Listen to The Snake Made Us Human: Joe Gordon on Fear, Scripture, and Creation

Yet it is also not uncommon for believers to experience times when God seems remote—distant, hidden—perhaps the feeling is that God is out of reach.

Have you ever felt that way? It can be a troubling experience, especially for those who are attached to the feelings that come from a sense of God’s closeness.

So what do you do when you’re in such a spiritual season?

1.) Do not despair.

The first thing to note is that this is a common experience—even for the most ardent and faithful. See Mother Teresa. Teresa of Ávila. John of the Cross. And other faithful ones and mystics. They often speak of “dark nights of the soul,” or moments of spiritual dryness. You are in good company.

2.) Realize that God is beyond our reach.

God is ineffable—beyond full comprehension, beyond the confines of human reason. God is beyond creation, and in no way limited by creation. It makes sense, then, that God would be beyond our tools of exploration. God is always a mystery.

So it makes sense that God might seem out of reach at times.

3.) Appreciate the moments of God’s felt nearness.

It’s incredible to recognize that a God who is “wholly-other” than the world can nevertheless make himself known. God shows up. That is a profound reality.

4.) Let this experience become an invitation.

This whole experience—God’s nearness and God’s seeming distance—is an invitation. It’s as if God, revealed in creation, invites human minds into a game of hide-and-seek.

When we take away the “play” language and replace it with liturgical and spiritual language, we might say that this is an invitation to seek after God.

Feeling God as distant should not bring you to despair. It should invite you to seek God further. It puts you on the hunt. It gives your life purpose, and it helps you live more intentionally. It won’t let you take your mind, the world, creation itself, or other people for granted—because God might be hiding just around the next corner. Don’t miss the glimpse.

Ultimately, the real issue is attachment.

While it is true that spirituality is the quest for connection with the divine, we are often attached—to the feelings we get when we sense God’s nearness. Those feelings can become an idol. God, in his mercy, disabuses us of that idol and calls us to detachment: we need to live faithfully without needing to feel certain emotions before we can believe we are “okay,” or before we can think we’re spiritually good.

Remember: feelings matter, but they are not everything.

So if you find yourself missing God—if God feels hidden—try thinking this instead of despairing or feeling guilty:

“God is inviting me to a game of hide-and-seek.”

And then be faithful to play.

Get on the hunt.

Translate

Poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, agrarian theorist, and angry Christian. Berry’s thought transformed my own. Through his poetry and prose, I could never again imagine my relationship to the non-human world in quite the same way. He changed how I thought about place, too: about our commitment to a particular psycho-geographical region, to local knowledge, to neighbors, to the land beneath our feet, and to the communities that make a place a home.

One of Berry’s most beloved poems is “The Peace of Wild Things.” My sister gave me a copy when I returned to work after months of medical leave and a near-death experience. It had a grounding effect on me then. Now I have it hanging on my office wall.

It remains there as a reminder of the peace of ordinary life. Real life. Life lived among the natural rhythms of things.

Berry writes of going to “the peace of wild things,” and that simple phrase has stayed with me. There is something deeply Christian about the movement of the poem. When anxiety about the future becomes overwhelming, Berry does not tell us to think harder, work harder, or master our circumstances. He directs our attention outward—to the world that exists beyond the anxious self. To water. To darkness. To the stillness of creatures. To the wildness that continues without our management.

That matters to me.

Berry reminds me that I have more neighbors than just other humans.

This may be one of the great gifts of his work. Berry had a way of settling me by first doing a little unsettling. He shook me out of my habitual ways of seeing. He made the familiar strange again. He asked me to look more deeply and wonder at the glories and enchantments of life as they actually are.

I think this is why his work has mattered so much to my intellectual and spiritual life. Berry did not offer an escape from the world. He offered a deeper inhabitation of it. He taught me to pay attention to the particular: a place, a field, a tree, a meal, a neighbor, a body, a season. He resisted the temptation to treat these things as raw material for our ambitions. Instead, he taught me to receive them.

That is perhaps the word I most associate with Berry now: receive.

I have spent much of my own life learning to think about Christian faith in increasingly abstract terms. Theology asks large questions about God, creation, humanity, redemption, and the future. Berry continually brought those questions back down to earth. Literally.

He reminded me that creation is not merely an idea. It is the world we inhabit. It is the soil under our feet, the food we eat, the creatures with whom we share our lives, and the places that teach us who we are. It is also the particular place to which we belong.

And perhaps that is why “The Peace of Wild Things” has become more than a poem for me. It has become a small liturgy of attention.

I look at it on my office wall and remember that the world does not depend entirely upon my anxiety. There is a peace outside of me. There are rhythms I did not create and cannot control. There are creatures who know how to live without carrying the entire future on their backs.

Berry’s great achievement, I think, was to make such things difficult to ignore.

He unsettled our assumptions about progress, prosperity, technology, community, agriculture, economics, and even what it means to be human. But underneath the anger was a profound tenderness. He wanted us to recover the ability to love what is close at hand before it disappears.

He wanted us to stop rushing past the world.

That is a lesson I hope to keep learning.

Wendell Berry leaves behind an enormous body of work, but his deepest legacy may be the people he taught to see differently: to notice the land, to know their neighbors, to resist the abstractions that make destruction easier, and to find holiness in the ordinary.

I am one of those people.

So when I look at the poem on my office wall, I will think of my sister who gave it to me, of the strange season in which I first needed its wisdom, and of the man who spent his life reminding us that the world is more alive, more mysterious, and more sacred than our anxious imaginations allow us to see.

Thank you, Wendell Berry, for helping me learn to look again.

And for reminding me that sometimes the way back to peace is simply to become attentive to the wild, ordinary, beautiful world that has been here all along.

As Ted Smith asked that question, the thought of theological traditions and liturgical moments flooded my mind. I thought of reading Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World where he explains the sacramental worldview of the Eastern Orthodox tradition revealed in its liturgical services. Schmemann imagines that in a worship service where the Eucharist is lifted it is as though heaven and earth are united, “The Eucharist of Christ and Christ the Eucharist is the ‘breakthrough’ that brings us to the table in the Kingdom, raises us to heaven, and makes us partakers of the divine food.”¹⁶ I also recalled Josef Pieper ‘s theory of festivity, and how it aroused in my mind that for communities of celebration true festivity and transcendence are inseparable.¹⁷ And I recalled hearing the heraldic words of Rev. William Barber call to a congregation, of which I was part, to greater solidarity with the “least of these,” and as his proclamation combined spoken word, sung refrains, stories, and recitation of the “great cloud of witnesses,” I felt caught up into something more than myself; his words were performative of solidarity and I was part of it.

Then, Smith made a direct appeal to some of those realities. He spoke of the African American church tradition beautifully. He reminded us in that tradition worship services there were often longer than in predominantly white churches. The worship was seen as an event—folks often went out for restroom breaks during the sermon, because sermons did more than just communicate a few bits of “how to wisdom,” they framed an identity, called hearers into a story, and performed pronouncements of justice. Smith also noted traditions that were more sacramental in focus like the Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholicism too did more than communicate Bible truths. Indeed, their services were performative. Something occurs in mass—ultimately grace is conferred and shared with the people. To these examples we can add the many charismatic traditions of Christian faith. However, the sermons or lessons are shaped in these churches, the overall purpose is an experience, not simply cognitive input or propositional truth claims.

Latour and Smith are on to something, and the more I observe the religious landscape of my own country, the more I see their assessments borne out. Take, for example, the global ministry Hillsong. As a pastor-theologian, my years-long observation of this phenomenon has led me to believe that much of its numerical growth stemmed from its music publishing arm. This aligns with Latour and Smith’s arguments—compelling music creates an experience, and Hillsong’s worship songs often borrow the lyricism of popular love songs, instrumentalizing the language of lovers for religious ends. My curiosity about the sudden rise and fall of Carl Lentz, the celebrity pastor of Hillsong NYC, revealed additional elements in their religious communication that amplified their brand. His congregation grew rapidly and included celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Vanessa Hudgens, and Kevin Durant. I won’t rehearse the details of his or the church’s decline here, but I will admit to watching more than one documentary about it—largely because I’m fascinated by stories of churches making headlines.¹⁸

The documentaries included clips of Lentz’s sermons and portions of Hillsong’s most famous praise songs—music so influential it’s sung in both mainline and evangelical churches. If attention is a measure of success, Hillsong sat at the top. On screen, thousands of young people sang with arms raised, emoting in unison, gathered in a solidarity not unlike a music festival. Lentz himself is a compelling communicator: his fashion is cutting-edge, his idioms tailor-made for social media, his physique fit and unapologetically displayed. He speaks with confidence, clarity, and contagious enthusiasm. Hearing him riff on a visionary thread is undeniably exciting.

But after listening deeply, I couldn’t quite pinpoint what drew people in. Many preachers speak with confidence and energy. What sets Lentz apart? Watching more sermons online, I was struck by how little he offered in terms of doctrine, illustration, theology, or biblical exposition. Loud, dramatic, rapid-fire declarations about God’s goodness abounded, yet rarely did he say something the audience didn’t already know or believe. Then it clicked: the draw wasn’t primarily in the content—it was in the spectacle. Lentz’s style felt like a Coldplay concert with a dash of Drake, facilitating a shared experience for thousands of young people in a secular city where religious speech was likely absent from their daily lives. For many, being a young, devoted Christian in New York might feel like being a Resident Alien (1 Peter 2:9–12). The atmosphere itself was the message. Listening to Lentz made people feel part of something new—something worth giving their lives to.

Kara Bettis Carvahlo wrote in Christianity Today of her experiences with the ministries of Timothy Keller and Carl Lentz when she was a young adult in NYC. When it came to Lentz and celebrity pastors, she says:

The nefarious truth is that we, too, are often responsible for creating celebrity pastors. In college, was I hungry for Scripture and gospel-centered community? Yes. Was I also willing to be emotionally titillated, spiritually distracted and even entertained, and looking for a place to belong? Also, yes.¹⁹

The key words here are “emotionally titillated,” “entertained,” and “place to belong.” The powerful mix of belonging and entertainment creates a sensation affiliated with religious experience, no doubt. When Taylor Swift went on her over 2 billion dollar grossing Eras Tour many “think pieces” assessing the affair were featured in periodicals like, American Magazine, The Presbyeterian Outlook, Spectrum, and the New Yorker. Their shared reflection that going to her show was like going to mass or some other related church service was a common one. The authors, all with unique backgrounds and church experience, reflect on the welcoming nature of the community of Swifties and how participation matters. Each one, in their own way, comments on the solidarity produced by singing with such a great cloud of witness eliciting a numinous experience. This experience is known to give you “chill bumps” too, a marker that something profound is happening, no doubt!

If the likes of Latour and Smith are right, how ought we to speak the sacred from pulpits, in classrooms, on retreats, or even on YouTube? It is all well and good to say that religious communication ought to create an experience, or that it is the “end” not simply a “means,” but what are some ways to go about it? I know enough to know that intentions matter, but no matter how well your intentions are, you cannot account for how another person will receive your communication. Nor can you account for their emotional and spiritual state on any given moment. There are always factors beyond one’s control or intention. But if pressed, the surest way I know to evoke any sort of experience of depth out of a person is through the arts. Stories, visual art, music, etc., all have a way of drawing people into an experience beyond propositional fact finding. Art is complex to define. Trygve David Johnson, through developing the metaphor of “the Preacher as Liturgical Artist” cites Flannery O’Connor, “The basis of art is truth, both in matter and mode. The person who aims for art in his work aims after truth, in an imaginative sense, no more and no less.”²⁰ And to respond to O’Connor, Johnson applies this to the role of preacher.

The Preacher as Liturgical Artist assumes that the creative powers of the imagination are given by God to be used in preaching not primarily so that preachers might persuade others, taking over the role of the Spirit, but so that they might offer back to the Father their human gifts that are redeemed in Christ. Therefore, the initial difference between The Preacher as Teacher and The Preacher as Liturgical Artist is that the former puts the focus squarely on human agency, while the latter embraces responsible human action as a way of offering back to God what God has provided humanity.²¹

I admire Johnson for remembering that part of being human is being creative—a creativity rooted in our divine givenness and connected to theological concepts such as creation and incarnation. What most interests me is his claim that when a preacher works artfully, they are, in a sense, fulfilling their purpose: engaging with material, tradition, imagination, and an audience. This means the audience’s response is not incidental; it flows from their own purpose as creative creatures made to respond to beauty. Johnson’s contribution is a welcome one in the field of homiletics, offering a theological justification for preaching artfully. If art can move people and grant them an experience of truth, then artful preaching offers a way out of the “preaching as a means to some other end” cul-de-sac that ensnares much contemporary religious speech.

Can artful communication also teach? Of course, but the distinction I wish to make between preaching artfully and preaching only to share information can be understood by the way the material works within the listener. Preaching to convey information, or didactive preaching, is knowledge transfer. Its aim is to clearly share knowledge between a speaker and an audience. At its worst it is transactional. There is merit in clarity and shared knowledge, but if the goal of religious speech is the transformation of persons, it often comes up short. Art on the other hand has a greater ability to move people. Art can move knowledge from the head to the heart—to knowledge it can add wisdom.

Theologically, it seems to me there is no other faithful way to preach than with an eye toward the artistic. In Scripture, God speaks creation into existence, suggesting a deep connection between religious thought and poetry. No wonder then, that just under half of the Bible is written in the poetry genre. And speaking of “speaking creation into existence,” consider the expansive vision St. Maximus the Confessor gives to the claim that Jesus is the Logos, the “Word of God,” through whom all things were made (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17).

In his famous “difficulty” Ambiguum 7, St. Maximus the Confessor argues that the Logos of God—Christ—is the one through whom everything was created. Maximus writes:

If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul’s imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (λόγος) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi?²²

This is Maximus’ well-known formula: one Logos is many logoi—that Jesus “held together in himself the logoi before they came to be, by his gracious will he created all things visible and invisible out of non-being.”²³ In this vision, the meaning and value of every creature is grounded in Christ, who is both its source and its telos. As Maximus says, “This same logos, whose goodness is revealed and multiplied in all things that have their origin in him, with the degree of beauty appropriate to each being, recapitulates all things in himself (Eph 1:10).”²⁴

For Maximus, creation comes into being through the divine reason, and every creature has its own logos (rational principle) within the one Logos of God. These logoi are the “inner meaning” of each thing—God’s purpose and design preexisting in the divine mind. Every creature’s rational principle participates in and relates to Christ, the one Logos. Humanity’s vocation is to contemplate, discern, and draw the scattered logoi of creation back to their source in him. The Logos is truly present in the world, though often hidden—waiting to be discovered through spiritual vision and theoria (contemplation). This is a profoundly priestly calling: to seek the logoi, hidden in plain sight, and unite them to Christ—a cosmic game of hide and seek.

The logoi hide in plain sight. They can be discerned only through intentional, contemplative seeking—in the realms of nature, persons, Scripture, and history. This hidden structure of reality draws us into intimacy with the world, inviting us to join a kind of sacred hide-and-seek, delighting as we uncover the inner meaning of all things and their coherence in Christ. Didactic communication may sometimes convey these inner truths through rigorous study and shared insights. For instance, one might study a strawberry in the laboratory, learning how it propagates, its botanical classification, its cellular structure, and its ecological niche. Such research can yield facts, figures, and data—but it may still fail to persuade someone to taste one.

There are other truths about the strawberry that can only be learned through the art and craft of gardening. By tending it through the seasons—from seed to harvest—observing which insects are drawn to it, and working to protect its fruit from birds and deer, you come to know it in a deeper way. Then there is the art of preparing strawberries for jam or jelly, where trial and error teaches you not only how to coax the best flavor but also how to serve it—perhaps on hot, buttered toast—in a way that might win me over for life. Both forms of knowledge have their place in the Logos/logoi “hide and seek” game, but it is often the artful approach that stirs people to the work of uniting the logoi with the Logos.

Namwali Serpell has recently written an insightful article for The New Yorker called “The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies.” Serpell’s claim is that movies of all genres are falling into this new literalist style.

When I say literalism, I don’t mean realistic or plainly literal. I mean literalist, as when we say something is on the nose or heavy-handed, that it hammers away at us or beats a dead horse. As these phrases imply, to re-state the screamingly obvious does a kind of violence to art. “A point is still a point!”25

I have been suggesting all along something similar about religious communication: it is often far too literal. Whether in sentimental paintings of Jesus with lambs, moralistic films like Fireproof, or “how-to” sermons, so much of it is so on-the-nose that it misses the subtle, transformative work that true art can accomplish.

Art is evocative. It is suggestive. It tutors the soul, leading the learner toward a greater school of understanding. While not perfect, art simulates religious experience well because it works within you—it stirs, rouses, and awakens new connections between the world and meaning. Those who seek to participate in religious speech would do well to take notice.

Because of this, I am inspired to preach in the style of an artist whose work once stirred my soul in a profound way, bringing me to a personal and emotional realization that the simple dictum “don’t judge lest you be judged” only hinted at. The artist is Sufjan Stevens, an indie folk-pop singer-songwriter. On his 2005 album Illinois, he recorded a track titled “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” The song sets the tragic life and horrific crimes of the serial killer to a sweet, almost lullaby-like melody. The juxtaposition is striking—evil deeds rendered in a soundscape that is tender and inviting. Stevens’ subtle, poetic language draws the listener in more gently than a blunt or aggressive telling might.

