“It was always obvious (or should have been)”

In retrospect, this post is intemperate and vague and needed a prudent editor’s eyes; see my follow-up post where I say why and much more.

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There is a style of punditry, as well as scholarship, that always knows, or in retrospect claims always to have known, something to have been true, and likes to castigate others for having failed to recognize what should have been obvious all along.

The result of this style, or rather its mood, is a cocktail of contempt, condescension, and self-aggrandizement. It’s also, in its breezy confidence and seemingly unbroken rightness, a rhetorical performance of casual omniscience. It makes a principle out of avoiding thought and the difficulty of thinking, because the answer, the right judgment about some thorny issue, was always obvious to me and therefore should have been to you. One pities the fool for not having had his eyes opened until now.

Even though this style is proper to pundits and scholars alike, I associate it most with sports commentary, especially when such commentary is concerned with gambling odds. Listen to someone like Bill Simmons before Sunday’s NFL games, and he, like any other sports fan, has hunches and intuitions and informed predictions. Listen to him after the games, however, and the refrain is the same week after week: “I should have known!” “It was clear the whole time.” “It was obvious.” “Anybody could have guessed it.”

That is, whether he was wrong or right, Simmons, like any rational observer, could and should have known in advance what the outcome was going to be. When he’s right, he’s no genius, because he was always going to be right—he could read the signs (not to say entrails) that foretold the eventuality in question. And when he’s wrong, he was an idiot, because fate never fails, and he should have known better. After all, the fated win or loss, the fated bet with or against the odds, was never contingent; it necessarily happened just as it always would and must. He just failed to read the signs aright.

This, for some reason, is the way too many political pundits and academic scholars interpret world events as well as one another’s writings and findings. “Finally, everyone else caught up to my long-since-established views” is the mood. And that mood is silly, superficial, and small. It’s the way teenage boys talk. Any mature adult, not to mention someone committed to the life of the mind, should have left this behind with adolescence. It’s unbefitting intellectuals and writers. Above all it’s unbefitting Christians who claim to be scholars.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee. It’s not going anywhere, unfortunately, but it can also serve as a useful shortcut for filtering out voices worth paying attention to—or not.

Cover! Title! Blurbs! Pub date! All the details for my next book…

I’m pleased to announce that on February 23 of next year—more or less exactly six months from today—Baker Books will publish The Screen-Free Church: How Pastors Can Diagnose and Resist the Spiritual Costs of Technology. Here is the cover:

The book is available for pre-order now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and Baker.

Here is the publisher’s description:

Our lives are saturated with screens, and digital technology continues to encroach even into our churches.

Brad East argues that resisting this encroachment is a critical task of ministry. Screens sap our attention and drain us of the ability to pray, read, or be still for more than a fleeting moment. In The Screen-Free Church, he reflects on the scope of the problem and offers practical advice for church leaders on reclaiming their congregations, ministries, and worship services—addressing pastors' own relationship with technology as well as their preaching preparation and pastoral care.

The Screen-Free Church will be a lifeline for pastors who want to understand and resist the technological takeover of the church.

And here, without further ado, are the endorsements:

If you have been entrusted with any form of leadership in the church, you must read this book—perhaps not to adopt every one of Brad East’s bracing recommendations, but certainly to grapple with the shape of ministry in a screen-saturated, AI-assisted, post-literate age. I’ve often been asked if I was going to write The Tech-Wise Church, but with this book in the world I don’t have to.

— Andy Crouch, author of The Tech-Wise Family and The Life We’re Looking For

Brad East is a voice crying out in the technological wilderness. In a day when the word “prophetic” is bandied about too easily, this book is actually and truly prophetic—and calls the church back to its prophetic witness. East offers a clarion call to the church to lead in becoming a community of rehumanization. This book is provocative—in the best sort of way. You may find things here you disagree with—but that is the point. These are the conversations we need to be having, the vital disagreements we, as church leaders, must be hashing out. This is the wisdom we should heed. This book is copiously researched and accessible. It is both hopeful and concrete. It is challenging and yet livable.  I want to put it in the hands of every single pastor I know. 

—Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, Prayer in the Night, and What Grows in Weary Lands

The modern church’s approach to the emerging technologies of the digital revolution has basically been to adopt it uncritically, to disastrous effect. Our approach to discernment has been, essentially, “everybody’s doing it.” I.e., no discernment at all. We’re still learning that ‘the medium is the message,’ and for a people whose entire worldview is based on the incarnation of God in Christ, this is a lesson we desperately need to learn in our bones. Brad East has brought his formidable mind and lively heart to the important project of digital discernment. He’s no Luddite, but he offers a clear, compelling, and courageous vision of an incarnational church in a hollow, empty time. I enjoyed this book immensely; I think you will too.

