Langham Preaching, a program of Langham Partnership started by John Stott in 2002 to develop grassroots expository preaching movements, now in more than 100 countries.

I met Sergiy Tymchenko, a Baptist pastor and founding director of Realis (the Research Education and Light Center). He had encountered Stott soon after the Soviet Union’s collapse and, in due course, was named a Langham Scholar to do a PhD in public theology in Britain.

The very notion of theological engagement with the public square was inconceivable under Communism, and afterward still suspect. So Sergiy’s vision seemed alien to those who, like him, had grown up under the Soviet Union’s antireligious ideology. But he was committed to serving Ukraine’s church and society as various needs arose in those exciting and troubling years. That meant developing counseling training programs, which were almost nonexistent in churches at that time. Since invasion has now traumatized an entire nation, this vision was sadly prescient.

Furthermore, the war has also proved the wisdom of Sergiy’s passionate support for introducing chaplaincies (military, prison, and hospital) into Ukrainian life. These had been inconceivable in a culture forged by decades of Communist atheism.

The primary focus of our collaboration, however, came through Sergiy’s desire to enhance local church ministries across Ukraine. We began seminars in earnest in 2017 in Irpin, near the Realis Center in western Kyiv.

So when the BBC showed footage of Ukrainian forces’ defensive destruction of an Irpin bridge in 2022, as well as news of the most appalling atrocities in neighboring Bucha, everything suddenly gained horrific proximity for me.

Lewis knew war from firsthand experience. He matriculated at Oxford in the summer of 1917, knowing his undergraduate studies would be curtailed by the Great War, then in its third year. After volunteering for military service and completing his basic training at Oxford, Lewis was commissioned as a junior officer and plunged into the infamous trenches at the Somme in northern France. He remained there for the next five months until being wounded by friendly fire and invalided out in April 1918.

That conflict left an indelible mark on Lewis and his generation. Lewis was no pacifist even before his Christian conversion, but he did later say he respected, despite disagreeing with, those who genuinely were.

The fact that Lewis volunteered to serve in the war lends his October 1939 sermon a greater moral authority. That address, given at University Church at St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, was published under the title “Learning in War-Time” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses.

Could the university even justify staying open, Lewis asked? Perhaps it was more sensible to close the humanities’ faculties to assign every resource to the war effort. After all, how on earth might the study of Petrarchan sonnets, J. S. Bach’s masterpieces, or Renaissance portraiture possibly defeat Nazism? Such were the insecurities circulating in many university towns as Lewis ascended St Mary’s grand pulpit.

Although Lewis did not expound a biblical text, there is no doubt that everything he said was grounded in his Christian faith. But that is not where he began:

A university is a society for the pursuit of learning. …Why should we—indeed how can we—continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?

I found myself asking a similar question last year, after the UK Foreign Office eased its travel advice for western Ukraine. I was desperate to see friends but anxious not to compound burdens. I had never visited, let alone ministered in, a war zone before. Was it appropriate to be there in any capacity as a noncombatant?

As I reread “Learning in War-Time,” not only did it provide impetus for my two-day preaching workshop and weekend seminar on the importance of the arts in wartime; Lewis’s sermon became the subject of a lecture in its own right.

A key question we must answer is: What has the war changed? Pose that question to any Ukrainian, and the response is, invariably, “Everything!” No doubt those suffering the aftermath of a hurricane, the effects of seismic economic challenges, or communal grief after a mass killing can relate. Those from Ukraine’s east have endured the destruction and occupation of entire communities since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Once the full invasion was launched, millions fled the country to uncertain futures. Whether they left or stayed, nothing could ever be the same again.

During my visit last year, it was certainly a shock for this privileged Brit to experience nightly air-raid sirens for the first time, despite locals appearing to barely acknowledge them.

Reminders of war were pervasive. Highway billboards still advertised the same old stuff—new cellphones or kids’ fashions—but they were now juxtaposed with recruitment posters for regiments or drone squads. Every few miles in Kyiv’s outskirts, soldiers loitered at military checkpoints as the regular commuter traffic flew past; but roadblocks with antitank defenses, affectionately known as Czech hedgehogs, could be retrieved from the roadside and made operational in seconds.