When I first heard the song, I was disarmed by the autobiographical detail that Gacy’s father was a drinker. That single phrase sparked a fleeting compassion for the killer. Then came the darker revelation—Gacy dressed as a clown “for them”—a haunting image of disguise masking horror. When Stevens rings the notes on the lyric for them, I feel terror and compassion in the same breath. The lullaby nature of the piece lowers my defenses. I might never have chosen to dwell on this man’s life, but here I am—and I am not looking away.

Toward the conclusion of the song, I realize that Stevens has taken me on a macabre journey. When he describes what Gacy has done to his victims he does so quickly, to spare the listener the indecency of dwelling there in the sinister crawlspace of human depravity. And like a firework exploding into its apex and then its sudden, fading decline, Stevens sings falsetto oh my God. “Oh My God,” is right. Did that really happen? And did I just listen to that song? Did I enjoy it too? The final lyrics of the song turn on the audience. The whole song Stevens has been pointing at the past, at Gacy, the Jaycee near Des Plaines, Illinois. But now the turn, Stevens sings somberly, confessionally these lines: And in my best behavior, I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid. It is easy to look at Gacy’s life and stand in the place of moral superiority. It is nothing to reduce his entire being to banal evil, in fact, that is the common way we speak of people like him. It would be easy to turn the song to the next track and skip over the indecency of reflecting on these nightmares. But Stevens takes us there, holds us enthralled by dark images and sweet sounds, he pushes us to compassion, maybe even empathy at times, and then at the end, he turns the tables. Stevens confesses that he is just as capable of evil as Gacy was. Stevens lets us know that he does evil. And if he does, then you, dear reader, do too. We are all complicit in some sort of evil! When I first heard this song, I trembled at the conclusion, because I went with Stevens through the distaste, judgment, compassion, and then I was forced to deal with the fact that I took pleasure in judging someone else while I conveniently ignore my own evil acts. I was moved. I was disturbed. Still am. But I was stirred.

Fred Craddock would argue that I am talking about an indirect method of communicating in the style of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “There is a way of speaking and writing that demonstrates an imperialism of the mind and that engenders the same in the listeners and readers, as though ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’ completed the transaction,”²⁶ writes Craddock. The moral in Stevens’s song, if there are any are: hurt people, hurt people; everyone is capable of evil; we all have secrets, etc. And if I set out to teach that lesson directly in a study or through a book, the reader might check the mental note: agree/disagree, and that would be the end of it. Craddock praises Kierkegaard’s indirect approach, which again is shared by Stevens in this song, “SK, sought another method,” Craddock declares, “one that would break the imperialism, with the listener or reader experiencing in every corner of mind and hear, ’I am undone!’”²⁷ What straightforward teaching does is “information but not realization,”²⁸ But the artful, indirect approach in Stevens’s song brought to my soul was a realization about the complexity of humanity, it humbled me through honesty and took me beneath the floorboards of unexamined living.

I have often called this song a sermon. In fact, I’m known for calling all sorts of songs, films, and television shows “sermons.” What these share with John Wayne Gacy Jr. is their use of imagination, metaphor, symbolism, narrative structure, and other artistic tools to layer meaning—often in ways not immediately apparent, requiring reflection to uncover. I call them “sermons” because they move me toward some greater truth or purpose, doing so subtly enough that I find myself carried along without retreating into cynical distance.

Actual sermons, and other forms of religious speech, can work in the same way. When artfully designed, they take an audience on a journey—one that brings listeners “down the road” before they even realize they’ve been traveling. This not only lowers defenses; it pushes beyond mere knowledge transfer, opening the possibility for genuine transformation.

In the end, artful preaching participates in the very pattern of creation itself. If, as St. Maximus tells us, the one Logos holds together the many logoi, then the preacher’s task is not simply to explain but to help people see—to draw out the hidden meanings of things until their coherence in Christ becomes visible. This is the slow, careful work of contemplation, but it is also the playful work of hide-and-seek, where beauty and truth are uncovered in ways that surprise us. Preaching and all forms of religious speech that leans into artistry joins the divine act of speaking the world into being, shaping words so that they do more than inform—they form, transform, and invite. In such speech, the congregation is not merely told about the Logos; they are drawn toward Him, awakened to the truth that all things—every creature, every story, every note of music—find their source, meaning, and fulfillment in Christ.

Religious speech is hard. Any form of communication is challenging enough on its own, but when you introduce weighty concepts of religion, communication seems impossible. How would you judge an effective bit of religious speech? Another way to put my question is blunt: what is religious communication for? Some religious folk might answer with one or more of the following: conversion, moral formation, social justice reform, church growth, community organizing/building, or giving voice to calamity.

I am convinced that most people, even the devout, do not consciously think about the purpose of a piece of religious speech like a sermon, but they participate in the communication, nonetheless. Innately, we tend to slide into rhythms of behavior that include religious speech. We speak and we listen to messages and filter them through the cultural and political trends of the day (plus many others). For cultural animals native to late modern capitalism, this means that religious messaging is often judged by its ability to persuade others or gain further attention—we are in the “attention economy,”¹ as many have noted. Church sermons often try to convince listeners to join, show up, volunteer, or chip in the donation plate. Prophetic appeals in front of the courthouses are about convincing society or the ruling bodies to expand their understanding of justice. The popular pundit and psychologist Jordan Peterson uses religious speech to convince young men to take responsibility and find purpose in their lives—doing so with as much fervor as a tent revival preacher.² And since convincing is the aim, it seems to me that so much of what counts for religious speech today is dominated by explaining ideas, knowledge transfer, teaching, and the like. To me, this leaves so much of what passes for a sermon or even a piece of religiously motivated art (poetry, music, film) to fall flat and boring. Perhaps the very best of religious speech should be more than simply about convincing people to some sort of action. I do not think so, or at least I hope for more. The purpose of religious speech is not merely about convincing; it must be about the strangest yet most desirable of phenomena: transfiguration of people.

Recently, an important but under-engaged philosopher put a fine point on the confusion and shortcomings of religious speech in a moving meditation called, Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech. That philosopher is the late Bruno Latour, a French catholic from a family of winemakers (dating back to the 17^th century). He was a leading thinker in the philosophy of science and technology writing on science communication, politics, ecology, and modernity. Latour’s work has always had the ability to look at concepts that we widely consider without much thought only then to expose the common concept as a bit weirder and harder to hold after an intentional analysis. His work is important because it can make you do the hard work to really understand the things you take for granted. This is helpful for the question that drives me, because Latour can help us get behind what religious speech does and what we should expect from it. To this aim, what is the point of a sermon? According to Latour it is not simply about information but rather transformation is the goal. But before we explore further, let’s consider the “torments” as Latour understands them.

In Rejoicing, Latour writes in a personal, meandering, and meditative style about what causes him shame when thinking about “religious speech.” His style is not propositional, nor is it scientific, and I am certain that the medium is an attempt to demonstrate the message. This is why his is a book beyond description, rather it needs to be experienced. I think it is fair to say that Latour would agree with my feeling that we are living in a dearth of quality preaching and religious communication in our time. Latour’s feelings are complicated. On the one hand he laments what he hears from pulpits each Sunday. There a clergy person presumes that the sermon, or homily, is the moment of information communication, as if religious “facts and figures” or simple explanation of its content may be delivered like scientific and political fact. But, as he points out, religious speech cannot do that, nor should it even try. It cannot because it is a constant act of translation between worlds, texts, terms, and concepts.³ The knowledge it aims to share is only ever approximate, incomplete, and girded by mystery.

Complicating matters is that religious people tend toward preservation. It makes sense, if you came to understand something as “sacred,” you would no doubt want to hold onto it, to safeguard its meaning and value. Religious people tend to cling on to the way religious ideas are understood and expressed in the past because that is where they have found light and life. This leads to a certain conservatism in religious life. There is more than an aversion to change going on here, on behalf of the religious observer—having a spiritual awakening or experience is not a normal event, so when one takes place in you, you cling onto it for dear life. The irony here is that by holding on to these religious relics of meaning and insight, we hold them in place with such a strong grip they begin to lose their ability to shed insight onto todays or tomorrow’s world. They become dusty, antiquated relics of time, eventually appearing more superstitious than truthful. Indeed, the religious act of translation and interpretation never ceases. Humanity has yet to exhaust the meaning of God or the world, let alone our own subjective selves.

On the other hand, Latour is ashamed of the questions he gets about his belief. In Church Life Journal: A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Paul Lynch writes, “he cannot explain his devotion to anyone: friends, colleagues, students, even his children.” Even though Latour struggles through mass because of what he hears in all the religious speech, he continues to go. The experience is best explained by Latour, himself:

and yet the Scriptures have been properly and faithfully handed down. Anyone can hear them. But then the sermon begins – and the overburdened listener feels like running away as fast as his legs will carry him, for what he fears finding is that, in accepting this heritage, he’s made a bad deal....no mountain of debt will make me give up my heritage. I covet the treasure hidden from those on the inside as much as from those on the outside, from the vendors who no longer know the value of what they are offering as much as from buyers who laugh at this old flea-market stuff.⁴

What is Latour’s primary gripe about “religious speech,” which includes but is not limited to acts such as: preaching, prophetic speech, teaching, liturgy, sacred music, art, etc.? For starters, right and proper religious speech is “never ‘about’ religion. Rather,” according to Latour, “religious speech is that which accomplishes the aims of religion: renewal, conversion, relationship. Religious speech does not convey information; it changes the audiences who hear it.”⁵ But for Latour, we tend to create religious speech, as much as we expect from it. What we expect is the communication of information about reality, moral teaching, metaphysical data—in a word we try to speak religion like we try to speak the sciences with a sort of one-to-one correlation between a stated fact about a thing that is studied, etc. But can one ever have such a grasp on something such as God or the soul? Speaking about the desire to speak of religion in the same tenor as the sciences, Latour calls, with exceeding cheekiness, the “perils of ‘double-click’ communication,” which for him functions with all the succor of a “madwoman in the attic.”⁶

Latour argues that actual scientific research is demanding, and so is communicating its findings, but all of that is masked by this “double-click communication,” because by it, “all difficulties vanish, all paths level out: information becomes faithful communication without any transformation whatsoever, through simple obvious likeness between the copy and the original.”⁷ This double-click communication gives people the illusion that by doing a bit of internet-based reading they understand a thing that was rigorously engaged with and studied in a laboratory with the accoutrements of peer review and lab-to-lab repeatability. Double-click knowledge of a thing is like the knowledge a student can have of Moby Dick by simply asking Chat GPT for a summary, themes, and critique of the book without having entered the narrative through reading and contemplating the text’s use of language, character, and plot. To really know a thing like Moby Dick is to require the transformation of the reader through the subjective journey of reading the text. The same could be said of reading a sacred text like the Holy Bible.

To repeat, for Latour, religious speech exists to transform people. And to make this point, Latour examines the role of angels from the biblical narratives. Claiming that religion does a poor job of communicating information, he says of these “messengers,”

It is precisely the utter lack of information conveyed by the panoply of religious expressions that provides a guarantee that we will never be able to use them to proceed to secrets superior to the secrets of sciences, to loftier mysteries, more exalted spiritualities, less indecipherable gnoses. Do a test: compile a list of everything said by angels in the Bible, despite supposedly being tasked with ‘conveying messages,’ and you’ll learn next to nothing about anything.⁸

Neither the great “pomp and circumstance” heraldry of the angles, their choirs and voices which fill listeners with fear, nor even their individual visitations to young, betrothed couples concerned much new information about God that was previously unknown. Latour announces, “this is because angels do not convey messages; they change those they address. What they transfer is not an information content, but a new container. They do not bring maps offering some hold to beings starved of knowledge – they transform their interlocutors. What they convey are not telegrams but persons.”⁹ Therefore, religion is not a life map, because “religion leads nowhere.”¹⁰ The real purpose of a pilgrimage is not the destination after all, but it is what happens to the pilgrim along the way. It is about the transfiguration of the pilgrim’s inner life. It is about existential and spiritual maturation. As Paul Lynch concludes, “religious speech...does not cover distance; it creates intimacy.”¹¹

For Latour, the language of lovers is a better metaphor for understanding religious speech. Is this saccharine or shallow? No, this language is useful, because when lovers speak of their love, what is being offered is much more than mere information. If my wife asks, “do you love me,” she is not really asking me to repeat the same phrases, ideas, or stories that I have said 100 times before. My guess is that she is not even asking for assurance of my love. If I professed my love 100 times before, then I would have already and quite clearly shared the information about my affections. Yet, as we know, the language of lovers is endlessly repetitive. At the sound of the question “do you love me,” I cannot simply offer the same old answer, but as Latour reminds me, I “also cannot not repeat old formulas. ‘There’s nothing more repetitive than the music of lovers, they always annotate the same story—theirs.”¹² Lynch explains, “sometimes those annotations fail, and they appear to lead lovers to the end. But sometimes the lovers manage to retell their story in a way that renews their love, by ‘twisting, hedging, shifting, redressing, reinterpreting the same episodes.”¹³

Reiterations of one’s love story reveals the pilgrimage nature of a long love—only by looking back over it and rehearsing the stories of twists and turns, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, can one look back and pay witness to the deep changes that occurred to the couple as a couple and as they exist as individuals. And so, it is with religious speech— “retelling the old recreates the new.”¹⁴ Indeed, if the etymology of religion is to “bind back to a source,” then it is a natural religious impulse to rehearse one’s stories and the stories of community.

Latour’s ambivalence about the state of religious education is on target. His meditation shares a lot of truth and wisdom I learned from theologian Ted Smith. Many will have familiarity with Smith’s recent addition to the discussion of religion and secularity through book The End of Theological Education. It is a landmark text for anyone curious about America’s religious trends. Although he draws much on the work of Charles Taylor, Smith’s approach shades more sociological. Specifically, he follows church membership and attitudes toward the professionalization of ministry as they relate to the decline of America’s primary social imaginary, “the voluntary association.” His work shows that declining church attendance is not so much to do with irreligion or a lack of spirituality. Rather it has to do with the diminishment of the voluntary association society which is the primary model of social grouping that America has experienced, and it has been the model for the church of the last 200 years. While researching and writing his book, our congregation hosted Ted Smith to lead a leadership workshop on being a cathedral for a secular age. He was working out many of his ideas on secularity, ministry, and the future of theological education in his presentation to our ministry leaders.

Among all the statistics and trends that Smith used to paint a picture of the growing religious landscape our church was facing, he made many comments about why our society is becoming more secular than previous generations. The section that stuck out to me concerned things that the church has done to increase the pull of secularism. And specifically, what trends in preaching have added to secularity. I sat up in my chair, how could the task of preaching about faith, God, and the supernatural amplify something so opposite? Smith suggested that one of the greatest pitfalls of contemporary preaching is that the sermon has become a “means to an end.” Many homiletics courses have been filled with advice to would-be preachers that they needed to make a “practical application clear.” Personally, I remember a time when I was asked to give a talk during an internship. The talk was to a group of lay leaders and the topic was on some assigned biblical passage that I have now forgotten—it does not really matter. At the end of the talk, my onsite supervisor gave me feedback in the form of a “compliment sandwich”: something to commend, a recommendation, and something to commend! I recall that the commendations were small, minor, and rather underwhelming. He was far more vocal in offering his recommendation, which he introduced with a hearty, “so what!?” I looked confused. So, he continued, “good, you told me about the Bible, and you offered some things many in your audience did not know, but so what? What am I supposed to do with it?”

Recently, I convened a group of clergy from my denomination to hold talks on how we can all improve in our attempts at religious speech. One senior member of our group who had a reputation for inspiring church attendance growth addressed the meeting, “most of the sermons I ever preached had the phrase ‘how to’ in the sermon or in the title. People are practical; they want to know how to improve their lives.” Sermons on leadership, overcoming anxiety, living without regrets, and how to deal with disappointment are common in the world of evangelical church growth preaching, indeed. Ted Smith was right. I recognize in my experiences with clergy colleagues, from my days in homiletics, and a cursory survey of the preaching in the largest churches in our country that the point of religious communication is meant to the end of getting listeners to do something, but what?

Sermons could be an appeal for a moral or ethical change in the listeners. Frank A. Thomas in How To Preach A Dangerous Sermon¹⁴ gives expert thought to the notion of preaching with moral leadership toward the end helping form and challenge society’s moral imagination, for example. And his is a necessary message for today’s religious communicators. Also, religious messages may be designed so that the listeners would give more to charitable causes. Religious speech is often used to tell people how to be of service to others, this is indeed the quasi-religious language of the 12-step program. In our age of secularity or at least “church decline” some messages like the “He Gets Us” campaign are designed to make the message of Christ palatable to groups that may have once felt ignored or judged by traditional expressions of Christianity.¹⁵ Religious communication, it seems, is about getting people to do something or to respond to an appeal. This means that it exists for some other end.

