April 7, 2026

Carl Trueman can't sleep, and the reason matters. Both his TGC podcast and a World Magazine feature this week make the same point: what's happening in Western culture isn't drift or mere unbelief — it's active desecration. The sacred is being rejected on purpose. That's a harder diagnosis than decline, and it lands differently during Holy Week. The Aquila Report has two pieces this week on the fulfillment of Israel's story in Christ — the root of Jesse, the pierced Passover lamb — and reading them against Trueman's cultural alarm is jarring in a useful way. The church is being asked to hold a cosmic claim about resurrection and sacrifice while living inside a culture that has decided those categories are not just false but offensive. Harvey Mansfield at First Things adds another layer: reason itself is losing cultural authority, which means the church can't assume a shared framework for any of this conversation.

Mere Orthodoxy ran a piece on Wendell Berry — his life as a kind of embodied grace and gratitude, slow and particular — and it sits quietly against everything else in the feed. Ligonier published on Ecclesiastes and mourning, arguing that sorrow properly received forms the soul. Neither Berry nor Qohelet would be surprised by Trueman's diagnosis. A Christianity Today dispatch from Kenya shows an Anglican priest preaching the gospel in nightclubs — not as a strategy, but as presence. Reformation21 pushed back this week on thin treatments of grace, asking whether evangelicals have turned a Person into a principle. The TGC piece on elders taking the low seat and the one on fixing eyes on Christ to fight sin both circle the same quiet conviction: formation happens through posture, not just proposition. Earlier this week we were watching the question of desire and whether our minds can even want the right things — today that question has a sharper cultural edge to it.