Resident Theologian
About the Blog
2025: out of touch
On waking up to the realization that I am out of touch with pop culture.
A few things came together in 2025 that finally certified something I’d not quite realized: I’m officially out of touch. With pop culture, that is. With pop culture that is popular with teens and twentysomethings, to be precise.
First, I turned forty. Second, I deleted the web browser from my phone. Third, I’ve not been on Twitter or Facebook in years, and I’ve never been on Instagram or TikTok. Fourth, I don’t have YouTube on my phone—I did not, until a couple years back, realize that YouTube “was” an app to have on one’s phone, akin to email or ESPN or Spotify—and on my laptop I don’t power-use it for videos, news, podcasts, or entertainment. For men my age I’m probably in the bottom ten percent of YouTube users: I go to it for how to fix something in my house or car, or to watch a new movie trailer. Occasionally a friend sends a link. That’s about it. Besides those incidental uses (not even purposeful, just the fact of the matter), YouTube might as well not exist for me.
On top of all that, even though I’m fairly well versed in movies in general, and in TV to an extent, I don’t actually watch that much newly released material. I know more about David Lean or David Lynch than I do the latest prestige HBO or Netflix series. And if it’s an arthouse film, nine times out of ten I’ll see it, if I ever do, months or years after its release date.
Although all this is a wonderfully welcome development—being out of touch is a happy place to inhabit—it’s relatively new for me. Growing up, I was always “in the know.” I subscribed to magazines and read pop culture websites with religious zeal. I hated to feel out of the loop.
Now, because my children are Gen Alpha, my students are Gen Z, and a few of my Millennial friends aren’t out of touch, I find more and more that I have to respond to references, allusions, and topics of conversation with a simple “I don’t know who that is.” And I love it. I’m fading ever more out of any kind of active awareness of “youth” popular culture, somewhat by choice, mostly by circumstance. It’s purging me of silliness by the day.
Just this year, for example:
I saw the name “SZA” and, in front of in-the-know others, pronounced it phonetically by saying each letter in a row. I was swiftly corrected.
I was also educated about who Sydney Sweeney is, since I (still) have never seen her in an actual film or TV show. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe I should see how long the streak can last?
A friend referred to someone called “Theo Vonn.” Never heard of him. Another mentioned someone called “Michael Knowles.” Ditto. Neither friend could believe my ignorance. It’s sincere! They filled me in, but I’ve already forgotten what they said.
I’ve never listened to Joe Rogan. I do know he’s popular. Good for him!
Just this week I asked a room full of adults: “Who is ‘Ms. Rachel’?” They looked at me with astonishment. The question was honest! Never heard of her.
I’m told there are members of the Kardashian clan—I do know who they are—whose last name is not Kardashian. I did not know who they were, or that they existed. I also did not know what was most important, namely, who they were dating.
What TV shows have I not watched, am I not watching? The Bear, House of the Dragon, Fallout, Industry, Bridgerton, Task, White Lotus, Paradise, The Last of Us, Hacks, The Studio, Shrinking, Landman, Shogun, Adolescence, The Rehearsal, The Chair Company, The Righteous Gemstones, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nobody Wants This, Presumed Innocent—and all the others I don’t know enough to list. I have no plans to give time to these shows, and if I do, it’ll be because I think they’ll repay it, not because doing so will provide a boost in social cachet.
If my life depended on identifying even one under-thirty female pop star I would almost certainly die on the spot.
Even in the realm of politics, with which I keep up mostly through reading and somewhat through podcasts, I find myself increasingly adrift. Reading Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News had a lasting impact on me. Friends are referencing “breaking” news items—names, events, scandals—and I’m discovering the pleasures of a blank face in response.
In sum, the circumference of my world is contracting significantly, and I’ve never felt better. All our knowledge has limits, and I’ve been been one of Tyler Cowen’s so-called “infovores” for far too long. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for me. It’s not what any of us were made for. I have a wife, children, friends, neighbors, parents, brothers, nephews, nieces, godchildren, mentors, students, and colleagues. I read and write books and essays for a living. My chosen field is theology, than which nothing could be further from Zoomer pop culture relevance. Given a choice, I’d rather know more about Saint Irenaeus or Nicholas of Cusa or Homer or Confucius or Fr. Huc or Pascal or P. D. James or Second-Temple Judaism or Hesychasm than about (let me Google real quick) Olivia Rodrigo, Olivia Dean, Billie Eilish, or Chappell Roan.