—John Mark Comer, author of Into the Quiet and founder of Practicing the Way 

For Brad East to write something and me not to want to read it, it would have to be marked “Classified” in a government silo. This book is no exception. East looks at one of the most pressing crises for the church and gives us not just a word of “why not” but a word of “what instead of all that.” The book will change the way you see your screens, and will help you to see without them.

—Russell Moore, editor at-large of Christianity Today and the author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America

Christians who are not enthusiasts for every new tech product typically want to be measured in their judgments. They say, “Well, it’s only a tool” or “I’m no Luddite.” Brad East isn’t interested in being measured in his judgments. He doesn’t care whether you call him a Luddite. He is instead trying to follow the logic of the Gospel of Jesus Christ wherever it leads, even (or especially) when it leads to a place that makes people think we’re weirdos. This is an uncompromising book, a wise book, and an immensely practical book. Pastors who want to help their congregations to a better world than the one Silicon Valley is promising will find here excellent guidance on just how to do so.

—Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University

Brad East has given the church a great gift in The Screen-Free Church: a work that rightly treats the question of digital technology as a robustly theological one, and that properly locates theological reflection in the life of the church. Here is a refreshing firmness of conviction, a call to resist conceding Christian doctrine to the pull of the screen.

—Kaitlyn Schiess, author of The Ballot and the Bible and The Liturgy of Politics

This book is a lucid, erudite, approachable guide for church leaders and for those of us in the pews, taking up the topic of screens and technology as a deeper invitation—to refresh our understanding of human nature itself, and to embrace life as the creatures we are, with and without technology. Refusing broad generalities or blanket prescriptions, East is an ideal scholar to think with on this timely topic. He gives us all a sturdy foundation of theological conviction for building lives together, including intentional constraints that limit and thereby liberate.

—Sara Hendren, author of What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World

There might be no greater challenge to Christian faithfulness than the challenge posed by our modern technological environment, and I cannot think of anyone better positioned than Brad East to offer pastors wise and bold counsel as they navigate these challenges with their congregations. East adeptly deploys both the theological riches of the Christian tradition and the resources of a longstanding tradition of technology criticism to help us understand what is at stake in a world structured by digital technology. The costs are high, and the need for sound judgement is urgent. The Church has a remarkable opportunity to offer an alternative and satisfying vision of human flourishing to a world that is exhausted and demoralized by the inhumane patterns of our techno-economic order. So, I urge pastors and ministry leaders to take up and read this book. More to the point, I hope East’s wise, practical, and charitable counsel is heeded.

—L. M. Sacasas, Executive Director, Christian Study Center, Gainesville, Florida

Far too many contemporary churches are plunging toward the obsolescence that awaits content producers. Along the way, they abandon their members to the deformations of what Brad East aptly terms “screentopia.” East has the sanity to recognize the gravity of this crisis, the courage to take a stand, and the levity to know he doesn’t have all the answers. I’m grateful for such a stirring and practical book to commend to pastors and other leaders who want to imagine how to make disciples and build up the household of faith amid the particular challenges of our technological society.

—Jeffrey Bilbro, professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at Front Porch Republic

A vital call to push back on the stories of technological inevitability and on Silicon Valley's powerful sales pitch: that all manner of work, play, study, and prayer must surrender to the digital—for the sake of the future, for the sake of efficiency. Brad East's important and timely book reminds clergy that the answer is found in the spirit and not in the machine.

—Audrey Watters, education technology critic and author of Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning

I wish this book didn't have to exist, but I am so grateful that it does. Brad East unveils, with courage and clarity, the alarming degree to which technology shapes contemporary spiritual conditions--and not for the better. His case is an extraordinarily convincing one. Thankfully, East does not stop at describing our digital impoverishment but points those of us in the Church to the profound and exciting possibilities of a ministry that is emancipated from pixels. An urgent and essential work, in other words, brimming with compassion, practicality, and hope.

—David Zahl, author of Seculosity and The Big Relief

Reading East's book is like opening the window on the first spring day warm enough to get away with it. His advice is an invitation into a bracing, lively world.