At that point in the Smith’s presentation, he got quiet and leaned in toward the audience and said, “most people who come to church already know the things that they are supposed to do.” It is true, general ethical teaching and principles are shared culturally, they can be found on children’s television (Bluey makes me want to be a better father!), and if you want to dig into unique themes, you can always take in a steady stream of Ted Talks. “So why,” he pressed, “would someone want to sit in boredom for 20 minutes in order to be told to do what they already know they should do?” At once I felt the sting of that critique, but I also knew he was right—deep in my core.

What if my preaching were not merely a means of getting people to do or not do something? Ted achieved his aim. Quite dramatically then, he peered out behind his glasses and deeply into our eyes and said, “what if the sermon (and the rest of worship) was not a means to an end, but what if it is the end itself—what if it is the reason?”

PART II….COMING

I train at Alliance Atlanta, and I know so many wonderful people who gather up the courage to step onto the mat and test themselves—to discover what they have learned, what they are capable of, and who they are becoming.

So I decided it might be worthwhile to offer a blessing for those who take the mat, in whatever form that takes.

What follows is offered in grace.

I pray that it is received in grace.

Courage carries you to the mat.

So does your strength, your cultivated skill, your preparation, and all the hours you have spent getting ready for this moment. Your contest is but a moment in time. It will pass.

And remember: the contest cannot take away what you have already gained by showing up.

You come with honor in your heart.
You offer respect to the one who faces you.
You respect the mat—its traditions, its rules, and its judgment.

Never forget the identity of your true opponent: yourself.

Above all else, you are here to overcome yourself—to overcome fear, doubt, impatience, ego, and every part of you that would keep you from becoming who you are called to be.

Notice your breath. Give thanks.

Offer gratitude for the sacred alignment of body and mind—for the strange and beautiful gift of having a body capable of learning, struggling, enduring, and becoming.

May this mat teach you well. May it lead you to the font of wisdom.

May technique and concepts steady your nerves. You know what to do. Play your game.Trust your training.

Be present. Be in the moment. Be alive in your body. And may you emerge from this contest in full health.

Like Jacob, who wrestled through the night with God, may this bout be another step in your journey toward overcoming. May you grapple honestly. May you roll courageously.

And may you discover, as Jacob did, that sometimes we leave the struggle changed—not because we were undefeated, but because we were willing to grapple.

The fact that you have stepped forward, bumped fists, shaken hands, and gone toe-to-toe says all you—or anyone else—needs to know. You are alive. You are here. Never forget and never deny that. You have been given this moment. Give thanks.

Now, Overcome.

1. She knew that confrontation isn’t the only way to make change.

We live in a polarized world. And in that world, standing up for a cause or speaking truth to power can be courageous and necessary. There are certainly times when confrontation is exactly what the moment requires.

But I sometimes wonder whether people with platforms have come to believe that confrontation and provocation are the normal means of bringing about change. Or for ideas to have a hearing.

Dolly Parton has always offered another possibility.

Think about Dolly alongside her 9 to 5 costars, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. Tomlin and Fonda have been outspoken and unapologetic about their political commitments. Dolly has generally taken a different approach, even while appearing with them as they perform their activist critiques. She has often been careful not to alienate the people who listen to her music, read her books, or love her movies. In those appearances, Dolly was careful to choose her words precisely so as to not inflame the situation.

And yet, when you look at the trajectory of Dolly’s career and influence, something remarkable becomes clear. She has impacted many of the very same communities that Tomlin and Fonda have advocated for—and arguably has reached them in ways neither could. Dolly cultivated one of the most remarkably broad and inclusive fan bases in American popular culture. She quietly moved the needle through her own money, philanthropy, institutions, and influence. And she modeled a gentle, witty form of out-narration in the public sphere. That is to say, she told a far more compelling story than the alternative!

She didn’t always defeat an opposing narrative by attacking it. Sometimes she simply told a better story. That strikes me as an important lesson for preachers and teachers.

Not every cultural battle needs to be fought head-on. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is tell a story so compelling, generous, beautiful, and human that people begin to imagine the world differently.

2. She worked from within tradition.

One of the things I love about Dolly is how deeply her work is rooted in the traditions that formed her. From murder ballads to gospel music, from Appalachian storytelling to songs about the particularities of her upbringing, Dolly’s genius has often been to take the material handed down to her and make something unmistakably her own.

Her songs emerge from a tradition and a community that bore her. That is part of why her voice feels so authentic. And I think there is a lesson here for those of us who speak the sacred. We are not inventing our message from scratch.

Preachers, teachers, theologians, artists, and other communicators of the sacred are inheritors of traditions. We receive stories, Scriptures, symbols, rituals, practices, melodies, metaphors, and ways of speaking that have been handed down to us. Our task is not to abandon tradition in order to become original.

Our task is to become ourselves within tradition.

It is precisely through learning the language, forms, and stories of the tradition that we begin to discover our own voice. Dolly didn’t become Dolly by escaping the traditions that formed her. She became Dolly by knowing them deeply enough to transform them.

3. Dolly innovated through authenticity.

Dolly brought a fresh perspective to her art without abandoning the tradition that gave her a voice. Consider Jolene. It is a remarkably vulnerable song. Dolly is pleading with another woman—an extraordinarily beautiful woman—to leave her man alone. And the fascinating thing is that Dolly doesn’t pretend that the other woman isn’t beautiful. She acknowledges it. Jolene is beautiful. She’s talented. She’s smart. She’s captivating. And Dolly is vulnerable enough to admit that she could lose the man she loves to her.

That’s not typical songwriting. Not in today’s culture anyway. It’s honest in a way that makes the song unforgettable. Then there is I Will Always Love You, a song born out of Dolly’s real and difficult relationship with her former boss and collaborator, Porter Wagoner. Again, the power comes from authenticity. Dolly’s genius was not simply that she could write a great song. It was that she could take something deeply personal and turn it into something other people could inhabit.

That is the work of the artist. And I think it is also the work of the preacher and teacher.

Innovate from the foundations of tradition.

And when you do, let authenticity and vulnerability be your friends. Don’t try to sound like someone else. Don’t try to manufacture originality. Tell the truth you have been given to tell. Speak from the place where tradition and your own strange, particular life meet. That is something AI cannot reproduce. AI can imitate styles. It can recombine language. It can produce something that sounds remarkably like a sermon, a song, or an essay.

But AI cannot be Dolly Parton. And it cannot be you. There is a singularity to a human life—to our particular histories, loves, wounds, failures, communities, memories, and hopes—that cannot simply be replicated. It is the “flesh and blood” of it all.

Perhaps that is one of the great gifts we have as communicators of the sacred. We are not called to be original for originality’s sake. We are called to be faithful enough to tradition, courageous enough to innovate, and honest enough to speak in our own voice. Those are my three favorite things I have learned from Dolly.

Tell a better story.
Know the tradition that formed you.
And have the courage to become yourself within it.

Dolly has been doing all three for a very long time. And I am a better preacher for paying attention.

You are not alone.

I recently watched two movies that illustrated for me the importance of self-coaching, self-compassion, and creating a little emotional distance from our problems. Both movies made me cry.

They are The Adam Project and My Old Ass.

Let me explain.

The Adam Project (2022)

Ryan Reynolds stars as Adam Reed, a time-traveling fighter pilot who accidentally crash-lands in 2022 and encounters his 12-year-old self. Forced to work together, the two Adams embark on a dangerous mission involving time travel, Adam’s estranged father, and a powerful technology that could alter the future.

Beneath the action and humor, however, the film becomes a surprisingly tender story about grief, regret, family, and learning to make peace with the life you have rather than the life you wish you had.

My Old Ass (2024)

On the verge of leaving home for college, 18-year-old Elliott spends a night experimenting with mushrooms and unexpectedly encounters her 39-year-old future self.

Future Elliott begins offering advice about what to avoid and how to navigate adulthood. But one instruction stands out: stay away from a boy named Chad.

As Elliott tries to follow her older self’s advice, she begins to see her family, her hometown, and the ordinary life she is about to leave behind in a new way.

What begins as a quirky time-travel comedy becomes a warm, bittersweet meditation on growing up, appreciating the present, and realizing that the life you’re eager to leave may be the very life you’ll one day long to return to.

The Shared Lesson

Each movie, in its own unique way, has a protagonist receive coaching, mentoring, guidance, and care from an older version of themselves.

And that reminded me of some advice I have both been given and frequently offer to others:

Sometimes, when we’re going through a difficult time, it helps to coach ourselves as though we were coaching someone we deeply love.

One way to do this is to imagine that you are speaking to your eleven-year-old self.

Ask yourself:

• What would I say to my eleven-year-old self if they were facing the same trial or feeling the same things I am feeling?

• What compassion would I show to myself—or to another child—in this situation?

• How would I reframe my circumstances if I could create just a little emotional distance from them?

• What would I want that younger version of myself to know right now?

You may not have heard of Solomon’s Paradox, a psychological phenomenon describing our tendency to give better advice to other people than we apply to our own lives.

But you probably know the experience!!

We can see someone else’s situation with remarkable clarity. We can recognize their options. We can offer them compassion. We can even see the ways their fears or assumptions are distorting their perspective. Then something happens in our own lives, and suddenly all that wisdom disappears. Part of the reason, psychologists suggest, is emotional distance.

When we are advising someone else, we aren’t quite as emotionally entangled in the situation. We can see things more objectively. We have enough distance to ask better questions and imagine possibilities that are harder to see when we are the ones hurting.

I have found that I can sometimes create that same distance by imagining that I am coaching my younger self.

I picture myself taking that eleven-year-old boy aside, without shame. And I don’t tell him that he should have figured things out already. Nor do I tell him to work harder, optimize better, or get his act together. I simply sit beside him, and I listen…with curiosity, then I ask:

What would you say to this kid if you really loved him?

Usually, the answer is different from the voice I have been using with myself. It is gentler, patient, compassionate, and, strangely enough, often wiser. Perhaps that’s because we are sometimes better at extending grace to the person we once were than to the person we are today.

Both The Adam Project and My Old Ass illustrate this idea in rather fantastical ways. Neither of us is likely to receive a phone call from our future self—or crash into our past self in the middle of a time-travel adventure.

But we can do something similar. We can create a little distance from ourselves. We can imagine the person we love who is going through exactly what we are going through. And then we can offer that person the advice, patience, courage, and compassion we might otherwise withhold from ourselves.

Sometimes the person who needs your best advice is you.

And sometimes the best way to give it is to imagine you’re talking to the eleven-year-old version of yourself.

Recently, I was encouraged by a sermon and lecture by Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III at the 2025 Festival of Homiletics at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.

An avid sports fan, he spoke of the usefulness of sports metaphors to understand things more sacred.

Specifically, he mentioned the cross-over dribble in basketball.

Moss declared that if you can only dribble the ball with one hand, then you can only go one way to the hoop. You are limited in your attack on the defense.

Then he said you need both hands and a good crossover (moving between hands and directions) to overcome your opponent.

Then, with a cheshire grin, he told the sanctuary filled with people we need to be able to dribble with one hand, “our more evangelical theology,” and he added names like Karl Barth to his list.

“But then, we need to be able to dribble to our left hand,” with the likes of James Cone and the social gospel folks.

“In order to defeat the enemy, we need both.”

Moss said we need to be able to think and speak with the tools of piety and conversion just as much as the prophetic, and we must be able to use both in the aim of seeking God’s heart for the world.

Moss is right.

If our sacred speech remains in the zone of personal piety, we will miss more than half of our chances to overcome the problems of the world. Likewise, if our sacred speech is “prophetic-only,” we will miss more than the other half.

If my experience is worth any measure, Moss’s wisdom is on point.

When I am with my cohort from my tradition, we often reflect on other churches that seem to be thriving in this age where so many are in decline. Who is being heard by the population, we ask? We think and analyze trends. We envy building locations and talented staff.

And the one thing that is true of all the most thriving ministries in my tradition is that their pastors may (or may not) be socially progressive, and thus they sometimes utilize the prophetic tone of social critique etc., but they are also culturally evangelical.

Culturally evangelical in this case does not mean to imply anything about their voting habits, or a tendency toward biblicism.

I am referencing the je ne sais quoi of Evangelicalism—their spiritual energy.

The unique spirit of Evangelicalism is bound up by an energy that calls people to conversion, transformation, assimilation into community, service, and personal/spiritual growth. It lays the fertile ground for growth and attracting an audience.

These churches that I am referencing do exactly all that:

1.) they do not shy away from telling their congregants about the life transformation they can experience in God.

2.) They mobilize to get folks engaged and trained in basic spirituality.

3.) And they continue to do works of mercy and justice.

There is no either/or method to their schemes.

They remember that the social justice part of our tradition grew out of its origins in revivalism and ecstatic moments of spiritual transformation. Their sacred speech maintains the agility of a “crossover dribble” as impressive as Allen Iverson’s.

Prophetic Preaching in the Time of Trump

Now we have come back to the start.

The question in my inbox, “how will the pulpit respond to the Trump of it all?”

Will the pulpit respond to the moral virtue signaling (an uncharitable interpretation to be sure) that fills many social media feeds?

There I feel pressured. Perhaps I am dropping the ball if I do not speak up on every concerning issue. Goodness, I often feel like I am playing on my heels.

Sometimes, these appeals for me to use my “platform” come in long before the facts are in, which means that judgment comes before understanding.

Must the pulpit go the way of the news media: be fast, be first...even if you get it wrong?

And given that I am thinking about this during this season of history, during this Administration (when changes happen at a dizzying pace), the opportunity to speak out about the broken issues of the world is great.

And given all that I have said about burning out, or if everyone has a platform then none do, or hot takes do not amount to prophecy, or finding a hearing, what is the best way to speak out in this cultural milieu?

Do I really only have one or two chances to take my best shot per year?

There is wisdom in discernment, no doubt. And I find wisdom in Otis Moss’s endorsement of the full message which is a both/and approach to the gospel’s application.

But in the end, perhaps the issue is not so much with speaking prophetically.

Maybe it is the tone and technique we employ.

As suggested, much of the prophetic is delivered in a rather confrontational tone. It is all too easy to deliver these messages with a sense of moral superiority, and in many cases, the delivery can be divisive, patronizing, and even harsh.

This is even more true given that, in America at least, everyone has a platform from which to make such proclamations. It is as if we are endlessly shouting at and past one another on points of great importance.

But, what if instead, we delivered the prophetic in a different tone?

As Brueggeman argued, the prophetic is about seeing and sharing an alternative vision of the world.

What if we reframe the prophetic message around the prophetic alternative vision and maybe the weirdness that comes with it, over and against the bold, confrontational approach that is falling on deaf ears in our hot take society?

This is nothing new in the prophetic tradition.

Figures like John the Baptist and Elijah did some strange things that made people look at them sideways, while Ezekial saw things no one else could see.

Speaking of vision, Martin Luther King told the listening crowds about something he saw—and he invited us to imagine it as well.

Embodying this tradition will serve us well in speaking truth to power in today’s dramatically oppositional time.

Preachers, teachers, song writers, artists, activists, and all who are called upon to speak some truth to power will do well to let the crowd in on the fact that maybe they are a little “off,” because they see a world that no one else sees—and then they invite the world to see it too.

This approach calls to mind three characters: Don Quixote, Kierkegaard, and Private Witt from Terrence Malick’s film A Thin Red Line.

In Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, the titular knight famously sees giants where others see mere windmills. His vision is ridiculed as madness by the world around him, yet it is precisely this “madness” that allows him to live out a nobler, more hopeful imagination.

Harold Bloom observes that Quixote’s madness functions as a kind of tragic faith, a refusal to accept a purely disenchanted world.

Søren Kierkegaard, writing centuries later in The Present Age, describes the corrosive effect of a cynical, ironic public that “levels” all distinctions and mocks genuine passion.

Against this “leveling,” Kierkegaard commends the “single individual” who dares to act on an inward vision of faith and hope—what he elsewhere names the “knight of faith.”

Quixote’s folly, then, becomes not mere delusion but a prophetic refusal of a world content with its own flat realism.

A similar dynamic is poignantly embodied by Private Witt in Terrence Malick’s A Thin Red Line (1998).

Witt confesses, “I seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.”

Like Quixote, Witt’s vision appears naïve or even insane to those around him, yet it shapes how he lives: with compassion, detachment from fear, and a readiness for self-sacrifice.

Like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, Witt refuses the ironic detachment of the crowd and instead acts from a passionate inward commitment to a transcendent beauty glimpsed amid the horror of war.

His vision is costly, even fatal—but it is also what makes his life luminous.

In both Quixote and Witt, we see that what appears foolish or mad from a cynical perspective may in fact be a deeper fidelity to hope—a hope that dares to see, and live toward, a better world.

What if today’s would-be prophets took a cue from our three heroes: Quixote, Kierkegaard, and Private Witt?

If they took to their platforms and espoused “another world,” described evocatively and passionately and if they did so with such commitment, they may appear just a bit off or a bit strange.

But would their message break through all the noise and contempt of our very loud culture of hot takes?

Could such visions not further divide us, could they even be a balm for all the wounds of a broken people?

Only singing in the key of the prophetic, or rather, only singing in its basest and harshest tones is a perilous proposition on several fronts.

For starters, it gives a faint and shallow account of the sacred tradition of Christianity, especially if it is divorced from a fuller message including pastoral, liturgical, and general proclamation communication. “Prophetic only” preaching is prone to trapping our imagination in what Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” ventures into alternative legalisms, and appears disinterested in the perils of church decline or the rise in religious “nones.”