In the center of Kyiv, I was relieved to see how intact the historic districts remained. Sergiy and I made the most of the autumnal sunshine, taking long walks across the magnificent city. We entered a large Baptist church in his neighborhood, one whose history dates to before the Soviet era. Its reverberating foyer contained the usual noticeboards of schedules and study topics. But one wall now presented color photos of roughly 40 men in military fatigues and, at its base, a row of four in stark monochrome: the fallen. All were members of this congregation.

During my 10 days in Ukraine, I did not meet a single person without friends or family at the front. Almost all had lost someone. Everything had changed.

Alamy

WWII, London: Two women stand amid debris from bomb damage.

Getty

2022, Kyiv: A man stands amid debris in front of a residential apartment complex that was heavily damaged by a Russian attack.

Read against the backdrop of lethal drones and aching grief, Lewis’s sermon makes a startlingly insensitive—and perhaps offensive—point. Lewis insisted that nothing has changed. It is important, he said, “to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.”

The key to his argument comes from his surprising entry point. After suggesting that the challenge of academia during a war could be considered akin to the proverbial Nero who fiddled while Rome burned, Lewis dared to mention what he called the “crude monosyllable” of hell. His justification was the teaching of the Lord Jesus himself, and his reason was that an eternal perspective is essential to his entire argument.

The reality of divine justice offers the ultimate benchmark for what is of true and lasting value. Neither the Second World War nor the Russian invasion of Ukraine—nor the current horrors in the Middle East—makes the slightest difference to that. That may sound glib to those suffering, yet it does not alter the fact of it. Lewis’s point is simply that eternity has always been life’s ultimate measure, war or no war.

The crucial question, therefore, is not which activities may be justified in wartime but which activities are worth doing at any time. For something to be worth doing, it must have inherent value, whatever the circumstances and despite human mortality.

This doesn’t mean that wartime doesn’t influence our work and our perspective. “Yet war does do something to death,” Lewis continued. “It forces us to remember it.” This is certainly happening in Ukraine.

Andriy is a Kyiv pastor who was previously a well-known journalist. He regularly visits the frontline and field hospitals as a volunteer chaplain. He was in no doubt of Lewis’s point. Before the war, many people were noncommittal or even resistant to matters of faith. It is entirely different now. Andriy barely has a single conversation with the active or wounded that does not concern eternity and divine justice.

Another friend of mine, Sasha, in Lviv, learned three days before we met that one of his oldest Christian friends had been killed at the front. His grief was intensified by the impending birth of his first child. Quietly agonizing, Sasha said in English, “Just what kind of world are we bringing him into?”

In light of such horrors, not devoting everything to the war effort can seem frivolous at best and obscene at worst. Surely our attitude must be all hands on deck? Maybe not. Lewis’s approach is carefully reasoned, working through a perspective that would seem absurd to nonbelievers but compelling for believers.

Because Christ sacrificed everything for us, it stands to reason that he deserves our everything in response (1 John 3:16). Consequently, only one object is worthy of our total devotion: God himself. Lewis insisted nothing else comes remotely close, be it a career, a family, an academic pursuit, or even a war effort. Lewis illustrated this with the concept of training to become a lifeguard, an inherently good thing to do:

We may have a duty to rescue a drowning man and, perhaps, if we live on a dangerous coast, to learn lifesaving so as to be ready for any drowning man when he turns up. It may be our duty to lose our own lives in saving him. But if anyone devoted himself to lifesaving in the sense of giving it his total attention—so that he thought and spoke of nothing else and demanded the cessation of all other human activities until everyone had learned to swim—he would be a monomaniac. The rescue of drowning men is, then, a duty worth dying for, but not worth living for.

The analogy is apt for Ukrainian forces desperately fighting to defend their country, as well as for any nation or community facing peril on a grand scale. How can we avoid becoming obsessive, especially at perilous times? Lewis’s solution is to ensure we do everything “as working for the Lord” (Col. 3:23). This Pauline principle subverts the old sacred-secular divide by insisting that a life of sacrificial worship embraces far more than just the “holy” or religious parts of life. It is a matter of whole-life discipleship.

Furthermore, as creatures created in God’s image, we long for what is true, beautiful, and good. As Lewis wrote, “An appetite for these things exists in the human mind, and God makes no appetite in vain.” So it is no accident when some seek to plumb the depths of truth, beauty, and goodness. That is inherently worth doing, war or no war.