—Leah Libresco Sargeant, author of The Dignity of Dependence

The Screen-Free Church is not a cranky piece of analog nostalgia. It's an eloquent, hopeful, and redemptive confession of faith in human ministry. Brad East demonstrates that when we stop ourselves from automatically falling in line with the promises of Big Tech, we (re)discover ways of thinking, teaching, and loving that fill us up instead of burning us out. This is a wonderful book for anyone who loves Jesus' church.

—Samuel D. James, author of Digital Liturgies and Scroll Less, Live More

Even though vigilant against heterodox teachings and deceptive philosophies, many Christians and churches have proven susceptible to more insidious and pervasive distortions of their beliefs and practices occasioned by an uncritical adoption of novel devices. This book is a bracing and timely challenge to pastors to resist and reverse the creeping mediation of the church’s life by screens and other digital technologies. It offers orienting principles and practical steps by which to do so reflectively and effectively, puncturing the myths of inevitability and necessity with which such technologies are surrounded, without advocating reactive Ludditism.

—Alastair Roberts, Professor for Davenant Hall and Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Theopolis Institute

Brad East has great news for Christians: it is not only possible, but necessary and life-giving, to make our churches places where we can be free from the (de)forming power of screens. The journey may be difficult, but we will find the benefits to our prayers and preaching well worth the effort.

—Matthew Loftus, MD, author of Resisting Therapy Culture

It would be impossible to overstate how honored and humbled I am by these endorsements. This book was one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, and it is gratifying to see that some of the thinkers and authors I most admire and respect saw something of value in the finished product.

Much more to come between now and February. But I wanted to finally share the news now that it’s all public and official online. If you are the pre-ordering type, please go ahead and do so. It makes a huge difference, especially for authors (like me) who lack a social media platform. Better still, order copies for your pastor, or for your eldership, or for your church’s lay leadership team! Have me on a podcast to talk about it! I’m sure I’ll be on the pod circuit once the new year arrives.

For now, thanks for reading. I can’t wait for this thing to arrive in the real world.

The future tense of the AI-pilled

Here are the opening paragraphs of my essay in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, “You Don’t Have to Use AI.” I’ve set in bold the relevant sentences I want to emphasize:

With the rise of AI, most people feel compelled to ask: How should I be using it? But this question assumes too much. We should instead be asking: Am I free not to?

The answer is simple: Yes, you are. If you would rather not use AI — if you don’t like it, if you don’t find it useful, if you just aren’t interested in adding it to your digital toolkit — then you are allowed to opt out. There is no imperative to use it. Whatever the eventual costs, it remains perfectly reasonable to hold off for now, perhaps forever.

If this sounds like heresy, that’s because it is. The line we’re being fed, week by week, day by day, is that generative artificial intelligence is comprehensive, transformative, and irresistible. It will touch every aspect of our lives, reshaping them from the inside out. Best, then, to hop on board the train now instead of waiting until it’s too late. God forbid you be left behind.

This type of narrative, sometimes sincere and sometimes propaganda, is perennial. It applies to politics as much as to technology. It says that, because history’s shape is determined by structural changes from the top down, we can know the future before it arrives. For this reason, technologists speak in the future tense. They don’t say “might” or “maybe” or “could,” only “will.” After all, they have visited the future bearing down on us and returned, like prophets, to declare its inevitable arrival.

The paradox, however, is that if the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Here are some paragraphs from the middle of Tyler Cowen’s latest column for The Free Press, “You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing”:

Someday we will feel the same way about text generated with the assistance of AI. We won’t care much where it came from, and much of the time we will not even know. The AI-detection devices, such as Pangram, will no longer work because the AIs will, to the extent we want them to, write just like high-quality human wordsmiths. …

In this new world, books, articles, and Substack posts will appear on a regular basis, as they do today. For a while, people will be trying to sniff out how much AI contributed, using ever more sophisticated detection techniques. But eventually they will give up and simply judge content on its perceived merits. …

There will be so much content to go around, because the AIs can be as prolific as you want them to be. You might prompt the AI to produce writing for your own consumption, as I do already, or rely on AI search bots to find the essays you really care about, as I also do already. The process will be so drenched with AI that, eventually, you will surrender to the notion that the AIs did some of the writing as well. You won’t be able to tell the difference in any case, so you might as well sit back and enjoy what is being served up to you.

Thus spake the technologist: “You will surrender.” Is it a prophecy, a command, or a threat?

My latest: low-tech parenting (in CT) and a review of Burge (in FT)

I’ve got two pieces from the past week to share.

First up is a review of Ryan Burge’s new book in the latest issue of First Things, titled “Mainlining Nostalgia.” I respect and appreciate Burge’s work, and enjoyed his previous three books, but I had issues with this one.