While the prophets found in the Hebrew scriptures often describe profound moments of religious ecstasy, experience, and conversion (i.e. transcendence) that initiate their public messages about justice (i.e. immanence) and confronting the powers and principalities (See Isaiah 6), if one were to listen to most prophetic messages today, I bet they would notice a steady diet focused on the immanent sphere.

By immanent sphere I mean that which appears separable from the transcendent. So, it is a more “this worldly” or “horizontal” orientation against a “vertical” one of transcendence. An immanent focus can include, but is not limited to: ethics, morality, duty, obligation, justice, etc.

In the words of a country preacher of my youth, the danger of staying here is that it can slide into a “works righteousness” message. He meant, of course, that what makes one justified before God is what they do, i.e. “good works” rather than all those influenced by Reformation readings of Paul would demand: “grace alone” justifies us before the Lord (Eph. 2:8-9).

Religion in the immanent frame only has value by infusing goodness into society.

If it is the case that “prophetic-only” preaching settles our imaginations only in the flattened world of history before our eyes, then we risk the continuation of modernity’s disenchanting spirit. If all things sacred are tied to our material and finite experience, then there can be no magic, no mysticism, nor transfiguration of the world.

It is important to recall that this is not a problem with prophetic messaging from all ages, indeed the ancients rooted their calls for justice in a transcendent source (see: Ezekial 1, Habakkuk 2:20, Isaiah 6:1-5). But, in our day of post-enlightenment social imaginaries, issues of immanence are more prominent than ones that are associated with the transcendent sphere.

Charles Taylor discusses the way our premodern social imaginary shifted with modernity and into a so-called secular time with words like flattening, direct access, horizontal, and disembedding in Modern Social Imaginaries. He writes, “a purely secular time-understanding allows us to imagine society horizontally, unrelated to any ‘high points,’ where the ordinary sequence of events touches higher time, and therefore without recognizing any privileged persons or agencies, such as kings or priests, who stand and mediate at such alleged points.”

Importantly these “high points” of a premodern narration reach the heavens and include the very heart of divinity.

The premodern way of seeing the world included pilgrimages where people went to sacred places and were transformed along the journey. Contrast that with the modern social imaginary. It has only tourism with ideal destinations to see, consume, maybe even to photograph for Instagram posts. They are locations to be marked off a “bucket list.” Been there, done that!

Time was received differently too. The premodern world understood time with a “vertical” dimension according to Taylor. The seasons, the weeks, and years of life intersect with eternity—thus sacred calendars told a bigger story of life and meaning.

Today, our time is marked by markets of production and consumption. With no transcendent intersection, life/time flies forward in space like an arrow, never touching the heights of the eternal. Our only hope in this imaginary is to improve conditions for people as we progress (hopefully) through society. Scarcely, however, can the modern imaginary produce hope rooted in divine intervention, or suffering to be redeemed in some deep, existential way.

James K.A. Smith commenting on Taylor’s read of the shifting attitudes after the likes of Adam Smith and John Locke asserts,

with Locke and Smith we see a new emphasis: particularly economic benefit. Humans are seen as fundamentally engaged in an ‘exchange of services,’ so the entire cosmos is seen anthropocentrically as the arena for this economy. What happens in the ‘new providence,’ then, is a ‘shrinking’ of God’s purposes, an ‘economizing’ of God’s own interests: “God’s goals for us shrink to the sing end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us.’ So even our theism becomes humanized, immanentized, and the telos of God’s providential concern is circumscribed within immanence.

Taylor himself writes, that we can see after the 18th century in “apologetics, and indeed, much preaching, is less and less concerned with sin as a condition we need to be rescued from through some transformation of our being,” which would require an openness to transcendence, “and more with sin as wrong behavior which can be persuaded, trained or disciplined to turn our backs on. This concern with morality of correct conduct has been observed by many historians of the period. Religion is narrowed to moralism.”

This is the point, “prophetic-only” preaching done in a social imaginary that only ever reinforces things having to do with this world and what we are supposed to do within it reduces the spiritual life down to a list of do’s and don’ts. And it functions on a personal level as much as a societal-institutional one.

Another helpful way to see how these shifts in the social imaginary impact our moral/religious imaginations comes through the theological ethics of Stanley Hauerwas.

Throughout Hauerwas’ entire project exists a recurring critique about reducing ethics to language having to do with “rights.” Rights language dominates Western thought. This is specifically true of the American starting point for thinking about ethics, justice, and community life.

But have you ever noticed that rights are easily and ceaselessly contested? They hardly seem fully established, let alone immutable. Once a right has been accepted, it raises questions about other rights and entities. This is to say nothing about their moral or ontological grounds—where do rights come from? What gives rights their ultimate value?

In a flattened, immanentized world, rights, which draw morality into the legal framework, are the very best we can do. But Hauerwas is quick to point out that Rights language is never enough for the Christian point of view. For example, he writes:

Christian thinkers, above all, should have been among the first to criticize the attempt to model the moral life primarily on the analogy of law. Instead, fearing moral anarchy, like our philosophical colleagues, Christian ethicists assumed that questions of the ‘right’ were prior to the questions of the ‘good,’ that moral principles were more fundamental than virtues, that a coherent morality required a single primary principle from which all others could be derived or tested, and that the central task of morality was to help us resolve difficult moral quandaries.

In places like The Peaceable Kingdom as well as A Community of Character Hauerwas critiques modern political liberalism for ascribing to politics the job of preserving freedom for individuals by judging and weighing competing rights.

Indeed, the endless disputing over rights exists because there is nothing higher or more primary within the flattened, modern world. According to Hauerwas however, “the good” is primary before morality, and virtue is necessary before “rights.”

Hauerwas will ultimately suggest that the church is the community of faithful witness and practice. It is formed in and through virtues revealing that which transcends rights. The church just so happens to believe that all of this takes place within the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

To put a fine point on it, rights language is not enough for the Christian tradition, because it is founded in something prior, or deeper, and in moral language this is where we venture into the language of virtue, which is tied to the good, the beautiful and the true.

A New Legalism

Given this, discerning how “prophetic-only” preaching might become a new legalism does not require much imagination.

I say, “new legalism,” because when I hear the term “legalism,” I tend to fall back into my boyhood church experience of camp meeting revivals. Then and there I heard many lessons where legalism was compared to “works righteousness,” or at least a stodgy set of rules one can follow that will ensure you “make it into heaven.”

Legalism has the ring of moralism. It is rigid, literal, graceless, and in the poor hermeneutics of many preachers I heard growing up, it is something associated with The Pharisees—the “black hats” of the gospels. Oh, how easy it is to become reductive and thus destructive with ancient, yet well-worn texts.

I remember the feelings of moralistic legalism in my faith training as a child well.

We were the “city kids” in a mostly rural church—a place we only went to because of my mother’s childhood faith. When she decided to seek out God as an adult she knew nowhere else to turn except for the church her momma loved.

It was a loving community, if not a little misguided at times. Indeed, I owe them a debt of gratitude for shaping me in so many ways.

But try as our Sunday School teachers did, my siblings and I never shook off our “city kid,” public school, Simpson’s watching veneer. The parents of other kids made it clear to us that it would certainly be better if we went to a private Christian school, a rural school, or something different.

Certain movies and music were to be shunned, (most of those were the ones my mom let me watch and listen to), and I knew that amongst the worst things I could ever do were drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex.

I remember walking with my girlfriend at church camp. We were going to the “fireside” room for dinner. As we walked, we passed by the camp director. He was a much-loved youth minister from another church—I really looked up to him.

He gave me a sideways glance and said, “avoid the very appearance of evil.”

All I ever wanted to do around this guy was impress him. Had I just disappointed him in some way? Was walking with a girl to dinner a sign of something more sinister?

I sheepishly asked him what he meant.

“Think about it, just think about it,” he told me with a long-lasting side eye.

He presented himself as a wizened sage seeing something no one else could. His goal was achieved that day, and I suppose every day since. I am still thinking about it.

It caused me to look over my shoulder for a spiritual cop to weigh in on all my actions (good or bad), my whole life long. I grew up in the height of purity culture for sure, and I have emotional scars to prove it.

Most Christian legalisms of this type were interpersonal, individual, and moralistic in nature. Yet, “prophetic-only” preaching is just as capable of producing the same disastrous spiritual effects as moralistic and shame-guided teachings of the purity culture were.

The primary difference between the two is that one is inward facing and the other is more outward facing. The outward sense concerns social realities which are often conflated with political realities.

How can appeals to justice or public morality be as legalistic or moralistic as my home-grown course in moralistic spirituality?

Episode one of season one of the comedy show Portlandia does a brilliant job of satirizing culture associated with progressive political ideologies. It makes fun of the progressive orthodoxy surrounding inclusion and care for those overlooked. In so doing, it shows how the rules can become so rigid, it has the opposite effect by harming people in the process or at least stands in their way of flourishing life.

The episode features a well-intentioned couple dining out. After hearing about their “farm to fork” chicken, they decided to put a hold on dinner to visit the farm where it was raised. There they fall under the sway of a charismatic cult leader, more than their dinner was upended. They become members of the commune. Their new life is trance-like and it must be, because in their right mind they would never have wanted it.

The episode’s “b story” is about two militant store clerks, more devoted to their cause than to their store’s success. A customer walks into a feminist bookstore and is met with a barrage of bizarrely strict ideological rules. She can’t use the bathroom unless she buys something. The clerks question her choice of purchase while lecturing her on privilege and moral ranking.

When she attempts to buy a book, she’s offered instead a class on protest organizing—because subscribing to a movement apparently matters more than a book sale.

The point is that knowing all the nuances of every issue might just stand in the way of hospitality and goodwill. As the show progresses throughout its seasons, the same store clerks violate their own beliefs of radical inclusion—it seems no one is ideologically pure enough to stand under their moral scrutiny.

Indeed, if all preaching amounts to what you should and should not do, and if the language of rights and ethical strictness is the height of our moral imagination, then legalism shadows right behind.

Neither progressives nor conservatives are immune. The same must be said for those who think in terms of smaller communities and those who think in terms of large systems.

“Prophetic-only” preaching can cause seekers who are in desperate need of forgiveness or overcoming shame to drown under the weight of a list rules to follow discovering that they are already in violation of things they never knew about (this is often the experience people have in attempting ethical consumerism).

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Third, and finally, “prophetic-only” preaching can functionally follow the “law of diminishing returns” for a spiritual community. This is why I suggest that it appears uninterested in church growth.

I know church growth is a real conundrum for many people. And for good reason. At its worst, church growth trades on the culture of capitalism and consumerism in exchange for more “butts in seats.” Often, this occurs at the expense of real community, spiritual growth, and allowing the church a voice in wider, community concerns.

In my own community, for instance, whenever there is a need for a faith leader to speak out on a public concern like needs of the unhoused, or on some immoral legislation, rarely is it ever the voice of our mega-church leaders speaking out or organizing some form of resistance.

Their ministries tend to focus on the personal spiritual growth of their attenders (often never moving beyond basic catechesis), and very rarely on systemic, social concerns.

On the other hand, if churches do not grow and if the inevitable decline follows stagnation, what does it matter if the pulpit is blaring out how to be a better society—if no one is there to listen?

At least for the Christian tradition, sacred speech is meant to bless the community. And at least one thing that the community is meant to do is to continue to share the same message to the wider world, to be a blessing, as it were.

In the barest sense, concern for spreading the message is part and parcel of the church’s identity.

Yet in my experience, churches that focus on a “prophetic-only” message from the pulpit tend to be less concerned with growth, or the conversion of individuals. These sorts of churches are interested in practicing a message of radical inclusion as a way of honoring their prophetic values which critique a social world where grave exclusion persists.

This is a good thing.

But with all things good, there is a way that it can be distorted into something less than desired.

Stanley Hauerwas says in After Christendom? “a church that only aims to be inclusive risks losing the very narrative that makes inclusion intelligible. The gospel is about transformation, not just welcome.”

Now a truly prophetic message must not end with simple inclusion, it is in keeping with its internal logic, interested in the transformation of selves and communities; to achieve this, there must be at least a passing interest in spreading the message.

I have spent the last year trying to get colleagues interested in studying ways to make our preaching more connective with secular audiences. But interest is light amongst my denominational colleagues.

Instead, our cohort has shown far more fascination with gathering to discuss the current trends in Christian Nationalism. And I totally get it; Christian Nationalism is one of the single greatest issues facing the contemporary church. It is one of the fastest growing church flavors in our culture.

Christian Nationalism is inherently idolatrous according to most traditional Christian interpretations, and it trades in racist and dehumanizing language. It appears to be at the growing edge of the church’s share of the cultural polarization we are all experiencing today.

It is very important to consider, no doubt. And so, our cohort has convened a whole season of meetings, interviews, book discussions, and conversations for us to consider this topic.

As I participate, I am not shocked that my colleagues are serving politically homogenous (or close to it) congregations that are more than ambivalent about Christian Nationalism, indeed it is the bogeyman at the door. Yet I do not think that there is a threat of this errant theology infiltrating their pews.

Worrying about Christian Nationalism, holding discussions and book studies on it, surely is doing something for this community. I think it is acting as a purification and identity ritual. It allows my cohort to say this does not represent us, this bad faith approach is “them.” By focusing on it, we get to purify ourselves against its theological taint and we get to remain on the side of the just.

And if that is our aim, then we will receive our reward in full.

Someone might protest that these meetings will help us preach against it on Sunday morning. That is true, and Christian Nationalism is just one idolatrous impulse that the church must exorcise from its life. It is one among many! It deserves to be spoken of from the pulpit.

But what if the sermon is just another moment of theological virtue signaling as you preach to the choir—to a congregation that already affirms the same message?

It is also true that congregations need to hear affirmations of belief, but in my context, I have been left wondering if the desire to study and think about this topic has outweighed our specific congregational needs.

Are my colleagues exercising their cultural angst or are they genuinely in alignment with where their people are in the spiritual journey?

Many of these colleagues are serving congregations in decline. What dominates the diet of their spiritual teaching from the pulpit?

Setting Christian Nationalism and its growing concern aside for the moment, most of their sermons address public, and sometimes outright political issues far more than things like overcoming addiction, repentance, contemplative prayer, making other disciples, the supernatural, or other personal expressions of faith and practice.

So, when I heard the crickets chirp after bringing up the issue of learning about preaching to more greatly impact our secular world or finding ways that appeal to a culture of church decline, I was no longer surprised.

It is as if our shared faith only matters if it brings large, sweeping social change—it appears much less interested in personal piety, or orthodox theological belief.

Indeed, the trend in the mainline church over the course of the 20th century was to move away from theological distinctives of denominations and move toward a shared social/political outlook.

Ted Smith comments of the situation in churches today, “there are things that mark a person’s identity in a way that religious affiliation might have in the past...the transition from religious affiliation to a secular political identity is especially smooth when congregations have already downplayed distinctive doctrine and ritual, making them instrumental to ethical and political commitments that are the real sources of identity.”

Many of my colleagues are not far from “prophetic-only” preaching.

I can imagine a response where one might respond, “well yes, the Christian faith is far more interested in the good done in the world than it is in helping people in their piety.”

I imagine they’d look to the great story of The Good Samaritan as a case in point (Luke 10: 25-37). There, a question is put to Jesus, “teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?” This is a question of piety, devotion, and personal concern.

Jesus’ famous answer has to do with loving God and neighbor.

“Who is my neighbor” asks the curious person, appearing a little defensive.

In response, Jesus narrates one of the most important stories for shaping the moral imagination in human history.

A man has been mugged and left half dead. Religious figures come and pass by on the other side of the road. Are they heartless? No, they are upright and personally devout. It is a religious problem to touch a dead body, of course. They would not dare sully their moral uprightness before God.

For the half-dead man, hope slips away.

Then, an unlikely hero emerges. A Samaritan passes by, but he does not just pass by. He does all the compassionate work of interpersonal care, health care, and financial care so that this one is rightly brought to health and restored.

Religiously, a Samaritan is not in good moral or religious standing before God, obviously, or at least that is what the audience believes. But because he acted with compassion and justice, he proved his righteousness.

Clearly, one might think it is far more important to focus on the prophetic teachings, for they push people to do what needs to be done. And that, after all, is far better than any personal belief, or pious behavior of an individual.

That must be more important than speaking in a way that gets folks to show up to church.

But what if the choice itself is the problem?

What if we have accepted a false choice between personal transformation and social transformation, between piety and justice, between evangelism and prophecy?

A preacher I heard recently gave me a wonderfully simple image for another possibility.

All it takes is a basketball—and the ability to dribble with both hands.

In Part Three: The Crossover Dribble.

The second Trump administration was still only a few weeks old. His executive orders were piling up like an overwhelming snowdrift blocking a garage door. Each day’s headlines were filled with commentary and critique. No matter which side of the aisle you fall on, I think all can agree that the pace was dizzying.

One Sunday morning, I opened my email to a bevy of messages about the political state of things. One was from an admired mentor. I could sense the anxiety in her words, “how will the pulpit address these things?” A list of political comments, actions, and executive orders were bulleted. My blood pressure immediately shot like a rocket.