Now, a country at war faces unique demands. Conscription is perhaps necessary, and it necessarily rips people out of their everyday lives. Lewis was not arguing for the precedence of academic study; his understanding of just war theory would suggest that there are circumstances when it is right to take up arms. He was simply saying that academic study, even study of the humanities, during wartime (albeit for a minority) is a legitimate vocation. If something is justifiable in peacetime from an eternal perspective, it is entirely justifiable in wartime.

This does not mean everybody will grasp this. I know that my grandfather, ordained to Church of England ministry not far from Oxford in 1940, often encountered incredulity and even hostility after the war years when explaining his lack of military experience.

So it was very moving to chat with a Ukrainian man I’ll call Petro as our Realis seminar closed. He had come at the last minute, despite being a senior energy specialist with responsibility over several power stations in Ukraine’s bitterly contested east. Two days before the seminar, one of his facilities was almost completely destroyed in a Russian attack. He assumed that leaving it would be impossible. On inspection the next morning, however, there was simply nothing he could do to repair it. He looked exhausted and hollowed out when he arrived at the seminar.

After three days, however, Petro seemed a little brighter. “Thank you so much for being willing to come to Ukraine,” he said through Andriy’s interpretation. “We need this. We need to learn more about preaching. We need to learn about what is beautiful in the world. Even now. Especially now. These things matter more than ever.”

I then remember Dima, praying on his balcony as drones fill the skies. Lewis’s perspective must resonate with him as he brings his requests before God. Yes, he prays for war to end. But he also prays for all the things that make life rich and livable, war or no war.

Mark Meynell has been director (Europe and Caribbean) for Langham Preaching since 2014. In 2025, he is focusing his attention on writing and teaching while serving as an associate of Langham Partnership. He writes at markmeynell.net.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "'Learning in Wartime' in a War Zone".

- More from Mark Meynell

Church Life

On Rabbits, Redemption, and the Written Word

Timothy Dalrymple

President & CEO

A note from CT’s president in our annual books issue.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Unsplash

One of the books I loved in my youth was Watership Down by Richard Adams. For reasons I could not name at the time, the peculiar tale of a band of rabbits escaping the destruction of their warren and sojourning to a new home captivated my imagination. Inspired in part by Adams’s experiences in World War II, the novel narrates the dangers the rabbits confront along the journey to a prophesied promised land as well as the fight, once they reach it, to defend it from danger.

Later, when I studied abroad in England, a friend asked whether I would join him on a day trip to retrace the rabbits’ journey. I had not known that Watership Down actually exists: It’s an elegant green hill outside Kingsclere in southern England. Adams described places he knew well, places that can still be found, down to the smallest details. So, dog-eared copy of the book in hand, that friend and I spent an enchanting spring day charting the way from the Sandleford Warren to the top of Watership Down. There, to our delight, we found dozens of rabbits peeking out of their holes as the sun set over the downs of Hampshire.

Watership Down became one of the best-selling books of all time and has been adapted into stage plays, animated films, and a streaming series. It deepened my sense of the profound pleasure of reading and its power to transport us to faraway places. It also sharpened my attention for things I had once overlooked—in this case, things close to the earth, berries and thistles and flowers—the kinds of things rabbits would notice.

The issue you hold in your hands is devoted to the magic of books. Books are teleportation devices, time machines, world engines, empathy generators, enliveners of minds, and invigorators of souls. The history of Christianity is, among other things, a history of books, from The City of God to the Summa Theologica to The Imitation of Christ, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Institutes of the Christian Religion, and Mere Christianity. And of course, God chose to bear the story of his relationship with his people and of his incarnation and ministry in the person of Jesus Christ in the Holy Book.

We congratulate the winners of this year’s Book Awards. We hope they capture new hearts and minds for the gospel of Jesus Christ. We hope they point our attention toward things we neglect, refining our vision of what it means to follow Jesus with all our hearts and minds.

Christianity Today remains committed to the written word. We believe in the extraordinary, life-changing power of stories and ideas. That is why we were founded and why we exist today. We all belong to an adventure story—a journey from a broken paradise to a promised land. We all partake in the grand narrative of God’s redemption and restoration of all things.

And as in Watership Down, the story is one of friendship and fellowship. We are a community on the move. When we lift our heads, we see the destination ahead of us: a high and beautiful place, a home in the sunlight, where we will be one with our Maker and Savior.