Second is an article for Christianity Today called “Low-Tech Parenting Must Be a Big Tent.” In it I argue for strong judgments about tech without the kind of judgmentalism to which parents are always prone. Let’s be tech fallibilists with heavy doses of tech grace.

My latest: the prosperity gospel of college grads

This week I’m in CT arguing that the prosperity gospel is afoot in upper-middle-class, college-educated Christian circles. It’s not the prosperity gospel you’re used to, though. Instead, it’s a kind of bastardized N. T. Wright for the masses, mediated by well-meaning seminary grads for fellow members of the laptop class. Implicit and sometimes explicit, it calls well-to-do believers to make the world a better place and to stop worrying so much about heaven. When it’s not the social gospel redivivus, when it’s not plain old works righteousness, it’s functionally a permission slip to ignore spiritual things for the sake of earthly things. But forgetfulness of eternity is ultimately avoidance of the gospel, which is never Jesus-plus but Jesus alone. Why? Because the only promise the gospel makes is Jesus.

Read the whole thing here.

My (two) latest: on communion wine and a new epistolary novel, in CT

In the last two weeks I’ve had two articles go up at Christianity Today. The first is called “Jesus Did Not Serve Grape Juice.” It’s an argument that evangelical and other low-church traditions should serve fermented wine in the Lord’s Supper rather than Welch’s grape juice. Thankfully, as I learned from my inbox afterward, everyone is already in perfect agreement about this, so the argument was probably superfluous.

The second piece went up this morning. It’s titled “This ‘Screwtape for Our Times’ Will Challenge and Confound You.” It’s a review of Ross McCullough’s new book The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster. I call it “the best new book you’ll read this year” and “an instant classic of Christian spiritual writing that deserves a wide audience.” It was published today, so order your copy now!

A literary culture left to hermits

In a 1981 book review for Harper’s, Hugh Kenner opens with a block-quoted excerpt from a 1978 essay called “Finding” by Guy Davenport. He then writes the following:

So commences a magical account. The day I first read it, on pages copied from a magazine called Antaeus, I resolved that if it ever appeared in a book of Guy Davenport’s nonfictional writings I would lose no time commending that book to the world. So this review was scheduled when The Geography of the Imagination was announced, and it was not to be aborted by the discovery, when the review copy arrived, that the name on the book’s dedication page was my own. If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits. (Mazes [1989], 67-68)

This, it seems to me, is the first and last word on reviewing books by people you know—whether onetime teachers, erstwhile students, present colleagues, occasional collaborators, academic acquaintances, outright enemies, or longtime friends. You review the book in front of you. You acknowledge a relationship if necessary. You give honor where it is due. You criticize where necessary, with maximal charity and minimal points-scoring. You grow thick skin when your own work is reviewed. You don’t look for special treatment.

And, without question, you participate in what can only be called a patronage system, a necessarily small network of insiders with varying and ever-changing degrees of authority, status, power, and prestige. Checking your naivete at the door, you do your part to keep the system running but also honest. Because the only checks and balances are internal to it; because the integrity of the particular intellectual culture in question is finally only as good as the individuals who compose it, who send off their little missives, who read and write and review with as little bias as possible—knowing that disinterested does not mean uninterested.

And most of all, you get on with your life when the system fails. Such is life.

My latest: on pastors and biomedical ethics, in CT

This morning I have a column in Christianity Today called “So What If the Bible Doesn’t Mention Embryo Screening?” It’s about the kinds of moral and theological questions raised by new technologies that are not directly or explicitly addressed in Scripture, and thus the kinds of intervention and teaching demanded of pastors for the sake of ordinary believers’ guidance in difficult decisions, and the general silence or unpreparedness everywhere in evidence today.

I tried to thread the needle. I’m sure readers will let me know whether or not I succeeded.

Hey, I started a newsletter!

A little over a year ago, at the outset of December 2024, I started a newsletter. I’ve kept it on the down low this year because I wanted to get the hang of it—and I wanted to see whether I’d be able to keep it up.

The goal was simple: A monthly update on my work, with news, announcements, and links to publications, podcasts, and blog posts, plus a round-up of what I’ve been reading. Fortunately, I already had a list of email addresses from my old Blogger site (RIP), and I’d been soliciting readers’ emails at the bottom of this website’s home page since it went live in 2022—although to what end, I’d never decided.