Prior to preaching with the newspaper (to invoke Karl Barth’s notion about preaching a two-handed approach), I already had a message planned. It was from the lectionary, so it was seasonal and theologically it was part of a series we were enmeshed in. Added to this strange brew were two more complicated ingredients: it was one of those dreaded “special days” on the church calendar when some non-liturgical/biblical/theological notion was to be addressed, as per congregational expectations. The other contender is that it was the kick-off to our church’s centennial year of celebration.

For a congregation these all fit into the important bucket. Her email poked my already underlying anxiety. I had no idea how I was going to address all of that, and I was not convinced that all of it needed to be addressed. But it was my job to do so and to somehow tie them all together. Or, at least, that is the expectation.

Ours is certainly an age of political and social angst. But to be fair, all ages are. It seems that humans suffer a bias some might call “presentism,” where we prioritize the ideas and assumptions of today over and against the past. Our understanding of the world is superior than understandings of the past and our problems outrank past problems as well—it seems that for good or ill the lyrics are true, “anything you can do, I can do better,” we say to the ages.

The past and those who occupied such waters are easy punching bags. We can all too simply and reductively levy non-contextual critiques of dismissal against them. It is the case that when current calamities or injustices befall our world today, we speak of their unprecedented nature or of a time when such things would not have occurred. Yet, when I think about it with any sustained focus, I remember similar hand wringing in past decades about other injustices and even administrations.

In the Trump era, I often hear opponents speak in psalms of laud for the likes of George W. Bush, but that was not the rhetoric when his administration was in power. No, opponents to his administration were just as apocalyptic in their assessments then as they are now. We were just as polarized. We cried out just as much for unity. Our world then, as it does now, feels wounded.

None of this means, of course, that things are not in fact worse now. Nor does it mean that President Trump will automatically be looked back on with praise for making our country and world better than when he found it; indeed, appraising history is an exercise in reading tea leaves. I will leave that work for future minds to sort out.

All I really mean to say is that for religious, ethical, and value leaders with a platform, the pressure to speak out and against the powers that be, or to “speak truth to power” to use a well-worn phrase about prophecy, is an unrelenting pressure tied with urgency.

I do not pretend to know when and who should speak out prophetically in our day. My gut feeling is that prophetic speech is primarily an occasional vocation and given my faith, I tend to think this is a Spirit-led endeavor. This is to say that the spirit moves when the time is right. It is also to suggest that prophecy is not a sustainable career—no, many good prophets died early deaths.

Is it really better to burn out than to fade away?

Let’s put that curiosity aside for a moment. My main concern is personal—how am I handling emails like the one I got that day, indeed on many days? My question concerns the office I occupy as a pastor of a church with a modest public platform—how and when am I to speak out in the prophetic tone?

It was far more than an email that brought that question to the fore. During those first weeks of the second Trump administration as well as with every other major move like DOGE, the bombings of Iran, or the 2025 Budget Bill my social media accounts are filled with professors, denominational leaders, authors, and others with a much larger public platform than I have, saying things like the following:

“If you have a pulpit, now is your time to speak.”

“Time to change your sermons for tomorrow.”

“Silence is approval for this action.”

There was so much more than that. Do these people really have so many followers on their socials that by pontificating thus, it makes a difference?

Though I am aware that the pulpit I occupy is something of a public platform, I am aware that I only have it because I am called to shepherd a congregation of political conservatives, progressives, theological mixes, new believers, ecumenical types, reactionaries, those who keep their politics to themselves, Generation Alphas, the elderly, international students, and people of varied race and socio-economic background.

One person in the mix may come to worship looking for help to make sense of the new budget and its implications for their parents’ Medicaid. And another attends looking for hope amidst their breast cancer diagnosis. Presumably, all are interested in the general question of what it means to follow Jesus Christ (we are a Christian church) in this century which implies political issues as much as it does learning how to pray and study the Bible.

How should I navigate the challenging social world of a congregation in a time where prophetic speech is necessary?

Hot Takes and Prophecy

Without a doubt, if I commented on every social issue or news story that required moral and ethical analysis, then I would burn my congregation out. I would also burn myself out. How could I keep up with it all?

My sense is that when I enter the realm of “news-junky” my struggles with anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal rise. With the media saturated, frenetic 24-hour news cycle, and digital ubiquity, speaking of such issues would make one like a real life “chicken little” adorned by a robe and stole.

But even if it were not so, congregations are communities going about living lives. They raise children, deal with death, get bored, try to break bad habits, and have goals. In short, folks are out there just living as best they can. Sometimes what they yearn for is more than anything else, is hope and a sense of purpose. Purpose amidst the fluorescent lighted cubicle.

This makes tolerance for the prophetic tone quite low, because it can create the feeling that no matter what one does or what we do together, it is never enough—spiritual Sisyphus’s all of us in our own way and time!

I recall being a much younger minister at a gathering of local clergy. One present senior clergy was a pastor of a large, historic congregation. He had quite a reputation for his skills in the pulpit. He graciously took me aside to chat about my work, to “pour into a younger minister,” you might say. I appreciated the chance to unburden myself to an expert!

I told him I struggled to know when to get prophetic or to directly address things some might call “political.”

Quite confidently, as though he had this worked out for some time, he said, “you are allowed two prophetic sermons a year. Congregations will only really tolerate two such sermons in churches that are historically Anglo-Saxon in makeup.”

Two is not much. But when you are the pastor of a church you do not have the same luxury of the guest preacher in the pulpit who is leaving town after the final “amen.”

“You have to live with these people,” he reminded me.

We will set aside the obvious point that historically African American churches have a greater tradition of prophetic preaching and note that this colleague was telling me that from a church’s regular preacher there is a real limit to what they can say on such matters. I had better pick and choose wisely.

Over the years this advice has served me well. Anecdotally I can affirm my senior colleague’s observations. But has anything changed since those early days in my ministry that might edit those guidelines?

Yes, but not the political uncertainty, nor our world’s penchant for creating unjust systems.

What has changed most clearly is the digital nature of the contemporary world.

It has been much commented on that digital spaces have overtaken embodied physical spaces for social connection. With social media’s ubiquity it now appears that every person with an account has a public platform. This is a truly novel notion in the history of political and religious communication. In most of human history platforms went to the smallest number of people—having one was a rare responsibility.

The prophets of old had platforms. How biblical prophets got their platforms is no mere formula. The same is true for late day prophets such as Martin Luther King Jr., and William Barber. Studying them shows that on a case-by-case basis, the prophet is one who has a message in a particular moment, and when called to speak, they spoke—truth to power, as they say.

The strange mix of message, gifting, moment, and need created the platform. At times that platform was a one-off speech (the “man of God” who rebukes Eli I Samuel 2:27-36), at other times it was through a demonstration (Jeremiah and the clay jar), still others through writing, or even some form of performance art (Ezekial’s lying down, Hosea’s marriage).

What is primary for the prophet is more in substance than in style. The prophet must be credible through a lived integrity, faithful to the covenant and to the heart of God for the world, they need to be engaged with the injustice of this world, and then they must voice a new or an alternative image of the world to that of the despotic status quo.

This work can take place in many forms, but it is a given that by confronting the world that is with what God intends it to be, the result often is rife with conflict, reprisal, and pain.

Ours is a different age from the mid-century Civil Rights movement, and even more so than the age(s) of biblical prophets. In the digital landscape of our time, anyone can be platformed. Indeed, each social media outlet or YouTube account is an opportunity to reach an audience.

And the digital linking of society means that with the news of injustice far and wide—one can pay witness to real time horrors a half a world away and consume countless points of view on it at the same time.

The situation is further complicated by algorithms. It is old news that social media, live streaming content, and almost everything else is run by algorithms designed to keep your attention on the interface you are using. The best way to keep your attention is to show you what you love or what you hate. Hate, or what angers people, is the most effective at keeping people’s attention, it turns out.

So, whatever comments you make on social media will only ever add to the algorithm and it will serve some end that was not your design in the first place. Your content will become someone else’s tool.

This is a dangerous situation for those inspired by justice and prophetic speech. Just like the generalized anxiety it is creating in generations of people, it can create in people anxiety (felt need) to speak out now and on everything that one deems as evil in the world. I expect that there might even be a real FOMO for not utilizing your platform to speak out.

Allowing a fashion of any type, especially political fashions to drive moral concern is dangerous. And if fashions can be shaped by algorithms, then the very things we find ourselves attending to might be out of place.

What is the practical result of this hyperfocus, hyperawareness, and hypertension to use one’s platform?

An endless cacophony of moral speech (sometimes in a legalistic tone) propagates without end. The volume is loud, because everyone with a platform, which is theoretically most people, are convicted that they must use it to “say what they need to say” (cue the John Mayer song), and if they have even a cursory knowledge of the prophetic tradition, they say it in a loud and confrontational tone.

Clearly, I am suggesting that our culture makes the prophetic more difficult to deliver and much more difficult to take seriously.

If everyone has a platform, then does anyone really have a platform—or are we all just shouting at each other and discounting one another’s views in the process?

In practice what ends up happening on a social media post, or a red-carpet interview at an awards show, or a demonstration at a university is a series of sternly spoken “hot takes.”

And a series of “hot takes” does not a prophecy make.

As one who is asked to speak week after week, I often ask myself if all I am doing is offering my hot take on whatever topic I find important. Or am I conflating policies with values, and thus politics and morality? Or do I genuinely have a word from God and for the people?

Implied in all of this is that the prophetic tone is often a hard pill to swallow. Like Kendrick Lamar at an NFL halftime show, it can be creative and rousing, yet supremely contentious. Like punk rock group Pussy Riot at an Eastern Orthodox Church, it can be performative, vexing, and irreverent. Like Greta Thunberg it can appear naive and exasperating to listeners from another generation, or who have an alternative vision of society.

Like Dr. Martin Luther King, the prophetic quest leaves no stone untouched—it calls for the whole society to change, by standing up and articulating an alternative vision of the world; indeed, there are only two options “chaos or community.”

And like our prophet friends from the scriptures, it can lead to a showdown with the powerful that ends in their own lives being lost.

If this incomplete list is telling about the tone and role of the prophetic, then you can see my point: articulating an alternative order of our world, speaking truth to power, standing for those on the bottom of the stack is always confrontational, even when done in a calm and serene tone a la Pete Seeger singing protest folk songs in court.

And when the confrontational prophetic impulses are tied with our digital and media saturated age (and other toxic ingredients not listed) much fuel is added to today’s fire of public discord and polarization: speak more, speak louder, draw more lines in the sand, speak passionately, speak simply and thus without nuance!

Should sacred speech be prophetic?

“Yes,” the chorus of voices shouted.

Can we agree that sacred, prophetic speech has the purpose of healing?

That is less clear if my inbox is any indication.

No, my inboxes are full of pleas that I cease being silent and take up boldness, and so on. I do not take this personally, however. I know these are mass appeals for the class of people I belong to who have some sort of platform to speak.

Yet, when I survey the resources at my disposal, I rarely hear voices that lead like Brueggeman did when he wrote, “the practice of prophetic ministry is not some special thing done two days a week. Rather, it is done in, with, and under all acts of ministry—as much in counseling as in preaching, as much in liturgy as in education. It concerns a stance and posture or a hermeneutic about the world of death and the word of life that can be brought to light in every context.”

For Brueggeman, the prophetic is not only something that occurs behind a confrontational pulpit. It is a sacred action that undergirds all religious speech no matter what the forum is.

Similar to what I have been saying, Brueggeman says that the penetrating action of the prophetic is meant to break through numbness, and one way to achieve that is “rage and anger,” but he adds, “the numbness is more likely to be penetrated by grief and lament...the public sharing of pain is one way to let the reality sink in.”

According to a master interpreter and deliverer of prophetic material, the prophetic task need not be sung in a singular and harsh register.

But that raises another question. What happens when that register becomes not merely a voice within Christian proclamation, but virtually the only voice we know how to use?

That is where the danger of prophetic preaching becomes something else entirely.

In Part Two: When Prophetic Preaching Becomes Another Legalism.

Yet, we do not dismiss feelings. They are important. They are at least data points about how we are relating to ourselves and the world. But it is important to remember they ARE NOT EVERYTHING.

I say all of that to you today, because I am reminded of a lovely insight offered by Jesuit spiritual writer Anthony de Mello. In the book Awareness, he says,

“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”

Feelings are important. They are powerful things. But instead of assuming our feelings are descriptors about how things are in the world, de Mello reminds us that they shape the way we interpret the world and others. And that matters. (Sometimes we need to work on ourselves so that we can better understand others and the world!)

But even knowing that, it is still possible to feel blue, disconnected, and disenchanted with the world and our place in it. It is still possible to despair. What this teaching reminds us is that we should not make hasty judgments about others or the world due to our feelings. Feelings are data points, don’t forget. It is much more useful to become curious about the way we feel. Before making assumptions or conclusions about the world around you, ask:

-Why do I feel that way?

-Is there some fear that is at the root of this feeling?

-What if my feelings are incorrect?

-What does my feeling tell me about what is important to me?

Questions like those are helpful because they can help you learn more about the sources of your feelings. They are also helpful because they can change your relationship with your feelings.

What does it mean to change your relationship with your feelings?

Well, you no longer have to believe that your feelings are the measure of truth. You can separate yourself from your feelings too. Your feelings no longer need to be associated with your total identity—they are just interesting data points. They are clues to our interior world. They are important, but they can and need to be managed.

Perhaps all of this is in some measure a meditation on St. Paul’s teaching from 2 Corinthians 10:5, “…and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.” Certainly, taking thoughts captive also means we take feelings captive too.

Not long ago, my thirteen-year-old daughter heard a speaker. When I asked about her impressions, she admitted she was put off by the message—precisely because the male speaker cast himself as the hero. Worse still, the story climaxed with his good deed “saving a woman’s soul.” My daughter couldn’t articulate all her feelings, but she was clearly alienated at that moment. Her instinct was right: stories framed around the preacher’s heroism rarely edify.

Another valuable maxim I’ve carried with me concerns storytelling itself: “Don’t just re-tell the story—re-live it. Let me see what you see.” I can still hear a mentor’s voice saying this. Stories should never serve as throwaway anecdotes. If you use one, let it be more than a point. Let it offer an experience. That principle has shaped me profoundly.

But are these “rules,” or are they simply pointers? I’m not sure what exactly qualifies something as a rule. Still, whatever we call this genre of codes, maxims, and guidelines, I am drawn to it. Significant ideas, expressed with economy of words, carry clarity and weight. Their apparent simplicity does not cheapen their depth; it sharpens it.

What follows, then, is a series of “rules” I would commend to preachers, homilists, and teachers in our time—a time marked by church decline and secularity’s endless buffet of meaning-making options.

1. Listen, Listen, Listen. Listening is the greatest tool in communication. As a communicator of sacred truths, one must first listen to God and the sacred texts. One must also listen to the needs of the community and the world. All this listening must happen long before the pen touches paper. Even during delivery, the speaker benefits from listening—attending to the Spirit’s leading and the congregation’s responses, making sensitive adjustments in real time. Listening is the superpower of communicators of all kinds. For me, listening is so important, I will often refrain from scrolling on my phone while alone at a restaurant or in a waiting room. By listening and observing, I find myself picking up bits of conversation, and interesting behavior—all of it is ripe for storytelling and illustration material.

2. Allow Space. Breathe. Practice the Sacred Pause. Reflection is rarely built into our schedules, even in church. Messages are often delivered and immediately followed by the net item on the agenda. Congregants rarely sit in silence afterward, pondering the message; more often, they are discussing dinner plans or sports schedules. Creating reflective pauses in worship gives the congregation time to let the message sink in. Such moments also support mental health—a rare gift in today’s fast-paced culture.

A colleague in contemporary evangelical circles once dismissed silence in worship as a “death-nail,” insisting that services must be scripted to the minute. I suggested that planned, intentional silence differs from accidental silence—and in my experience, it does. Before preaching, I often invite the congregation to take a few cleansing breaths, grounding both mind and body. This prepares them to receive the message—and helps me inhabit the space to deliver it.

3. Summarize Each Message with an Aphorism. Your aphorism might serve as your message’s “big idea,” a guiding principle, or even your closing line. Its placement is flexible; what matters is the clarity it brings. Crafting an aphorism forces the speaker to understand the core meaning of their message. For the listener, it provides a memorable takeaway. Aphorisms function like poetry, riddles, or songs—windows of meaning through which light can enter.

4. Avoid Third-Person Plural Where Possible. Using “they” to refer to groups risks demonization and othering. This is especially dangerous when the groups exist in the present—political, racial, ethnic, or religious. Respectfully naming people, rather than reducing them to a collective “they,” preserves dignity and avoids diminishing entire communities.

5. Let Your Scholarship Fade into the Background. Public speaking carries the temptation to prove intelligence through extensive research. Intellectual honesty demands acknowledgment of sources, but the preacher should avoid letting scholarship overshadow clarity. Mentioning Greek word origins or etymology without purpose becomes a gimmick. Instead, let your deep study inform your teaching quietly. Scholarship is the foundation, not the centerpiece; it should support understanding, not obscure it.