The kingdom of God is among us and ahead of us, and it is a real place. One day we will see it in full. As we at Christianity Today move through our One Kingdom Campaign and follow where we believe God is leading, we are grateful to our readers. Thank you for seeking the kingdom together, and we pray you’ll bring those around you to join us in the journey.

- More from Timothy Dalrymple

Corresponding Issue

Christianity Today

January/February 2025

Culture

Krista Tippett on Wishful Thinking Versus Hope

Mike Cosper and Krista Tippett

CT Staff

From Soviet-era Berlin to current-day USA, the longtime radio host shares insights on countering discouragement.

On a recent episode of The Bulletin, Christianity Today’s senior director of CT Media, Mike Cosper, spoke with journalist Krista Tippett, who has covered religion and spirituality across traditions on her show On Being for more than 20 years. Their conversation touched on the fraught political climate in the US, the individualism corroding American culture, and how hope and community can offer a pathway to healing. This excerpt has been edited for clarity.

Illustration by Ronan Lynam

Mike Cosper and Krista Tippett

Mike Cosper: What I have loved about your work for years now is that you have called us to pay attention to the spiritual undercurrents of our culture. What taught you to stop and pay attention to the spiritual elements of our world?

Krista Tippett: There are so many ways to answer, but I’ll just say that I grew up in a culture and a family where there wasn’t a lot of deep listening and attention.

Sometimes we learn to value things because it’s been modeled for us, and sometimes it’s because of an absence. And it’s a gift when you have this hole that you couldn’t articulate and then you realize what needs to fill it.

In terms of the spiritual aspect, I grew up Southern Baptist in a very religious world, but I’m not sure I would say it was a very spiritual world. When I left home, I was not really turning against religion, but I wasn’t sure what relevance it had for the world I was moving in at that point. Later on, I went to divinity school and I learned to love theology.

I got interested in politics and ended up spending most of my 20s in divided Berlin. The Cold War was the great geopolitical drama of the ’80s. It was years before I could have articulated it this way, but that place was a fault line of the geopolitical landscape at that time.

What I started to perceive was an absence of attention the spiritual dynamic of the division of the world and these weapons we had pointed at each other. In divided Berlin, you took one city with one people, one language, one culture and split it into two—and gave them two absolutely different competing realities that had missiles pointed at each other. And because I loved people who lived on both sides of that wall, I watched people create lives of dignity, beauty, meaning, and intimacy—or fail to do so.

And it wasn’t about which side of the wall they landed on. It was not the raw materials people were handed but what they did with those raw materials. That brought me back to this primal, original fact of “us.”

Spiritual is a word that I use lightly because it’s pretty vague. But yes, it was that spiritual aspect that the policymakers and the politicians and the people who were moving the missiles around on the map weren’t paying attention to.

I just got fascinated with the question “How do we pay attention both amid and despite what the official, serious ‘political economic world’ is doing around us?” And paying attention to that has served me pretty well, living in this time we inhabit.

MC: In your book Becoming Wise, you say, “Hope … is a choice that becomes a habit that becomes spiritual muscle memory.” And then you go on and describe it as a “renewable resource.” Can you unpack that for us and for this moment in particular?

KT: I think a lot about hope, and these days I mostly just leap and say, “Hope is a muscle.” And what I’m contrasting is, a muscle is different from wishful thinking and it’s different from assuming or believing that things will turn out all right in the end. The way I think about hope is reality-based. It’s not optimism.

I have some role models in this. I think about John Lewis, who talked about hope a lot. It’s almost prophetic—on your podcast, I can use that language, right?—it’s a refusal to accept the way you are told things have to be. It’s a refusal to insist that the world has to be this way.

And then hope, the muscle, is throwing what we can of our life, our will, our energy, our intelligence, our creativity, our care behind that insistence.

One of the great gifts of my life of conversation has been being in conversation with people who really have shifted the world on its axis in some way. And it is always true in those situations—and really in all human leaps of creativity and innovation and social transformation—that somebody sees a possibility that, almost always in the beginning, other people don’t believe can happen or scoff and sneer at.

So it’s a leap of imagination in the sense that you are insisting on a better possibility. And human beings have done this across time. This is how we move forward. You throw your life behind that possibility.