My life is full, in other words, and its fullness is threatened, not expanded, by taking time I lack to snack on pop culture’s perpetual empty calories.
The danger for the old (for those getting older) is that this loss of organic in-touch-ness is felt as a loss. It’s not. To be sure, the lie of our culture is that “everyone” of a certain age is intimately familiar with pop culture, when that notion is far from the truth. Plenty of home-schooled and religiously conservative Zoomers have no idea who any of these people are: they don’t watch them on TikTok or YouTube, they don’t listen to them in the car, they don’t stream their shows or movies. And others, who do engage in all those media, don’t care. Instead, they like sports, or epic fantasy novels, or restoring old cars, or playing endless hours of MMORPGs. There is no generic default Gen Z twenty-five-year-old. We do not have a monoculture, if we ever did.
Nonetheless it can feel like we did, and we do, and that it is therefore a loss to be out of touch with it. But as I say, it is not a loss, for three simple reasons. First, you can’t know everything, and it isn’t worth trying. Second, you should like what you like, what seems good or desirable or beautiful in itself, not to an imaginary younger digital neighbor. Why outsource your enjoyments to the undeveloped tastes of the immature and foolish? Chasing relevance is an exercise in the worst kind of Zeitgeist swift-widowhood.
Third and finally, youth-obsessed pop culture is intrinsically and necessarily superficial. It’s good to be released from its appeal, even if against your will. It’s good not to know. It’s good to be out of touch. It’s a kind of freedom. The easiest way to achieve it is technological: the more apps, platforms, and devices you delete or remove from your life, the less likely “the latest thing” will find you. You’ll move, ever so slowly, from faux knowledge to happy ignorance.
It happened to me. I woke up and I … just … didn’t know what was going on around me. Like a man startled out of a coma, I was delivered into a sort of ambient cultural apophasis. And from now on my aim is to keep it that way.
2025: pods, talks, travel, etc.
A rundown of travel, talks, and podcasts in the past year.
This year I traveled more for work more than I ever have in the past. I gave talks, lectures, classes, and at least one sermon in five different states (Florida, Washington, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas), plus another country (Canada). I also got to spend a week in Pittsburgh, my first time, for a mix of a grant meeting at Grove City College and a retreat for CT writers near Carnegie Mellon. And besides the travel, I recorded a total of twenty-one podcasts, thirteen of which were for Mere Fidelity.
The coming year looks to have more of the same: on top of stops in and around the great state of Texas—including Laity Lodge!—I’ll be in North Carolina, New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Colorado, plus a pilgrimage abroad with friends. The pods will continue (although we’re on a bit of a hiatus right now). And in a happy development, we (i.e., the fam) have begun checking off national parks: Big Bend in 2023; Rocky Mountain, Zion, and Grand Canyon in 2024; and Wind Cave, Grand Tetons, and Glacier in 2025—with Carlsbad, Tetons (again), and Yellowstone set for 2026.
I don’t think we’ll ever top this summer’s trip, though. In August, one week before our kids went back to school, we pulled into town on the last of a fourteen-day road trip north-northwest, in which we hit a total of ten states, plus the Canadian side of Glacier. (Having never been to Canada before, I visited three times between October 2024 and August 2025: Toronto, Vancouver, and Alberta.)
In short, what a year! What a few years. And God willing, it’ll be another great one.
Head over to the podcast page for a complete list of episodes, with the most recent ones first. And below, in order, are the talks and lectures I gave by location and date.
“Spiritual Formation in a Digital Age,” University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, February 12, 2025.
“From Scripture to Scrolling: How to Be a Christian in a Digital World,” Whitworth University, Spokane, WA, February 19, 2025.
“Anxious Generations,” Memorial Road Church of Christ, Edmond, OK, March 5, 2025.
“Why the Church is the Reason God Created the Universe,” The Church of St. John the Divine, Houston, TX, April 9, 2025.