6. Let the Text Be the Text; Don’t Demythologize. Historical-critical methods and Bultmannian demythologizing have value, but biblical texts have purposes beyond the historian’s lens. Allow them to speak in the ways they were written. Let the text live, breathe, and convey its own power. That is where the magic happens. I never told my children a fable or parable and then spent the whole time applying the historical-critical method or “literalistically” explained metaphors—the whole purpose is lost. I avoid explaining jokes too, for that matter. Let the text be the text, its purpose is self-evident.

7. Avoid Ideological Preaching. Ideology presumes assumptions no longer debated but simply accepted. Preachers risk framing the Gospel as inherently “conservative” or “progressive,” reinforcing polarized thinking. Sacred speech should transcend such constraints, cutting through ideological silos and offering the congregation a vision beyond narrow, partisan lenses.

8. Let Your Message Flow Like Music. I rarely use notes or manuscripts. Instead, I know the beats I want to hit, the stories to tell, and the big idea. The way I move from beat to beat is extemporaneous, guided by the congregation, the space, and, I hope, the Spirit. Consider your sermon like music, with moments of legato, staccato, crescendo, and decrescendo. The message should be felt as much as it is heard.

9. Move with the Audience in Mind. Gestures, posture, and stage movement can reinforce meaning. Symbolic movement—walking from one side of the chancel to the other as the story of scripture unfolds—can subtly illustrate narrative progression without overt explanation. Audience-centered movement enhances comprehension and connection.

10. Use Silence Wisely. Silence is sacred space. It allows the point to land, invites reflection, and can heighten drama. But misuse it as manipulation undermines trust and holiness. Avoid coercive pauses that shame or intimidate; instead, let silence serve as a vessel for contemplation and presence.

11. Everything Is Study. Sacred communication demands constant engagement with texts, theology, culture, human development, and daily life. Stories, jokes, historical references, statistics, or anecdotes may all serve as illustration. Sources of inspiration are everywhere: literature, films, conversations, sports, media—life itself is a classroom for sermon material.

12. Exegete the Human Condition. Knowledge of scripture or tradition alone is insufficient. Understanding the human experience—what motivates, troubles, and excites people today—makes preaching relevant and meaningful. Study contemporary life as deeply as the text itself.

13. Study with the Saints of Old. The ancients were brilliant and creative. Beyond presentism, we can discover insight and wisdom from past thinkers, leaders, and exegetes. Their perspectives illuminate human nature and provide a lens for understanding today’s challenges.

14. Be Positive Whenever Possible. The Gospel is easier to describe negatively—what it is not—but strive to offer positive examples. Avoid saccharine cheerfulness or toxic positivity; instead, provide generative ideas, hope-filled examples, and illustrations that inspire transformation.

15. Acknowledge the Sacredness of Your Audience. I learned from Fred Rogers the power of recognizing the sacredness of those who listen. Bowing at the beginning of a talk or sermon sets a tone of care and responsibility. Honor the dignity of your listeners—they are entrusted to you for that time.

16. Major in Proleptic Speech and Imagery. Christian faith anticipates the hope of the future by bringing its reality into the present. Preachers must use language and imagery that embodies this proleptic vision, showing how the Gospel transforms here and now.

17. Do not dichotomize the body and soul. Preach an integrated life. Honor the inner life of people, but always connect it to their outer and public world. Honor the body. We do not merely have souls—we are souls. We do not merely have bodies—we are bodies. Resist the temptation to oversimplify through dualism or reductionism. When we do, we end up prioritizing the soul or inner life at the expense of the body, other bodies, and ultimately the created order itself. There is profound richness in exploring spirituality through the lens of the body—through somatic expression, physicality, and embodiment. Don’t miss that richness.

Nolan does some fascinating things with the story that make it feel fresh for contemporary audiences. The acting was superb—Anne Hathaway and John Leguizamo, in particular, stood out to me. The cinematography is breathtaking, the set pieces are magnificent, and I even thought the visual effects were restrained and effective.

But you know me—I can’t simply enjoy a film. I have to have a theological hot take.

Before I offer it, let me say this: I have no interest in a one-to-one cinematic retelling of Homer’s epic. That would never work. Every adaptation must make interpretive decisions. Every filmmaker has to decide what themes to emphasize, what characters to deepen, and what moral vision will drive the story.

Nolan makes some very interesting choices.

Those choices substantially alter the theological and ethical center of Homer’s poem.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is defined by his cunning and cleverness. Those are admirable qualities, but they also feed his greatest vice: hubris. His pride repeatedly prevents him from getting home. That is a simplified reading, of course, but it captures one of the poem’s major themes.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the encounter with Polyphemus.

Odysseus enters the Cyclops’ cave as a poor guest, violating the ancient expectations of hospitality (xenia), one of the highest moral obligations in Homer’s world. In some respects, Odysseus and his men begin to resemble the monsters, while the Cyclops appears—at least initially—to be the wronged party. The episode is morally complicated.

After blinding Polyphemus and escaping, Odysseus cannot resist revealing his true name. It is an act of pure pride, almost like a scene from a mafia film where one crime boss dominates another and says, “Look at me. I did this to you.”

It is insult added to injury.

That single moment changes everything.

Polyphemus calls upon his father, Poseidon, to avenge him, and from that point forward the sea itself becomes Odysseus’ enemy. His long journey home is not merely bad luck; it is, in large part, the consequence of his own pride.

Nolan tells a different story.

His Cyclops is no misunderstood victim, and while the confrontation unfolds in broadly familiar ways, Odysseus never boasts or reveals his identity in a moment of arrogance. Hubris is no longer the central problem.

Instead, Nolan’s Odysseus seems to suffer from something much closer to moral injury or PTSD.

He is a haunted hero.

He is burdened by memory.

He repents of leading his men into destruction.

The monsters he encounters are terrifying, but the deepest monster is the one he carries within himself.

One of Nolan’s most intriguing decisions is his blending of Homer’s mythology with the historical memory of the Bronze Age collapse. Throughout the film people whisper about the coming “Sea Peoples,” mysterious invaders who destroy kingdoms and leave civilizations in ruins.

Whether in Ithaca, Sparta, or elsewhere, the rumor is always the same: destruction is coming from the sea.

Penelope understands this better than anyone. She repeatedly tells Telemachus that Ithaca needs its king—not simply because she longs for her husband, but because a kingdom without a ruler becomes vulnerable.

By the end of the film, however, Odysseus reaches a startling realization.

The Sea Peoples were not someone else.

They were him.

They were his soldiers.

They had become the destructive force haunting the Mediterranean world.

That is a remarkable reinterpretation.

If Homer’s Odysseus is delayed by hubris, Nolan’s Odysseus is nearly destroyed by what violence has done to his soul. In his desperate attempt to accomplish a good end—to win the war and return home—he gradually becomes the very monster he fears.

Christians should find this moral insight familiar.

Augustine called it the libido dominandi—the lust to dominate. Aquinas reminds us that vice slowly deforms the soul. The Reformers likewise understood humanity’s frightening capacity for self-deception. We justify ourselves. We demonize our enemies. We convince ourselves that evil is necessary because our cause is righteous.

How easily the will bends.

How quickly the conscience becomes malformed.

There are other contemporary reinterpretations throughout the film. Circe is portrayed less as Homer’s mysterious divine enchantress and more as the kind of witch familiar from modern fantasy literature. Her story is shaped by concerns about exploitation and male violence. Penelope likewise reflects on how few choices women possess in her world, observing that, had she been born a man, her life would have unfolded very differently.

These are unmistakably contemporary concerns, and Nolan intentionally allows them to shape the ancient narrative.

Whether one agrees with every interpretive decision is almost beside the point.

What I found most fascinating was the shift at the heart of the story.

Homer’s Odysseus is ultimately undone by pride.

Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by trauma.

In Homer’s telling, the great danger is hubris.

In Nolan’s, the great danger is becoming the monster yourself.

That shift says as much about our moral imagination as Homer’s poem said about his.

Did you enjoy scoffing at the ticket prices? Did you relish watching some of the game’s greats near the end of their careers? Were you surprised by a particular team—and, if so, wasn’t that part of the delight?

For me, the best part was what so many others seemed to love: watching people from around the world encounter one another.

I enjoyed the videos and testimonies of visitors falling in love with America and its people. I laughed at the Scottish presence in Boston—and at all the beer drinking that came with it. I felt a small pang of jealousy that I am not Norwegian when I watched their supporters perform the Viking Row.

More than anything, I enjoyed the gathering itself: people from different nations, languages, and cultures inhabiting the same cities, singing in the same streets, and giving themselves to the same game. As a resident of Atlanta, my family ran into visiting families at restaurants, parks, and stores. It was very cool.

Did you know that something like this was part of the World Cup’s original vision?

The tournament emerged, at least in part, from a Catholic imagination and from a distinctly Christian concern for human dignity, meaningful work, social solidarity, and peace. I recently learned this from an excellent episode of NPR’s Throughline, which I commend to you.

Here are a few of the details that stayed with me.

1. The World Cup was influenced by Catholic social thought

One of the lesser-known influences behind the tournament was Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. (Our current Pope Leo took his name because of shared values with this Leo, the values of labor rights, etc).

Jules Rimet, the French lawyer who became president of FIFA and is often called the father of the World Cup, was a devout Catholic. He was deeply influenced by the encyclical’s concern for workers, human dignity, and the bonds that hold society together.

Rimet did not regard sport as mere entertainment. He believed football could cross social divisions, build character, and create solidarity among people who might otherwise remain separated by class, nationality, or politics.

2. Rimet imagined football as an instrument of peace

Rimet’s vision deepened after his experience of the First World War.

Having witnessed the horrors of war, he became convinced that friendship between nations had to be cultivated before the next catastrophe arrived. He believed international sport might provide a peaceful alternative to conflict.

Nations could compete on the field rather than the battlefield.

Ordinary people could encounter one another across national boundaries.

Former enemies could gather around a shared game.

Rimet’s goal was not simply to determine which nation played the best football. He hoped the World Cup might become an institution of peace and reconciliation.

That is an astonishingly ambitious vision for a sporting event.

Maybe you think that the Olympics already achieved these aims. But for Rimet, the Olympic attitude toward amateurism ensured that only wealthy people could compete. He wanted World Cup players to be paid—like the rest of the Rerum Novarum, he was interested in workers’ rights!

3. The tournament was entangled in controversy almost immediately

The idealism did not remain pure for long.

The first World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930. Only a small number of European nations participated, largely because of the cost and difficulty of the long sea voyage. From the beginning, national interests, money, and politics shaped the tournament.

The deeper controversy arrived four years later.

In 1934, Benito Mussolini’s Italy hosted the World Cup. Rimet continued to insist that football could rise above politics, but Mussolini understood perfectly well how sport could be used for political purposes.

The tournament became a propaganda triumph for the Fascist regime. Allegations of intimidation, political pressure, and favorable refereeing surrounded the competition. What had been imagined as a celebration of international friendship became a stage for authoritarian nationalism.

The World Cup had scarcely begun before its founding ideals were being compromised.

4. The World Cup has always carried this contradiction

The World Cup has always possessed two competing identities.

On the one hand, it bears Rimet’s hopeful conviction that shared play can bring human beings together. On the other, it has repeatedly been shaped by nationalism, dictatorship, corruption, commercial excess, and geopolitical conflict.

Its history is not one of innocence.

And yet, for all its contradictions, the World Cup remains one of the few events in which much of the world turns its attention toward the same thing at the same time.

People travel. Strangers sing together. Cities become meeting places. National pride becomes playful, at least for a while. We are reminded that competition does not always require hatred and that difference does not always require distance.

The World Cup has never fulfilled Rimet’s dream of world peace. No tournament could bear such a burden.

But perhaps the togetherness we witnessed this year offered a glimpse of its original grace.

For a few weeks, people from across the world gathered in our streets, our stadiums, our restaurants, and our neighborhoods. They remained different. They cheered for different teams. They wanted different outcomes.

And still, they gathered.

Perhaps that is not peace.

But it may be one of the places peace begins.

A few months ago I realized that my “solitude” wasn’t very spiritual.

Yes, I spent time alone. I got away from the crowds. I even built quiet into my mornings. But I wasn’t really practicing solitude.

The problem was that I was never actually alone.

Every quiet moment was filled with inputs. Music. Podcasts. Audiobooks. Even my exercise became another distraction. I was constantly consuming something. I was never quite bored enough to hear the gentle whispers of God—or honest enough to look deeply at myself.

So I began a new practice.

For the first ten minutes of every morning, I simply try to turn my attention toward God.

Almost immediately, my mind wanders. We call this MONKEY MIND

What do I need to accomplish today?

Did I answer that email?

Did I lock the door?

How am I going to solve that problem?

At first I was incredibly self-critical. I assumed I was bad at prayer. Then I realized something freeing:

A wandering mind is simply part of being human. It's a feature, not a bug, perhaps.

The point isn’t to keep your mind from wandering. The point is to keep returning it to God.

Every return is itself a small act of prayer.

Here are three simple practices that have helped me.

1. Choose a mantra or a sacred image.

I often repeat the opening words of Psalm 121:

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord.”

Sometimes I simply repeat the words.

Sometimes I imagine the hills.

Sometimes I picture myself standing before them, quietly waiting on God.

The goal isn’t to think harder. It’s to give your attention somewhere holy to rest.

2. Don’t fight the monkey mind.

When my thoughts drift, I don’t scold myself anymore.

I simply notice.

“There’s the monkey mind again.”

Then, with gratitude, I return to the Psalm.

Returning is the practice.

Returning is the prayer.

Returning is the gift.

3. If all else fails, breathe.

Sometimes words won’t come.

Sometimes Scripture won’t settle my thoughts.

When that happens, I simply pay attention to my breathing.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Be present.

Prayer begins with attention. If I can do nothing else, I can simply become aware that God is present, and I can be present too.

Prayer has become much gentler for me since I stopped trying to master it.

Years ago, I noticed something similar in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Even black belts will tell you that jiu-jitsu is hard. They’ll often say they’re still not very good at it. Mastery always seems to remain just over the horizon.

Prayer is much the same.

We never really master it.

Nor are we meant to.

The point isn’t perfection.

The point is practice.

So don’t be discouraged if your mind wanders.

Just come back.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Every return is another step toward God.

So, it seems that Stoicism is attractive once more, because humans still suffer. And as Tillich observed in a declining religious milieu, Stoicism is the only religious sensibility our society will have left. For those who have everything one could ever want, Stoicism addresses the unfillable existential needs we humans have. This leads me to my particular interest: what does the growth and climbing influence of Stoicism today suggest for religious speech in this day and time?

First, the growing interest in Stoicism suggests that there is still an openness to sacred ideas within our culture. By its focus on wisdom, virtue, the inner life, and placing one’s existence within a cosmic framework, Stoicism reveals that humans have a need that perhaps only spirituality can answer. The growing interest in it – like the young men joining my book club (see above) – shows that people are seeking spiritual answers to life’s questions and that existential needs are not being met by late modern life. Perhaps that is why so much of modern religious speech is styled in an advice-like manner. But this is not enough. I think popular Stoicism hits deeper than mere advice; it addresses the hard issues of human finitude without resorting to simple, saccharine shortcuts.

Speakers of the sacred would do well to pay attention to Stoicism and make use of its more perennial elements, those that overlap with other traditions, such as the Judeo-Christian tradition. Three specific elements found in Stoicism are helpful jumping-off points for further religious communication in today’s age: Memento Mori, Primacy of Virtue, and Amor Fati.

As mentioned above, memento mori is the remembrance that one will die. Rather than a morbid fascination with one’s own death, memento mori uses contemplation of one’s death to take the brevity of life seriously, and induce a healthy awareness of mortality to push one into taking life more seriously. Ecclesiastes 7:2 even commends attending funerals to prompt reflection on one’s own mortality. We all know that we are going to die, but life has a way of lulling us into complacency through mundane living. What I find most useful about memento mori, from a personal perspective, is that it supports healthy detachment, so that more important things can be focused on.

Memento mori is baked into so much of the traditional liturgical life and calendar of the Christian faith. There are All Saints and All Souls, days when we are supposed to honor and remember the dead—and if you are so bold, be inspired by their lives of witness. Any reflection upon those who have gone before us in life and in death ought, no doubt, to bring our own finitude to mind. Yes, these traditions are still very much alive in many communities and denominations. But amongst the fastest-growing movements of the faith, there is not much reflection on grief, death, the dead, mourning/lament, or memento mori in corporate worship. The reason is simple: those practices are replaced by more attractive elements of faith and practice to avoid alienating new worshippers. Yet, it cannot be denied that the practices in question are faithful ways to engage spirituality with the whole of human experience. They, like actual biblical material, engage the entire human person; thus they can assist in human development and healing. To the church leaders that forgo such practices, I repeat the charge of British historian Tom Holland (who recently has been seen lauding Christianity, though he remains an agnostic, yet wishes to be Christian) to “keep Christianity weird.” Its weirdness, he suggests, lies in how it is life-changing and how it can really speak to society's needs.