MC: That foundational idea that hope is a choice, I think, is so important in a time like this, because if I understand who listens to The Bulletin and where they’re coming from, I think we’re mostly dealing with people who feel—to some extent spiritually and to a large extent politically—homeless. Their options don’t represent them well.

And the temptation in that kind of loneliness and isolation is always despair. Or the other temptation is to adopt an ideology that ends up being very radical. How does one choose hope in the midst of a situation like the one where I think most people find themselves these days?

KT: First of all, I want to say that I’m not hopeful about everything. I don’t think that hope is a blanket attitude. For example, I wouldn’t make a general statement that I’m hopeful about our political culture. It’s not a reasonable choice. I know there are people who are working on this. I actually know some, and there’s a very young generation of new politicians coming up who I can get hopeful about. And I also see that they’ve got 20 years before they’re going to be running things. So I think there’s a discernment in this.

I also think politics is not really the realm that I am engaged in or touch. I think of Bryan Stevenson talking about knowing what we’re being called to—how discerning what we want to be in the world and how we want to be in the world has to do with getting proximate. I think there’s something to this—something about what we can see and touch and know.

So when I say hope is reality-based and reasonable, I think it’s meant to be an informed choice, and we’re not all informed about everything. There’s a focus to it. Being hopeful in general is not reasonable right now and not right. That’s not what I’m talking about. That’s not muscular. That’s more in the wishful thinking category.

The other thing I would say that feels really important to me is, I think one of the most corrosive tenets of American culture that has infected all of our other realms, including our religious lives, is this cult of the individual. We’re not even conscious of this. We’ve just been raised to think that it’s all about being an individual. And none of the virtues is meant to be carried alone. That’s not what they’re about. They’re not about being a courageous individual. None of these things is supposed to happen in isolation.

I say this a lot when I’m talking to young people now, because I actually am having this experience—that these younger generations know in their bodies at a very young age what I think all of us are having to face, which is that whatever we are working for to make this world a better place right now is our work for the rest of our lifetimes.

We’re not given two-year plans or five-year plans or ten-year projects. We are facing these intimate, civilizational—really, species-level—crises. Or callings, to put it more positively. And if that is the case—and it is—none of us is going to be able to feel, to hold onto this hope every day, or hold compassion or courage or love.

One of the things we’re called to do—and really, in doing so, we buck this fiction of individualism that we’ve grown up with—is to surround ourselves with others. We have to surround ourselves with others who are going to be able to hold that hope on the days and the weeks and the years when it is too much for us to ask of ourselves.

That’s also the reality of the time we live in. That’s how I think about it. It’s complicated, and if we leave ourselves alone with this, we will not succeed.

MC: How does that message connect to people who are constantly being sold the opposite of that? Look at our social media culture—the great enforcer of main-character syndrome for everybody. How do we convince people that they’re part of a family and a community and that some deference to that family and community matters?

KT: I don’t have an answer to that, but I think that’s the question. You’ve probably heard me quote Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke’s idea of living the questions. Rilke said to this young person, “Don’t search for the answers that you couldn’t be given now because you can’t live them yet.” I think what he was saying is, when to rush to an answer would be to deny the gravity of the question, then what we’re called to do is live the question and love the question and hold the question until we can live our way into the answer. One way you could describe our time is it’s just all these vast, aching, open questions.

But this mentality, this individualism, it’s so embedded in us that it’s below the level of consciousness. We have to root out something that we’re not even aware of. I think it starts with having conversations like this and naming it and people kind of waking up.

One of the things I’ve always said on On Being was that in the beginning, it took me a few years of my work to realize that I’m animated by these great questions of meaning, which are the animating questions behind our traditions. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?

And in this century, if you look at every crisis or calling before us, whether it is ecological or racial or economic, that question of who we will be to each other—if we don’t center that, I think we only maybe survive. What we will not do if we don’t center that is flourish as communities, as nations, as a species.

MC: You can kind of reduce that into “Love thy neighbor.”

KT: You can.

MC: And that’s not a bad reduction, you know?

KT: It’s not, and you just tripped onto another favorite topic of mine right now, because that “Love thy neighbor” also is not a feeling. It’s agape. It is love in action.

I also think that we need to rediscover that love is actually not a soft skill but the hardest thing of all. The Beatles were right; it’s what will save us. But only if we bring the intelligence to our public life that we actually possess in our private lives, in our lives of love.