So I sent a sample newsletter last December, then began the monthly schedule in January of this year. This morning I sent my eleventh and final newsletter of 2025. Really it was ten newsletters across twelve thirty-ish day periods, but either way, I’ll call year one a success. The practice has become regular and reliable enough that I feel comfortable advertising it to readers.

So in this season of appeals for money, hear this modest one: Sign up for my (FREE) monthly newsletter today!

If you sign up, you’ll get nothing more or less than a monthly update on my work—amounting, most likely, to ten or so total newsletters per year. Your subscription helps me to reach readers directly in the age of Substack and Twitter (and Instagram and BookTok) and thus enables to me to show publishers that I do, in fact, have an audience.

Sign up below: just add your email address, click the button, and you’ll get the next newsletter in about a month. Beneath the sign-up button I have links to each of last year’s newsletters arranged by month, if you’re curious as to what will be showing up in your inbox.

I’ll repeat once more: If you like my work, subscribe today!

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• January

• February

• March

• April

• May

• June

• July

• August

• October

• November

• December

2025: blogging

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.

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Theology

1. Read together or die alone

2. Evangelical gentrification

3. Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

4. The solas don’t imply each other

5. A statement of faith is not a creed

Technology

1. On the phone with Google

2. Carr, Sacasas, and eloquent reality

3. Robert Farrar Capon on God, matter, wine, and things

4. Browser-less

5. Tech exit, pro and con

Reading, Writing, Academia

1. Three types of Christian higher ed

2. The ten-plus authors club

3. Simon Leys

4. The C. S. Lewis test

TV & Film

1. Toward a definition of Dad TV

2. Scorsese

3. DiCaprio

4. “Another great year for movies”

5. CGI animals

6. Wake Up Dead Man (—> more thoughts)

My latest: Christmas (in CT) and Kingsnorth (in Commonweal)

Merry Christmas Eve!

I’ve got two final pieces to share for the year 2025. The first is a reflection in Christianity Today on what the birth of Christ reveals to us about God; the second is a review in Commonweal of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine.

The former, in more detail, is a meditation on how the incarnation, especially in Bethlehem, shows us the classical divine attributes, rather than their converse. The latter is an appreciation of Kingsnorth’s thought, work, and writing over the years, proposing his particular combination of essays, poems, and fiction as a worthy successor to Wendell Berry—before concluding with a negative verdict on the book itself. I love Kingsnorth, but in the end the book doesn’t work. I’ll read the next one though. And I’m glad it’s expanded his reach to a new and wider audience. I’m especially excited for a new novel, should it come.

2025: writing

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.

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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.

The C. S. Lewis Test

I’ve written before about the need for American evangelicals to press the pause button on their love affair with C. S. Lewis, and in particular for American evangelical writers to take a break from quoting Lewis as well as a dozen other big names like Chesterton, Tolkien, Guinness, Chambers, Schaeffer, Henry, Graham, Kuyper, Piper, Keller, Stott, Packer, and Machen. Not because they’re not worth reading, learning from, or excerpting, but because their prominence in Protestant writing is so prominent that it crowds out other voices. More to the point, focusing overmuch on these figures—lionizing them, quoting and re-quoting them, treating them like the only doctors and saints the church has to offer or learn from—fails to learn the first lesson one ought to take from their example, namely, their vast erudition and mastery of fields and authors not themselves. I call this “aping the Inklings.” And we should cut it out, myself included.

Having said that, I’ve realized over the years that, when I’m reading non-evangelicals or non-Christians, I find myself unconsciously applying to them a kind of inverted test. Call it the C. S. Lewis Test. It is what it sounds like: I want to know whether the author in question, if he or she lived and wrote in the last seventy-five years, appreciates Lewis’s work. By “appreciates” I do not mean “is a fan of,” much less “worships at the feet of.” I mean, simply, “appreciates.” Lewis is renowned for a reason. He was a wonderful stylist, a sharp thinker, and a medieval scholar. He wrote poems, allegories, novels, children’s stories, essays, reviews, academic monographs, and apologetics. The man had, and has, much to edify anyone with an open mind, on any number of subjects. He was catholic and ecumenical in his tastes, his friends, his topics. I’m thinking, for example, of his late (recorded and transcribed) conversation with Kingsley Amis on the subject of science fiction. These two writers couldn’t have been more different. But you can sense each of them feeling the other out, poking, jabbing, teasing, querying. And each man comes out unscathed, with, I take it, a measure of respect for the other.