The other practice that is quite well known to arouse the memento mori is Ash Wednesday. Each year on Ash Wednesday, the church, to put it bluntly, reminds the faithful that they will die one day. It is a somber reflection of the mind, met with the physical reality of ash imposed on one’s forehead—a sign to wear, feel, and accidentally smear throughout the day. This is a more than cognitive assent to an idea that we will all die one day. It is fully embodied and ritualized. As a somatic experience, the lesson is seared into one’s experience. Through it, we carry the truth of our finitude in our minds and on our foreheads, perpetually beckoning us to ask whether the way we live is worthy of our brief time in this world.

And then there is the primacy of virtue. Stoicism’s conviction that the primacy of virtue is the key to a flourishing life gives Christian preachers fertile ground for bridge-building. For the Stoics, virtue is the highest good—it is better to be just, wise, and courageous than to be rich, healthy, or powerful, because only virtue endures when circumstances change. A Christian preacher can readily affirm this, for the Sermon on the Mount itself suggests that blessedness does not arise from external advantage but from purity of heart, hunger for righteousness, and peacemaking. In both traditions, the measure of a life is not comfort but character. By beginning here, the preacher can establish common ground with Stoic moral seriousness and then extend the conversation toward the deeper Christian claim: that the virtues are not merely human achievements but are animated and perfected by the Spirit of Christ.

Additionally, in our own day—when values are fiercely contested, and a sense of meaning often feels elusive—there seems to be a growing hunger for lives shaped by virtue. The popularity of movements such as wokeness or MAGA suggests that people are searching for moral frameworks, for codes to live by. The pressing question, then, is not whether we seek virtues, but which virtues are worthy of our allegiance. In this cultural moment, when so many are yearning for guidance that places a moral claim upon human action, the language of virtue is not one to be avoided by those who speak the sacred word. Stoicism and Christianity both suggest that a virtue tradition might not only be necessary but appealing for today’s hungry audiences.

Yet it is at the point of amor fati—the Stoic call to “love one’s fate”—that the paths of Christianity and Stoicism diverge. For the Stoic, the highest wisdom is to affirm all that happens, even tragedy, as the necessary unfolding of Nature. Christianity, by contrast, does not baptize fate as good in itself but acknowledges the fragility of life, the horror of death, and the reality of sin. Here the Christian vision both meets and challenges Stoicism. Like the Stoic, the Christian is called to courage and acceptance, but not because the universe is fated and immutable. Rather, the Christian trusts that God redeems suffering and fragility in Christ, transforming them into the site of resurrection hope. Thus, where Stoicism counsels resignation, Christianity proclaims restoration: the fragility of life is not merely to be endured but is taken up into God’s promise of new creation. Communicators of Christianity’s sacred vision can speak to the usefulness of amor fati, but they can also go beyond it to a more hopeful vision of life. This final point is important. Amongst the reasons for its importance is that if one is too focused on amor fati, they might be held complacent towards many of the world’s injustices. Christianity, on the other hand, can meet Stoicism in offering a useful way to navigate life’s challenges, but its more hopeful vision demands that the present state of the world (with its pains, injustices, etc.) is not the end; a better life of flourishing for all must be worked toward.

Conclusion

In the end, what emerges from comparing Stoicism and Christianity is not a matter of choosing between two equal options, but of discerning how each tradition answers the deepest human questions. Stoicism’s call to virtue, resilience, and tranquility resonates across time, offering wisdom that continues to shape lives. Its modern resurgence is therefore significant: in an age of anxiety, secularism, and fragmented meaning, Stoicism provides a language of strength and stability that many find compelling. Christians should not dismiss this appeal but take it seriously, for it reveals deep longings in our culture. Yet Christianity presses further. It does not simply invite us to accept our fate, but proclaims a God who enters history, suffers, and redeems. Where Stoicism steels the will, Christianity transforms the heart. While Stoicism teaches us to endure what must be, Christianity reveals that even amid fragility and death, there is hope of resurrection. For the Christian preacher, this dialogue is fertile ground—Stoicism can open the door to reflection on human limits and courage, but only the gospel can carry us beyond resignation into the fullness of grace.

I agree with Tillich, much of what people find interesting about Stoicism is the courage that it can grant you. In the 21^st century, so much of what draws people to read Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and others, and more what compels them to create newsletters around their content is their practical strategies for coping with life’s ubiquitous struggles. Seneca famously wrote concerning the universal reality of life’s shortness:

I have no time for such nonsense; a mighty undertaking is on my hands. What am I to do? Death is on my trail, and life is fleeting away; teach me something with which to face these troubles. Bring it to pass that I shall cease trying to escape from death, and that life may cease to escape from me. Give me the courage to meet hardships; make me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Relax the straitened limits of the time which is allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little....You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage there is a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand; yet everywhere he is near at hand.

Seneca’s words are illustrative of how the Stoics look honestly at life’s fragility and uncertainty so that one may live life more wisely or virtuously. A Stoic tradition shared by other traditions such as Christianity is memento mori—remembering death as an exercise. It was a tradition born in ancient Greece but spread throughout history and over Europe. “On the face of it,” writes L.S. Dugdale, “the idea of memento mori might strike us as morbid. But in medieval Europe it was considered a vital tool for orienting life’s priorities. Life was lived with a view toward death.” Stoic philosopher Epictetus instructs this contemplation in his Enchiridion, “Let death and exile, and all other terrible things appear before your eyes daily, but most importantly death; and you will never again entertain a hopeless thought, or too early desire anything.” The idea is not unlike something one might learn in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy through exposing a patient to something so fearful that over time and exposure the fear subsides and aids the patient in developing a mastery of old fears. Or to be terribly practical about it, Marcus Aurelius wrote in his meditations, “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” One must certainly appreciate the clarity in this practical bit of motivational wisdom—philosopher and tech entrepreneurs alike.

Human existence is not only difficult because we are finite and will all suffer and die. It is also challenging because of the psychological suffering we experience. We suffer from our heightened attachment to the opinions of others, are people pleasing, and experience other forms of social stress. So, in a world where someone could suffer injury from public opinion, Epictetus’ words are useful: “If a person had handed over your body to a stranger, you would certainly be angry. So why do you not feel any shame in handing over your own mind to any criticiser, to be unsettled and annoyed.”¹⁶¹

Marcus Aurelius too chides himself in a philosophical way that reminds one of a parent teaching their child on the playground, “honey, you just worry about yourself, don’t worry about what others do!” Aurelius says, “Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. For thou losest the opportunity of doing something else when thou hast such thoughts as these. What is such a person doing, and why, and what is he saying, and what is he thinking of, and what is he contriving, and whatever else of the kind makes us wander away form the observation of our own ruling power.”¹⁶² Aurelius‘ Stoic outlook is very practical about human nature. His advice becomes simple to say, harder to accomplish, but the reason for it is very practical. You have better things to commit your time and energy to; he constantly reminds himself in Meditations.

My favorite portion of Meditations comes at the beginning of section II. I can imagine this as a daily meditation for leaders of all types, rehearsed like a mantra or morning prayer. I can even see it hanging up on walls as a framed poster, next to another framed poster of Rudyard Kipling’s If, “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil,” says Aurelius. Yes, he is saying, you will meet jerks today, people will no doubt irritate you. He continues,

But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and turn away.

These examples show how Stoicism is uniquely poised to help those who suffer greatly navigate the suffering. I dare say, in our world of great excess, the kinds of things that money and success have yet to be able to “fix” have to do with our mortality, and the fact that we will find things to worry about socially—indeed, people are wonderful and challenging. Stoicism is practical and helpful, and I must say when I read it I find much in common with other strains of thought, like the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but also with Buddhist philosophy, and aspects of Christian thought.

In the introduction to Charles Taylor’s magnum opus, A Secular Age, he sees similarities between Buddhism, Christianity, and Stoicism in that they all have ways of dealing with the suffering of life that is connected to renunciation. “In both Buddhism and Christianity,” he writes, “there is something similar in spite of the great difference in doctrine. This is that the believer or devout person is called on to make a profound inner break with the goals of flourishing, to the point of the extinction of self in one case, or to the renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God in the other. The respective patterns are clearly visible in the exemplary figures. The Buddha achieves Enlightenment; Christ to a degrading death to follow his father’s will.” Stoicism too involves a great deal of renunciation, or a realignment of life’s expectations such that one is detached from the expectation to flourish, because, “in the Christian case, the very point of renunciation requires that the ordinary flourishing forgone be confirmed as valid.” Christianity does not deny the goal of flourishing, for its ultimate goal consists of restoration of a just cosmos beyond the travails of this age. Stoicism has no view of such hope.

There are overlapping concepts that can mislead readers into thinking Stoicism is fully compatible with religions such as Christianity. For instance, both traditions use terms like God and Logos. Yet as C. Kavin Rowe demonstrates in his insightful One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, these words are not used in translatable ways. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity may share some surface content, but when it comes to metaphysical substance they differ sharply and must be contrasted. Rowe’s subtitle proves instructive: Stoicism and Christianity are best understood as “rival traditions.” His central insight is that each offers not just ideas but a distinct way of life, rooted in its own practices, narratives, and moral grammar. For the Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), philosophy is a therapeutic discipline—shaping existence through inner fortitude, alignment with Nature, and mastery of the passions. In contrast, early Christians formed identity through story and community: St. Paul by building the church, St. Luke by narrating the continuation of Jesus’s redemptive work, and Justin Martyr by presenting Christ as the incarnate Logos, true wisdom by which life is ordered. Crucially, Stoicism lacks a theological account of sin and redemption—the Fall—while Christianity never fully reckons with Fortuna (chance, fate). Their aspirations may overlap, but the stories they tell and the lives they form diverge at the deepest levels.

But it is the overlaps between Stoicism and Christianity (and to a lesser extent Buddhism and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) that interests me the most in this 21^st century moment. Partly this is due to Tillich’s notion that for the West, in religions decline all we are left with for religious sensibility is Stoicism and partly because of the popularity of its usefulness in today’s society, when what is found so useful are the elements one might find in traditional Christianity, Judaism, and other views of life. Besides the decline in traditional religion, what is missing in contemporary society that makes Stoicism so appealing?

Coping at the End of the Road

Perhaps, nothing is really missing at all. Perhaps, it is that at this point in history, when we have gotten everything we could ever need materially, and when we have pursued libertarian freedoms to their end, and when we have been able to assert ourselves authentically that we have finally discovered that we still suffer truths of our finitude. Each one of us will experience pain, death, and each one of us will no doubt worry about our place in this world. To prove my point, all you must do is read the fascinating interview between NY Times columnist Ross Douthat and tech venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel’s whole point was that we have been in technological stagnation and society must put an end to it, or we will suffer:

Douthat: To keep us in the concrete, I want to stay with that example for a minute and ask: OK, what does it mean to say we need to take more risks in anti-aging research? Does it mean that the F.D.A. has to step back and say: Anyone who has a new treatment for Alzheimer’s can go ahead and sell it on the open market? What does risk in the medical space look like?

Thiel: Yeah, you would take a lot more risk. If you have some fatal disease, there probably are a lot more risks you can take. There are a lot more risks the researchers can take.

Culturally, what I imagine it looks like is early modernity, where people thought we would cure diseases. They thought we would have radical life extension. Immortality was part of the project of early modernity. It was Francis Bacon, Condorcet. Maybe it was anti-Christian, maybe it was downstream of Christianity. It was competitive. If Christianity promised you a physical resurrection, science was not going to succeed unless it promised you the exact same thing.

I remember 1999 or 2000, when we were running PayPal, one of my co-founders, Luke Nosek — he was into Alcor and cryonics and that people should freeze themselves. And we had one day where we took the whole company to a freezing party. You know a Tupperware party? People sell Tupperware policies. At a freezing party, they sell ——

Douthat: Was it just your heads? What was going to be frozen?

Thiel: You could get a full body or just a head.

Douthat: The “just the head” option was cheaper.

Thiel: It was disturbing when the dot matrix printer didn’t quite work, and so the freezing policies couldn’t be printed out.

Douthat: Technological stagnation once again, right?

Thiel: But in retrospect, it’s also a symptom of the decline, because in 1999 this was not a mainstream view, but there was still a fringe boomer view where they still believed they could live forever. And that was the last generation. So I’m always anti-boomer, but maybe there’s something we’ve lost even in this fringe boomer narcissism, where there were at least a few boomers who still believed science would cure all their diseases. No one who’s a millennial believes that anymore.

This is an astounding section of an astounding interview, and it reminds me of the recent satire film Mountainhead about a group of billionaires on a retreat trying to outdo, outlive, and outshine one another’s prestige in every aspect of life: love, material wealth, power, and even be the first to enter into a transhumanistic consciousness. Douthat and Thiel’s real-life conversation goes on to discuss theology, transhumanism, the antichrist, and private conversations about how Elon Musk is afraid that woke ideology will follow him to Mars. But what floors me when I read it, is that it represents yet another cultural artefact: denying finitude. Our culture is in denial. Our technocentric hopes and dreams diagnose that we as a culture are still “kicking against the goads” of what philosophy reveals about human existence. Stoicism’s appeal in this late time in history might be the sobering alarm and early waking up of many who realize that no matter how much we advance as a society, we must still contend with the fundamental nature of our lives as a species in this universe, again, suffering is part of what it means to live.

Finitude is not for wimps. If ever we are able to amass more wealth than ever before managed, we might find ourselves still wishing to escape our planet for another one where the presence of an ideology we do not like is left far behind. Or as in Mountainhead we might have more than we could ever want, yet when we compare ourselves to others, we find that it is still not enough. The most existentially impactful storyline in that film has to do with the senior most billionaire, the mentor of the group, if you will. He has an incurable cancer. The entire drama of the film is set off by his calculating desire to turn the tide of companies, governments, and culture just so he can extend his consciousness in a post-human state. No matter our Net worth, we will all die—this is the truth of biological life.

I promise, I do not mean to pile on. As I said, finitude is not for wimps. But speaking in the language of toughness, who can forget the spat between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk? These two men are amongst the wealthiest our planet has ever seen. They are successful by so many metrics. Both, presumably, have great health care, and many friends (at least on Facebook and X). Yet, they suffered at the hands of social scrutiny, by one another. Yes, they started a public spat. This, of course, led to them challenging one another to a cage match fight. Social shame, the pain of our standing and issues of respect can be so pronounced that it can even lead intelligent, and well-educated men to an embarrassing display of toughness. Then, of course, they suffer from the humiliation of that display which is more embarrassing than the original sleight. No one thought it was tough, so then they have to deal with the mockery associated with the whole affair. In the end, at this late stage of our advanced society, it seems that its many discontents have to do with existential pains that simply concur with being a finite, biological, and social creatures.

I do not need to focus on the plight of others when it comes to suffering in the modern life, and how Stoicism might proves helpful. Several years ago, I found myself in my own unexpected state of suffering. Rather abruptly, I discovered that I was in late-stage liver failure and I was dying. Through medical intervention and time, my body was stabilized, but I still needed a liver transplant. I was in a sort of liminal space. I was healthy enough to take walks, visit the doctor, and read books. But I was too sick to be at work—I had a lot of time on my hands to contemplate my ever-closeness to death; without a new liver my day to day existence was very unreliable. Over the course of that year I read many books, all in an attempt to help me cope with my fragile existence. I read theology and philosophy. Sincerely, I found help in Stoicism and Buddhism. I even listened to The Subtle Art by Mark Manson as I took my midday walks trying to rebuild my strength and stamina. If I was not painfully aware of my condition, all these texts made me confront my death and imagine the fragility and shortness of life.

I recall, after living this experience for some time, speaking to a therapist about my present condition. “I feel like I have a superpower,” I told him. “What do you mean,” he asked. I went on to explain that all the things that typically led me to fits of anxiety had gone away. “I do not care anymore,” I told him. Indeed, all the stuff that aroused anxiety, worry, mind-wandering, and “the monkey mind” had faded away. I no longer gave inappropriate levels of care to those items. I held them much more loosely. No, it was not the simple reading of Stoic thought or other traditions that practice memento mori. Rather, it was because I was forced into memento mori with every moment of my uncertain life. Even though I hoped to live and worked for my health, I felt a freedom to care about things that matter more than at any other point in my life.

A few months went by, and my health began to improve. I was healthy enough to go back to work, though still destined for a liver transplant. During that time I was under the care of a Spiritual Director trained the Jesuit tradition. He asked me, “how have you been experiencing God in this time?” After 2-3 minutes of silent reflection, I spoke. “I have felt God all the way through this season. But over the past few months, I do not think I have felt God in a personal way.” I told him I still believed that the divine was present, ever near. But I did not necessarily have any deeper feeling or sense of the presence. Frankly, I wondered if that would be the “wrong response.” I was unsure of how he would take this news. After a few moments of listening and processing, he spoke. “You need to learn the lesson of detachment.” “Detachment,” I repeated curiously. I mean, Christianity teaches about detaching from stuff of this world, Buddhism teaches detachment from desire, but how is detaching from God a healthy thing. John, my director, said “yes, you need to detach from your need to feel God to know God is there, to follow God, to be secure in God’s love.” He suggested that our feelings come and go, that the sense of God is revealed and hidden in this world, so “it is natural that you will sometimes feel God and it is natural that sometimes you won’t.” He taught me that by learning to detach from the need to feel God, and to accept this reality I would be even more free.