“Digital Discipleship in an AI-Driven World,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene, TX, June 4, 2025.
“The Future of Catechesis of the Bible in Churches of Christ” and “Response to Reviews of The Church,” Christian Scholars’ Conference, Abilene, TX, June 5, 2025.
“The Sanctuary of the Spirit of God,” Regent College, Vancouver, Canada, June 10, 2025.
“A Theological Case for Techno-Pessimism,” online webinar, Chesterton House at Cornell University, October 27, 2025.
“Lessons for Figural Reading from Saint Thomas on Isaiah,” plenary lecture, conference on Saint Thomas’s commentary on Isaiah, Mundelein Seminary, Mundelein, IL, November 7, 2025.
2025: blogging
A round-up of the (meager) offerings this year on the blog.
This year I published a total of forty-two blog posts (at least before I started doing my 2025 recaps), exactly half of which were nothing more than links to pieces published elsewhere. In other words, across twelve months I wrote a whopping number of twenty-one “real” posts for this blog, by far the fewest since re-starting it in the summer of 2017, when I moved to Abilene to start teaching.
By comparison, I published eighty-three blog posts in 2024, seventy in 2023, and just over one hundred in 2022. That’s a continuous, steady, sizable drop!
Moreover, I blogged a respectable eight times between January and March, then—besides a single post on July 3—I did not write up a new “real” blog post (=more than a link to an essay published elsewhere) until the week of Thanksgiving. That post is called: “Why I’ve Not Been Blogging.”
In short, between April and November this blog nearly died, y’all.
Since Thanksgiving, however, I’ve posted more than a dozen times, and I feel like I’ve gotten my groove back. Part of that is because my bottleneck of commitments and deadlines finally opened up, and I gained some more time for unpaid, purposeless, free-form writing. Part of it, too, is that I recommitted myself to blogging, even if not a soul on earth reads it. It’s just good for me to get some of these half-baked ideas out of my head, if not out into other heads, whether they’re about movies or authors or tech or church. As I’ve said many times, the micro blog is for micro blogging (not tweeting) and essays and reviews are for long-form, “official” writing, which leaves this space for mezzo blogging. I just need to give it twenty minutes a day and it’ll take care of itself.
I hope and expect more of the same in 2026. Below you’ll find links to what little I did write here in the past twelve months.
*
Theology
Technology
Reading, Writing, Academia
TV & Film
2025: writing
A rundown of what I published in 2025.
As best I can tell, I published thirty total pieces this year: three in academic journals, twelve essays and reviews in ten different magazines, and fifteen columns for Christianity Today. That comes to about two and a half per month, or a little over one every other week.
That number’s going to come down in 2026. It’s the result of a sixteen-month sabbatical from teaching, and it doesn’t even count the talks and lectures, the travel, the podcasts, and the things I wrote that won’t be published for another month or two. Plus the grant application, and the book proposal, and the …, and the …
In a word, I over-committed heading back into the fall semester, and I’m intentionally trying to cut back as the spring approaches. We’ll see if I’m successful.
For now, here’s what I wrote in 2025.
*
Academic
“Stephen Fowl and Theological Interpretation: Retrospect and Prospect,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 19:1 (2025): 130–36. Link here.
Frances M. Young, Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Vol. 1 (Scripture, the Genesis of Doctrine) and Vol. 2 (Scripture in Doctrinal Dispute), in The Heythrop Journal 66:6 (2025): 654–656. Link here.
Philip G. Ziegler, God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, in Modern Theology (forthcoming). Early access here.
Essays and Reviews
A Future Worthy of Life (Mere Orthodoxy, 7 January 2025). Reflections on Houellebecq, decadence, and dystopian fiction, with an assist from P. D. James.
How to Raise Readers, in Thirty-Five Steps (Front Porch Republic, 31 January 2025). What it sounds like. In my view, my “funnest” piece of the year.
Generation Autodidact (Mockingbird, 12 February 2025). In which I admit how little I’ve read, and try not to be embarrassed about it.
Luddite Pedagogy (Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 April 2025). There are dozens of us!