So, as I say, when I read someone—anyone—writing since World War II, if I read much of his or her work, I wait for the choice Lewis quote, the unapologetic citation, the sly allusion. If the writer is worthy of respect, be he pagan or skeptic or anything else, it usually comes. You don’t have to love Narnia to appreciate his criticism, or to like his Space Trilogy to value his writing on education, or to share his faith to take his philosophy seriously. And it also tells me the writer in question isn’t ashamed to quote someone as popular or ostensibly middlebrow as Lewis, as if associating with a writer that evangelicals love might sully one’s reputation with readers who matter. It tells me, in other words, that the writer cares more about truth, style, or both than about superficial appearances. And that’s enough to win over this reader.

Simon Leys

2025 was the year I discovered Simon Leys.

The discovery came in the Regent College bookstore in Vancouver. The book was The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays. I’m a sucker for essay collections; this one was a NYRB Classics edition; it was big and hefty and the topics were gloriously wide ranging.

Somehow I’d never heard of Leys’ name. For the fellow uninitiated, “Simon Leys” is the pen name for Pierre Ryckmans (1935–2014), a Belgian essayist, novelist, translator, and scholar of Chinese literature, art, and calligraphy. He read, spoke, and wrote in French, English, and Chinese. His 1971 book about Mao was a bombshell in the playground of the postmodern French intellectuals—it woke everyone up to the unvarnished truth of the Cultural Revolution. He lived and taught for decades in Australia as a professor. He won a raft of awards, had a novel adapted into a film, and wrote gorgeous prose about everything under the sun. He was also Roman Catholic.

Above all, Leys was a man of letters. To read him is to be inducted into another world, the world of literature, a world made of books, words, and the men and women who write them. Yes, history and politics enter in, but it’s the words that matter, the selection of which words in what order to what end. The man knew style because he possessed it himself.

Simon Leys was a man of principle who did not flinch from criticizing living dictators, “China experts,” and academics full of hot air. He was a moralist who refused to moralize and an aesthete who believed in truth. He had no compunction about calling pundits’ and intellectuals’ bluff, as in his extraordinary reviews, respectively, of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Mother Teresa and of Edward Said’s Orientalism. (The final sentence of the latter review: “It is nice to see that Said is now rediscovering such a basic notion; I only deplore that it took him 300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe to reach at last one sound and fundamental truism.”)

Reading writers like Leys is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a gust of wind at your back. It shows you your own moral and intellectual cowardice, not to mention the absolute void that is your learning compared to such a man. But far from enervating, the epiphany empowers. It’s a call and therefore a calling: This life, the writing life, the life of the mind in the life of letters, is possible. Don’t give up, not yet.

“There is no sublunary topic,” Leys wrote, “on which Samuel Johnson did not, at some time, issue a pithy and definitive statement.” You could say the same about Simon Leys. He was that good. I’m grateful to have discovered his voice, and through his so many others.

Why I’ve not been blogging

I’ve just been too busy. That’s the reason.

There are other reasons, or reasons behind the reasons. For instance, my sabbatical from teaching lasted from May 2024 to August 2025—a full sixteen months away from the classroom. During that time, I published two books, drafted a third, and kept up a publishing schedule of two to four essays/reviews per month. On top of that I did dozens of podcasts, mostly publicity for the books, but also more regular fare for Mere Fidelity. And I began traveling more than I ever have before, giving talks and lectures at colleges, conferences, and churches.

And then I returned to the classroom, without slowing any of that down. You can imagine how that went. September and October formed an airtight bottleneck of deadlines I barely met and in some cases did not. I’m out of that now, and mostly I’m recovering.

The obvious point is that I can’t keep up a sabbatical schedule of commitments while teaching a full course load of undergraduate classes. I was foolish to try to combine them without giving something up.

More than that, I’ve simply realized that in the 40-45 hours I give to work each week, besides teaching, grading, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with students, I have time for the following (in order):

1. Email

2. Reading

3. Writing

4. Podcasts

“Blogging” is distinct, because writing means either paid work or academic work that will pay for itself later, in other currency. If I have a spare moment to write—for that matter, if I have even the germ of an idea for anything that could be written of interest to others—then I’m going to give it to an essay, a review, an article, or a book manuscript. I can micro blog because it takes mere seconds, and I never develop anything essay-like over there. Here at the mezzo blog, by contrast, it’s difficult to justify the time, even 15-20 minutes’ worth. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, which means that I’d always (without exception!) be better off reading than blogging. But in that case, as I’ve discovered in practice, the blogging will go by the wayside entirely.