Time marched on, mercifully. Eventually, I underwent the lifesaving transplant surgery—my life was spared after another person’s life was cut short, abruptly. I recovered from surgery, went back to work, and over time I allowed all the day-to-day concerns to fill my imagination. The superpower I once had when I was closer to death was starting to fade. I began to care too much about things that had been re-evaluated when I was closer to death. I sensed this was a problem, and I wished to get back to the clarity I had when I was so sick, months before. And I devoted much time to exploring this in my personal therapy as well as my spiritual direction sessions. That is when I double backed to a lesson I knew from before (found in Stoicism and Christianity), but realized that I needed to surround with practices and disciplines so its truths would penetrate my mind, heart, and being: memento mori. I must remind myself often that I am going to die, to realign my mental priorities. And I have some practices that are particular to me.

Over time, I learned that I have three natural reflections based upon my illness that take me right to the edge of life reflection. In my post–liver transplant life, I often turn my body itself into a site of memento mori. The scar that runs across my abdomen is a daily reminder that I have walked close to death. The jar that holds my old liver sits as a strange relic—an artifact of both my frailty and the medical grace that carried me through. And every morning when I line up my pills, I am reminded that my life is contingent, dependent, and borrowed. These embodied practices are not morbid rehearsals but contemplations that orient me toward gratitude and humility: each scar, relic, and pill is a teacher whispering, “Your time is finite—live awake, live wisely, live well.”

CHECK IN TOMORROW FOR PART III On What We Can Learn Form The Stoics as We try to Speak the Sacred today

Stoicism has been what all the “cool kids” have been into lately. For the last decade or so, Stoic philosophy has been quoted, referenced, and even peddled by thought leaders associated with business and the tech industry.

The first time I noticed this was during a walk around my neighborhood. I was surveying podcasts, looking for something to queue up that would prove life-giving. I occasionally listened to Tim Ferriss of The Four-Hour Work Week fame. His show has a clever hook—talk with top performers and ask them about their habits, hacks, tricks, etc. I associated Ferriss with a certain “tech-bro” aesthetic. He was a professional investor, was associated with Silicon Valley types, and has developed his brand of being an expert at reverse engineering, so learning can take place faster, not to mention his penchant for biohacking. Personally, he lauded the impact of meditation on his life and often quoted Stoicism and other “tech-bro” influencers who wrote blogs on Stoic philosophy for life and business.

Through Ferriss, I learned of Ryan Holiday, marketer and author.

Not only is he an author writing about marketing secrets, but he also developed a following offering a popular version of Stoicism. His most prominent offering is The Daily Stoic, a series of meditations stylized like a Christian daily devotional.

Not many years after this encounter, and through Ferriss-Holiday related circles I learned about Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life. Manson’s offering was a clever-titled blog post that went viral. A book deal followed. The Subtle Art shares a common trait with The Daily Stoic in that the authors trade in self-aggrandizing rhetoric either through their romantic prowess or celebrity name-dropping. All that was a bit much to read, if I am honest. Another similarity is that The Subtle Art also introduces Stoic practical philosophy to mass audiences. Where it is different is the approach—Holliday’s offers more reflective of Stoic texts and thinkers, while Manson’s Stoic ideas are blended with all sorts of pragmatic philosophies, psychological teachings, data, and wisdom literature.

Again, there is an aesthetic that surrounds much of the recent interest in Stoicism; it is something I have at least observed. It is not uncommon to see a successful businessperson quoting from the Daily Stoic email. In addition, you might find them trying out Keto or Paleo diets—maybe they are simply interested in their “macros” for optimal gym performance. They might be attracted to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. They found their way into it by reading to their kid Jocko Willink’s self-help/self-reliance children’s books about “Uncle Jake,” the super cool and tough Navy SEAL who toughens up Marc in Way of the Warrior Kid. They sign up to help coach their kids’ travel sports team, and they grace the field in Vuori shorts, Lululemon pants, and On Cloud shoes. They drink out of tumblers and Stanleys, and they probably have a few podcasts queued up for their afternoon ruck. I am describing an upwardly mobile, educated person of relative comfort and an “instagrammable” life worthy of envy.

Some years after I discovered the likes of Ferriss, Holiday, and Manson, I offered a book club on wisdom. The club was open to all but was generally populated by Baby Boomer men and women, that is, until the day I offered Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. After I promoted that book, the group doubled almost immediately. Who joined? Mostly Millennials and Gen Z—not the donors of expensive athleisure wear I described a moment ago. And most of them were young men. What is going on?

It is not enough to find out what this growing cohort finds helpful in Stoicism; we must also ask why they are seeking a new philosophy from the ancient world in the 21^st century. Why is Stoicism making such an impact on culture today? Stoicism, it seems, is what remains in a world of declining religious sensibility for those who wish to maintain a pseudo-religious or spiritual sensibility. Furthermore, Stoicism is a helpful tool for mitigating the suffering of modern existence. These are indicators of the spiritual need and hunger present in today’s culture that need to be considered in sacred speech.

For Tillich Tells Me So

Paul Tillich wrote the book The Courage to Be in 1952, and even though it was an “ontology of courage,” the book broke through to draw wide appeal. He touched on anxieties so basic and so universal that people flocked to its pages even if they were not accustomed to religious and philosophical discourse.

Tillich’s examination of courage includes reflections upon historic Stoicism:

The larger concept of courage which includes an ethical and ontological element becomes immensely effective at the end of the ancient and the beginning of the modern world, in Stoicism and Neo-Stoicism. Both are philosophical schools alongside others, but both are at the same time more than philosophical schools. They are the way in which some of the noblest figures in later antiquity and their followers in modern times have answered the problem of existence and conquered the anxieties of fate and death. Stoicism in this sense is a basic religious attitude, whether it appears in theistic, atheistic, or transtheistic forms.

Therefore it is the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western World.

Tillich knows that this was a controversial claim to make. There are other religio-philosophical forms that were present in our world, some even sharing a portion of the syncretic whole that makes up Christianity, such as Neo-Platonism. Tillich famously argues that Christianity was able to outflank what it shared with schools such as Neo-Platonism, and while it shares much in common with Stoicism (such as Logos, or reason, undergirding the world), it cannot genuinely escape Stoicism as an alternative altogether. This is because, as he says, Christianity “could not assimilate the genuine Stoic attitude.” This is because Christianity’s ultimate outcome was eternal salvation and hope beyond death. Stoicism, however, is “the acceptance of cosmic resignation,” and thus offers a genuine alternative to Christianity’s more optimistic outlook.

According to Tillich, Christianity’s historic victory led Stoicism to the sidelines, but it was there waiting to emerge as a real alternative to Christian belief:

It emerged only in the beginning of the modern period. Neither was the Roman Empire an alternative to Christianity. Here again it is remarkable that among the emperors it was not the willful tyrant of the Nero type or the fanatical reactionaries of the Julian type that were a serious danger to Christianity but the righteous Stoics of the type of Marcus Aurelius. The reason for this is that the Stoic has a social and personal courage which is a real alternative to Christian courage.¹⁵⁵

This Stoic form of courage, Tillich argues, is a genuine alternative to Christian courage. Yet it is a courage powered by resignation, and as Tillich observed, it still carries a fundamentally religious sensibility. In our time—marked by increasing secular attitudes and a decline in traditional religious observance—Tillich’s claim that Stoicism is the only real alternative to Christianity may help explain the renewed interest in its modern expressions.

This makes enormous sense to me, given that we are living in a sort of “meaning vacuum” in much of modern culture. In this era that we all inhabit, many have commented on the loss of meaning. Some suggest that it hails from the decline of religious or spiritual belief due to commitments to modernism. Others call attention to capitalism and its side effects—material gain and excess have not solved the basic suffering of human living. Whatever the case, it is hard to argue that at this point in Western history, individuals are more untethered to prior meaning-making systems and institutions than ever before. Of course, I am referring to things like religion, cultural tradition, family and tribe, and even the nation-state. Meaning has been handed over to the individual’s attempt to define it for herself and seek it without interference from anyone else—this is freedom as many understand it.

I Don’t Want Much, I Just Want it All

Many in our culture hold to an unstated script for their lives that is supposed to produce happiness or the good life. That script is really more of a checklist. Ambition varies among individuals, but the goal seems to be some version of success. The plan to follow is some version of 1) get into a good college, 2) make your best and lifelong friends, 3) get a job/career, 4) couple off, 5) have kids, should you want them, 6) amass large amounts of wealth, climb the ladder of success, etc. This is a modest version of the script. Dare I say this is the version of it that has some values baked in, but you could just as well have a version of this where you end up a trillionaire playboy who has so much real estate that you feel you must colonize Mars next.

Yet, no matter how much we follow the script, or how much you exceed its stated goal, meaning, purpose, or whatever you want to call it, it may still elude you. We all know that too—we write books and movies about that. So, the encouragement is for us to find things to give our lives meaning. This is where religion, an engrossing hobby, or social service fits in. There is no cookie-cutter fix; the point is that an individual seeks this out for themselves and makes a choice and action to follow it. But here is the thing: one can do all of these things; one can find success by the script's standards. They can discover meaning in this “something more,” but life is still what it is, challenges will persist. Life is full of suffering.

To live is to suffer. One response is to detach from desire. But isn’t that Buddhism? Yes—but not only Buddhism. It is also profoundly Jewish, Christian, and even Stoic.

The Scriptures are filled with reminders that suffering is part of life. “The rain falls on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Paul writes that “all creation groans” (Rom. 8:22). Famine, exile, and despots are not treated as strange intrusions into an otherwise perfect world. And, of course, there is Job: “A mortal, born of woman, few of days and full of trouble” (Job 14:1). Scripture does not flatter us with illusions of ease; it prepares us for the inevitability of pain.

Then there is Jesus himself. He tells his disciples that if you want a life worth having, you must first lose it (Mark 8:35). This is a call to detachment—not from love, but from the illusion of control, from clinging to possessions, status, or even life itself. In that sense, Jesus’ words resonate with both Stoic endurance and Buddhist non-attachment, though uniquely framed in the hope of resurrection.

Even in our modern world, with its comforts and technologies, suffering persists. The most “successful” among us still battle depression, anxiety, and profound loss. Stoicism, with its frank realism and disciplined detachment, has found renewed relevance in this meaning-hungry age.

Let’s paint a picture. Suppose you had the good fortune – straight up luck – of being born into a family with very wealthy and successful parents. You did well in school, and with your connections you were able to matriculate into an Ivy League institution. There, you made the contacts you needed to get the resources you could only have dreamed of to bring your big idea to fruition. Your big idea is funded, and you are capable of employing the best young minds in your cohort to help it “change the world.” No it is not good enough to produce a great product that people want to buy. No, you sense that there is a meaning vacuum, or that the world is incomplete in some way that what you are making might make an existential impact. So, you become one of the many who will produce something that will change the world—the vision is just as exciting as it is ludicrous to onlookers. But there is enough buy in, because your big idea is possible with all the resources at your disposal. Besides, it might just be a good idea too.

Your big idea is now a big company. It is off to the races; people are excited about it; you are printing money. Your company goes public, and you are on the cover of every magazine, and are on every talk show. People want to know the secret to your success. You have everything money could buy. You have high value in the world of mating and coupling, and presidents want to know what you think. But no matter how good things look, the anxiety disorder you have been working through since you were thirteen still persists. In fact, it is sometimes harder to manage now than it used to be, when life was simpler. Eventually, your company will be called before congress for one or another reason. Perhaps you are being accused of being a monopoly, or maybe your big idea is proving harmful to society. You/your company fades in and out of fashion over the decades. You will still be wealthier than small countries, and you will be able to pivot any time you wish. Eventually too, you will begin to lose loved ones to disease and death—we all do, and you are still a mortal, so no matter how hard you try, your body will decline. Maybe even you will visit the doctor and find out there is something you are facing that has no medical answer. Maybe not. But you are still a human animal, thus you will still die. Death stands at the end of your road too. You need to do what everyone needs to do in life. You must ask, am I happy with how I spent my finitude.¹⁵⁶

Clearly, I am describing a number of scenarios around the lives of several big tech leaders. It is for such lives that Stoicism is becoming so very popular. This is rather ironic, because in antiquity, Stoicism was a religio-philosophical attitude mostly associated with slaves. Frankly, its teachings helped people navigate life's suffering and pain. The wealthy might have been able to enjoy the spirit of Epicureanism, but it was those on the bottom who needed Stoicism. So why is Stoicism so popular amongst the very privileged in our very wealthy and powerful society? Because when you have it all and think you've met and exceeded every dream you might have, you learn that life is ultimately something you’ll never master. Life is filled with suffering, it is not something we perfect. Life is much more like a pilgrimage one is on. And as my football coach aways told us, “wherever YOU go, there YOU are.”

When you have it all, and an eat, drink, and be merry philosophy does not seem to get you through the natural and psychological torments of the living what will you do? Many have reached out to religion for help in coping. This is what Freud, quite famously, found suspicious about religious belief. But in our increasingly secular milieu, it makes tremendous sense that Stoicism would gain traction, for, as Tillich has reminded us, it is one of the few alternatives to Christianity that offer something unique in the realm of religio-philosophical attitudes.

IN PART II We Will EXPLORE: Happiness and Coping with Challenges

That wasn’t important only for my own flourishing. I have a wife and children who needed me—not to have all the answers, but to have a way of moving forward with purpose.

I have far more to say about finding meaning in the midst of suffering than can fit into one article, but here are ten practical ideas that have helped me navigate hardship. I hope they’ll help you too.

1. Tell Yourself a Useful Story

We all live by a story, so you might as well choose one that helps you live well.

For my money, the best stories are those that are beautiful, good, and true.

The story I chose is that life is a pilgrimage—a journey of transformation and discovery. If you see your hardship as part of a pilgrimage rather than an interruption to life, setbacks become part of the path instead of evidence that you’ve lost your way.

Purpose has an incredible ability to carry us through pain.

2. Find a Few Mantras Worth Carrying

Mantras aren’t magical. They’re not wishful thinking or empty affirmations.

They’re compressed convictions.

They’re brief statements that remind us what we believe when our emotions are trying to tell us otherwise.

One of mine comes from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

Carry the fire.

Simple. Memorable. Powerful.

I also say that fear is the mind-killer. This comes from Frank Herbert’s Dune, and it brings an entire litany to mind as I gird myself for the challenge!

The Stoics are full of these distilled insights. Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

And:

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

One of my favorites is:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it.”

When philosophy isn’t enough, borrow from poets. Mary Oliver and Joy Harjo often have many lines running in the background operating system of my mind.

3. Stop Comparing Your Journey

Comparison is one of the quickest paths to unhappiness.

Your pilgrimage is yours alone.

Limit your exposure to the endless stream of curated lives on social media. Detach when you need to. The less time you spend comparing your behind-the-scenes life to someone else’s highlight reel, the freer you’ll become.

4. Move Your Body

Nothing reminds you that you’re alive like using your body.

Walk.

Hike.

Lift weights.

Train for something difficult.

I started training in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu—and boy, oh boy, talk about mind-body alignment!

Embodied practices reinforce your inner story. They remind you that transformation isn’t merely an idea—it’s something lived, step by step, mile by mile.

5. Feed Your Mind

Don’t consume only entertainment.

Nourish your imagination.

Read Kate Bowler’s reflections on cancer. Read Mishka Shubaly’s story of recovery and endurance. Read Kierkegaard on love. Read Scripture. Read philosophy. Read poetry.

The mind needs good food just as much as the body does.

6. Watch for Bad Stories

Your mind is constantly trying to replace your pilgrimage with lesser narratives.

“If only...”

“When I finally...”

“Then I’ll be happy.”

These are stories built on scarcity and postponement. These stories imply that we lack agency over our happiness, too!

Pilgrimage is different.

It assumes that even setbacks can become part of your transformation. It teaches gratitude, hope, and abundance rather than resentment and fear.

7. Learn Something New

Learning is an act of hope.

Start a hobby.

Take a class.

Become a beginner again.

When life feels like it’s falling apart, choosing to learn something new quietly declares that you believe there is still a future worth preparing for.

Remember:

Mood often follows action. I am not sure who said that, but I quote it often!

8. Choose Good Traveling Companions

No one walks a pilgrimage alone. If they begin alone, they no doubt encounter others along the way (see the film The Way).

Find people who simultaneously comfort you and challenge you.

They remind you that you are loved as you are while refusing to let you settle for less than who you can become.

9. Keep a Record of Kindness

Record acts of generosity, not grievances.

Remember encouraging words.

Notice unexpected kindnesses.

Express gratitude lavishly.

You’ve never accomplished anything entirely on your own. Every meaningful life is built upon the generosity of others.

Life is too short to keep a ledger of insults.

10. Slow Down

In suffering, we naturally want to skip ahead to the end.

But if we could somehow leap over the hardship, we would also leap over the transformation.

Growth rarely happens under easy conditions.

These days I notice how quickly life moves. I used to wish winter away. Now I try not to, because every season seems to disappear almost as soon as it arrives.

The invitation is to become present.

To inhabit this moment.

To receive the gift of being alive today.

Rushing will not heal you. More often than not, it simply causes you to surrender your life before you’ve actually lived it.

Do Not Forget, I am on your team. I will be cheering you on as you go along your pilgrimage.