Goldilocks Protestantism (First Things, 4 April 2025). Probably my most-read piece of the year, at least based on feedback from friends, emails from strangers, and essays written in response to it.
Low Church in High Places (The Public Discourse, 21 May 2025). A follow-up or companion piece to the First Things essay on Protestantism.
Lexicon for the Phenomenon (The Hedgehog Review, 3 July 2025). My aliens essay. This one didn’t seem to get the traction I’d hoped it would. Oh well.
The Stickiness of Religion (The Lamp, 11 July 2025). My attempt to be just to a good book while skeptical of some of the methodological assumptions of the author’s academic discipline.
No Love Lost for Heretics (Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 July 2025). Come for the summaries, stay for the criticisms.
Politics for Losers (First Things, September 2025). If I had to choose, I think this is the best written thing I published this year. I’m happy that, even though Phil disagreed with most of my criticisms, he thought it was fair.
The Connector (Arc, 9 October 2025). This is the one I worked on the hardest. Turns out profiles aren’t easy! With help, I think it turned out all right.
Keeping the Faith (Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 October 2025). This one seemed to vanish into the mist, but I’m really proud of it. A tough book to review.
Christianity Today
A Little Book About a Little Word That Contains the World (4 February 2025). A review of Wesley Hill’s book about Easter.
Ross Douthat Bets on Belief (11 February 2025). A review of Douthat’s book on religion.
Baptism Is Not Optional (18 March 2025). A 3,000-word invitation to evangelicals to have a higher, sacramental view of baptism.
Christians Are Conspiracy Theorists (2 April 2025). An attempted intervention in the conspiracy theory discourse.
How Dude Perfect Won Me Over (28 April 2025). A fun little candy bar of a column.
Finally, a Tech Book That Doesn’t Pull Punches (3 June 2025). A review of Clare Morell’s new book on teens and smartphones.
Just Say No to Online Church (10 June 2025). A critical review of a new book commending hybrid worship. Probably the most negative thing I’ve ever written.
The God Who Must Not Be Named (1 July 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to stop enunciating YHWH aloud in Christian worship and preaching.
Put Down the Shofar (4 August 2025). A plea for gentile Christians to cease and desist from ethno-religious cosplay.
Hating Hitler Is Not Enough (12 August 2025). A review of Alec Ryrie’s new book.
The Bible Is About Jesus—But Not Jesus Without His Bride (26 August 2025). A review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book on Scripture.
The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess (16 September 2025). An effort at mediating the PSA wars. I think it threads the needle, but I leave that to others.
You Don’t Have to Be Radical (7 October 2025). A letter to my younger self. I’m not a funny writer, but one line in here made my editor laugh out loud.
In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker (11 November 2025). A review of Guillermo del Toro’s new film.
In Bethlehem, God Chose What Is Weak to Shame the Strong (16 December 2025). A reading of Christmas as a revelation of classical divine attributes.
2025: reading
A recap of my year in reading.
This is my fifth annual post recapping my year in reading. If you go back and read past year-end posts (see 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021), you’ll see an annual theme: frustration that I can’t seem to break past a certain limit of books read per year. I’d like to be in the 120-160 range, but I find myself stuck at 80-120. In line with that trend, I read fewer books this year than any in the last fifteen years—and I didn’t teach until September! If I can’t read more in a year like this, I’ll never do it; or so it feels, at any rate.
Maybe if I just stop setting the goal, it’ll happen on its own. Or not. Oh well.
As for what I did read, it was another eclectic year. Fiction was low, but the tech and nonfiction genres held some real highlights. I continue making discoveries of magnificent authors I’d never even heard of before. In that spirit I hope this list might introduce other readers to some of them for the first time as well.
(A reminder: The following is not a list of all that I read this year, just the books I enjoyed the most, organized by category.)
*
Poetry
Next to nothing, except for Virgil’s Eclogues and Wendell Berry’s This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems (2013).
Fiction
8. Mick Herron, Clown Town (2025). A good back half, and an unexpected ending, but I’m starting to sour on (reading) this series. More thoughts here.
7. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992). I did not “like” this book—no more than I “liked” Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)—but I’m glad I read it, and no one can deny Stephenson’s prescience.