What does that mean, then? For one, it means that I remain secure in my decision to stay off social media; for another, it means that I won’t be joining the Substack cinematic universe anytime soon. From the bottom of my heart I do not understand how anyone—by which I mean writers and academics—even owns an account on these platforms, much less gives them the time of day. If that were me, I would accomplish literally nothing: I would write nothing, read nothing, and do nothing but scroll, half-reading “notes” and tweets and suchlike, intermittently, in every nook and cranny of my days.

Since I would like to read and write, when I’m not doing other things, it stands to reason that I should stay off. So I will. Having said that, I’m going to give mezzo blogging one more try between Thanksgiving week and the New Year. If there’s just no way to squeeze it in, then this space may be reduced semi-permanently to a ghost town of occasional announcements and little more. If so, so be it. But I do love blogging, and I especially love reading others’ blogging, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t make it work again.

In the coming weeks, then, expect more posts. And if they don’t appear, then you’ll know what I’ll have already learned: in this season of life, there’s just no time for it.

My latest: del Toro’s Frankenstein, in CT

This past Tuesday Christianity Today published my review of Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The title is “In Netflix’s ‘Frankenstein,’ Monster Is More Compelling Than Maker,” with the following subheading: “The Guillermo del Toro adaptation brings unique perspective—but fails to match the depth of its source material.” That’s a fair representation of the review, which is critical of the film but appreciative of some of its virtues, not least Jacob Elordi’s performance and some of del Toro’s marvelous compositions. The last lines of the review sums up my theological take, too.

I must say I love the opportunity to moonlight as a film critic for CT. The original review I submitted was basically a cinematic recap of del Toro’s entire filmography, some of which remains in the final version. Turns out I got multiple degrees in theology and a job as a tenured professor just so I could finally fulfill my heart’s desire as a teenage cinephiliac: to get paid to write about the movies. What a life.

My latest (four): radicals, connectors, gods, and devils

I had four pieces come out in the last month, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t even posted links to the blog. Apologies all. One of my goals for 2027 is to back into the blogging game; all my time for writing and editing has gone to paid pieces, so it’s hard to justify more time here. In any case, here are the relevant links:

• “You Don’t Have To Be Radical” (CT, October 7) is a fun little autobiographical ode to the evangelical aughts and the perennial dynamic of young Christians who get it in their heads that there’s only one way to follow Jesus: by being “radical.”

• “The Connector” (Arc, October 9) is a profile of the wonderful Leah Libresco Sargeant, timed to the release of her excellent new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, published in October with the University of Notre Dame Press. Thanks to editor extraordinaire Mark Oppenheimer for getting me to do this, or rather letting me try my hand at it as a non-journalist first-timer.

• “Keeping the Faith” (Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23) is a review essay of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, published in October with Yale University Press. My first time in the Review.

• Finally, the academic journal Modern Theology posted an early-access online version of my review of Philip Ziegler’s new book God’s Adversary and Ours: A Brief Theology of the Devil, which came out in September with Baylor University Press.

My latest (six): UFOs, leftists, Hitler, Scripture, doctrine, and PSA

I’ve been remiss of late, not sharing links to my latest pieces when they go up. I’ve had six essays or reviews published since August 7, the last time I posted on this blog. Here’s a quick round-up of links:

• “Lexicon for the Phenomenon” is in the latest issue of The Hedgehog Review, and is no longer paywalled. It’s about UFOs, or rather, how we talk about UFOs in public, and the ways theology can shed some terminological light on ufology.

• “Hating Hitler Is Not Enough” (CT, August 12) is my review of Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. The book is very good—indeed, welcome and opportune—but the final two chapters, in which Ryrie gives advice to conservatives and progressives, left me underwhelmed.

• “The Bible Is About Jesus—but Not Jesus Without His Bride” (CT, August 26) is my review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture. Wonderfully written and engaging and Lutheran in the best way—but almost completely devoid of the church, both as an encompassing liturgical-sacramental context for the hearing of Scripture and as the corporate communal human agent for the writing of Scripture. Alan thought I was unfair, but I leave you to be the judge.

• “The Way We Debate Atonement Is a Mess” (CT, September 16) is my attempt to arbitrate between pro- and anti-PSA Christians, who very rarely either argue well or even get each other’s views right. I’m not much of a PSA-er myself, but nine times out of town I’m unimpressed by the anti-PSA brigade: its posture uncharitable, its rhetoric overheated, its arguments overcooked. Then again, neither are pro-PSA folks faultless in these debates. So I say: Let’s argue better—as Christians.