Because in our lives of love, with the most intimate relationships, love is very often what we do in spite of how we feel at this very moment, right? It is very rarely about feeling perfectly understood or perfectly understanding the other person.

The way love works—not as a feeling but as an action—is very often about what we choose not to say right now. In social media, of course, we say everything right now. But we choose not to say things right now because we choose to stay in relationship.

So if we just “love thy neighbor” as a muscular, reality-based, pragmatic, effective way to be, not just a beautiful way to be, it’s exactly what we need.

MC: I think that’s a great place to land. Thanks for joining us here.

KT: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Krista Tippett is an award-winning journalist, author, and creator and host of The On Being Project.

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and cohost of The Bulletin.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".

- More from Mike Cosper

Ideas

Reading—and Eating—as Communion

Ashley Hales

Staff Editor

A note from CT’s editorial director of print in our annual books issue.

Illustration by Trevor Shin

Two weeks after America’s COVID-19 shutdowns, a friend of mine gathered ten thoughtful Christian women to read the novel 1984. We called ourselves The Plague Reading Group, focused as we were with placing words from the past around our turbulent present.

Since 2020, when we first met on Zoom, we’ve moved outside and then finally inside. We’ve read dystopian fiction and histories of the fall of empires. Over plates of Korean short ribs and Swedish meatballs, we digest what we’ve read together, sharing our reading over a long table robed in candlelight.

Books, and a shared desire to understand the times we’re in, brought us together.

As Christians, we are “people of the Book.” Each Sunday, we read, recite, and are formed and fed by the reading and preaching of God’s Word. The Bible is always a conversation partner to the other books on our nightstands and bookshelves.

It is our delight, then, to invite you to this feast of words. We’re particularly proud to share our annual CT Book Awards (p. 78), curated by our senior books editor, Matt Reynolds.

Also in the issue, editor in chief Russell Moore shares how his own book club taught him how to live and die well (p. 30). Picking up that theme, Jen Wilkin explains how biblical structure illustrates our life arc in “A Life’s Faithful Symmetry” (p. 34). Mark Meynell shows us how C. S. Lewis’s sermon “Learning in War-Time” relates to
ministers in Ukraine today (p. 64).

Poet Malcolm Guite guides us into the pleasures of poetry as a vehicle for developing a Christian imagination, vital in our time of division and polarization (p. 70). Emily Belz reports how churches in New York City are preserving endangered languages (p. 52). And in Guest Appearances, you’ll read how hope is a muscle from journalist Krista Tippett (p. 21).

We pray that as you read the stories on these pages, your own muscle of hope will be strengthened to work at connection rather than division, at truth rather than disinformation, at goodness rather than rancor.

Good reading so often goes with good eating, as both are vehicles for communion with God and each other. To whet your appetite for good conversation and good gathering, enjoy my sister-in-law’s recipe for your next book club or dinner. Take up and eat!

Kerry’s Mustard Braised Pork

Ingredients:

A 5–7 pound pork butt roast or similar (bone-in is more tender)
1 bulb of fresh garlic
Salt and pepper, to taste
Yellow mustard and brown sugar, to taste
1 small can of pineapple juice (may substitute apple juice)

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.
Use a knife to make holes in the meat, and insert a whole peeled garlic clove in each hole—about 6 to 8 cloves altogether. Salt and pepper all four sides of the roast (kosher salt is best). Score the fat cap with a knife.
Warm up a well-greased dutch oven or other casserole dish over medium heat on the stove. Place the roast fat side down first, and then, using tongs to rotate it, brown all four sides, nudging it to keep it from sticking.
With the fat side back on top, spread some mustard and brown sugar on the fat. Pour in some pineapple juice until there is at least an inch of liquid at the bottom of the pan.
Cover and place in the oven. After an hour, reduce the heat to 275 degrees.
Cook for 3–4 hours until the meat chunks easily.

This is great to serve alongside boiled potatoes or roasted vegetables. You can thicken the pan gravy with cornstarch and pour it over the meat and vegetables. Serve all together on a platter and bring to the table. Mustard and currant jam make lovely condiments.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Editor's Note".

- More from Ashley Hales

Corresponding Issue

Christianity Today

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

related

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

related

related

related

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Corresponding Issue

January/February 2025

Share

Share

Related

Share

Share

Related

Corresponding Issue

January/February, 2018