6. P. D. James, The Taste for Death (1986). It’s not a complete year without one more Adam Dalgleish mystery crossed through. At this rate I won’t have any more James to read once I hit my fifties. I guess I’ll have to re-read them all!
5. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021). This one crushed me.
4. Robin Sloan, Moonbound (2024). A continuous pleasant surprise from start to finish.
3. Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (1979). My final read of the year, but a pure delight so far.
2. Ted Chiang, Story of Your Life and Others (2002) + Exhalation: Stories (2019).
1. George Saunders, The Tenth of December: Stories (2013). My first. Not my last.
Christian (popular)
8. Myles Werntz, Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century (2025).
7. Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus (2025). Review here. I read not only Wes’s book but also the rest of the published series so far, all of which are wonderful.
6. Ross Douthat, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (2025). Review here.
5. Jonathan Linebaugh, The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture (2025). Review here.
4. David I. Smith, Everyday Christian Teaching: A Guide to Practicing Faith in the Classroom (2025). Smith’s sterling reputation had me suspicious, but he overcame my doubts. A lovely read.
3. John W. Kleinig, The Lord’s Supper: A Guide to the Heavenly Feast (2025).
2. Leah Libresco Sargeant, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025). Review and profile here.
1. Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness (2025). I read this in galley form before 2025, but I couldn’t count it last year, since it hadn’t come out yet. So I’ve revised this post on Christmas Eve to update my rankings accordingly. Read my blurb here.
Theology (academic)
8. John F. Boyle, Aquinas on Scripture: A Primer (2023). A model of lucid explanatory prose; it helped immensely as I read through Saint Thomas’s Commentary on Isaiah for the first time this fall.
7. Jonathan Rowlands, Befriending Scripture: Sideways Glances at a Theology of Reading (2025). Blurb here.
6. Ryan Darr, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism (2023).
5. Philip Ziegler, God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil (2025). Review here.
4. Frances Young, Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Volumes 1-2 (2023–24). Review here.
3. David Bentley Hart, The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology (2025) + Lewis Ayres, Christological Hellenism: A Melancholy Proposal (2024).
2. Judith Wolfe, The Theological Imagination: Perception and Interpretation in Life, Art, and Faith (2024). Theological scholarship at the top of its class. Wolfe is among the best “younger” theologians writing today.
1. Paul T. Sloan, Jesus and the Law of Moses: The Gospels and the Restoration of Israel within First-Century Judaism (2025) + Jason A. Staples, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites (2024). I love good biblical scholarship, and these two volumes are outstanding; read them as a pair and they’re even better.
Technology
9. Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Thread of Big Tech (2017).
8. John Dyer, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture (2022).
7. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (2025). I’m anti-anti-Klein and anti-anti-abundance. I don’t get the vitriol or the mockery.
6. Clare Morell, The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones (2025). Review here.
5. Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (2020).
4. Matthew Ball, The Metaverse: Building the Spatial Internet (2025). Ball is way too credulous, even a hype man, but he’s also an expert surveyor, synthesizer, and hand-holder.
3. Tom Bissell, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (2010). I secretly love to read video game criticism, and no one’s better than Bissell. But so far neither he nor anyone else has persuaded me to take it seriously as an art form except theoretically. Maybe one day I’ll be won over. Either way, these essays were worth the time.
2. Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2018).
1. David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2019). I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Just read it. No account of digital or any other contemporary technology is complete without the story or the framework he offers here.
Nonfiction
10. Ryan P. Burge, The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future (2025). Review here.
9. Alec Ryrie, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (2025). Review here.
8. Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Square (2000). A lesser Hitch collection, but I continue to plod slowly through his back catalog.
7. Wolfgang Streeck, Critical Encounters: Capitalism, Democracy, Ideas (2020). A powerful and challenging read. I’ve got more Streeck on the docket.
6. Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1979).
5. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (1990). None of Berry’s essay collections is a dud, but this one is particularly special.
4. C. S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (1966). Ditto.
3. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (c. 1800).
2. P. D. James, A Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (1999). A beautiful book from my favorite stylist. She is the very best.
1. Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (2013) + The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (1983). A revelation. More here.