• “Politics for Losers” is in the latest issue of First Things, paywalled for now but not for long. It’s my review of Phil Christman’s new book Why Christians Should Be Leftists. I see that Phil has read it and isn’t angry but isn’t sure whether he’ll reply. While he holds us in suspense, check out some other reviews of the book by Matthew Loftus, Todd Shy, Adam Roberts (paywalled for me), and (not yet published, but forthcoming in Mere Orthodoxy) Bonnie Kristian.

• Finally, The Heythrop Journal published my review of Frances M. Young’s two-volume Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. If you know Young, you already know how fortunate we are that we have these two works of extraordinary patristic scholarship. I’ll close this post with the paragraph that opens the review:
  
  Midway through her ninth decade of life, after nearly sixty years of prolific and wide-ranging scholarship, Frances Young offers us, if not a parting gift, then a fitting one: a two-volume summative account of Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity. At around 650 pages total, and running from Justin Martyr to Theodoret of Cyrus, or the roughly 300 years from the middle of the second century through to the middle of the fifth, this single work is the capstone to an extraordinary career. The books, articles, and accolades are too many to count. I pause here at the outset, then, instead of waiting until the end, to register my thanks and not a little awe. Young has not only deepened scholarly understanding of early Christianity in all its vast complexity. She has built up the people of God. Would that all of us could say the same.

My latest: gentiles and the Torah, in CT

Earlier this week Christianity Today published my latest article, called “Put Down the Shofar.” Bluntly stated, it’s a call for gentile Christians to stop cosplaying as observant Jews. It’s written much more gently than that, though. Here’s how it opens:

One day a student approached me after class with an urgent question. The course was on the doctrine of the church, and we’d spent a few weeks on Abraham, Israel, and the law of Moses. Some years back, my student’s family left a mainstream congregation to found a house church which sought to be more like the Christian communities in the Book of Acts. Though Gentiles, they began observing Jewish customs and celebrating the festivals commanded by Moses, including Passover.

My student asked me earnestly, “Were we wrong?” This small church was trying to heed the admonition of James to “be doers of the word,” following “the perfect law, the law of liberty” (1:22–25, RSV throughout). And their logic was impeccable: The Torah (the Hebrew word for the law of Moses) is God’s Word for God’s people. Baptized Gentiles are members of God’s people; therefore, they ought to obey these commands.

The question is not a trivial one, nor is it obscure in American Christian life. You’re likely familiar with shofars blown in public, Seder meals for Passover, and circumcision for baby boys. But as common and well-intended as these may be, I want to explain why I told my student that, yes, his house church was wrong—or at least, misguided. The New Testament is not silent on the question of Gentile observance of the law of Moses. And its answer is a firm no.

Read the rest here.

My latest: a review of American Heretics, in LARB

I’m in the Los Angeles Review of Books today with a review of Jerome Copulsky’s American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order. Here are the opening paragraphs:

CHRISTIANITY HAS NEVER been certain of its place in the United States. True, from the beginning, it has been more or less acknowledged as the state religion. In fact, the nation’s frontier spirit seized the faith and multiplied it a hundredfold: in the time between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln alone, the former colonies sprung forth Methodists, Mormons, Adventists, and Stone-Campbellites. The US is infamous for its energetic, fissiparous, and entrepreneurial religiosity, a religiosity essentially Protestant in style, if not always in substance.

At the same time, the Constitution is conspicuous in its failure to mention Christ, scripture, or even a generic deity. The government is said to derive its powers from the consent of the governed, not from any transcendent source. The voice of the people supersedes, or perhaps constitutes, the mandate of heaven. Lacking formal establishment or official preeminence, therefore, American Christians have had to rely on the ambient culture, social activism, voting, and sheer numbers to maintain a dominant presence in public affairs. Anxiety about the decline of that presence is itself a long-running measure of Christian involvement in, acceptance of, and alienation from the American project.

It is this third category, the politically alienated, that forms the subject of Jerome E. Copulsky’s recent book American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order (2024). Specifically, Copulsky considers seven groups of Christians who have dissented from the American consensus, in part or in whole. Some rejected democracy; others, disestablished religion; still others, liberal modesty with respect to human nature and the common good. All of them marshaled arguments and movements to reform, repair, renew, or replace the given constitutional order. Copulsky calls his book a “heresiography” of the individuals, ideas, and institutions dedicated to these aims, since they understood themselves to be “theological-political adversaries of the American order” and, thus, “American heretics.” Having departed from political orthodoxy, they stood under liberal anathema. They stand there still.

Click here to read the rest.