April 14, 2026

The church is asking today whether it has the courage to stand apart — from the crowd, from the state, from the saviors culture keeps offering. Desiring God puts it simply: Jesus calls you to a peculiar path, not the crowd's. That's a discipleship claim. But Christianity Today is making the same point from a darker angle — reviewing a new book on 'Muskism' and warning that the evangelical hunger for a powerful protector is producing exactly the kind of misplaced trust the prophets condemned. Bonnie Kristian at Christianity Today goes further, invoking Nathan's parable before David — the idea that the most devastating rebuke often arrives disguised as a story. The prophetic imagination, she's arguing, is a political act. Meanwhile First Things is running a piece that almost reads as a counterargument: a defense of cultural Christianity, haunted by Kierkegaard's warning that the church's domestication is already complete. The tension there is real. Is the peculiar path a call to prophetic courage, or has the crowd already won?

New York is pressuring nuns who care for the dying to participate in assisted suicide — First Things has the story, and it's not subtle. The state isn't asking these women to look away. It's asking them to act against their theology of death and dignity. That question of who gets to define care at the end of life sits alongside World Magazine's reporting on the collapse of federal enforcement around abortion pill distribution — a legal vacuum with real body counts. That question — what the church bears witness to when no institution will — hasn't gone away. Earlier this week we were watching it play out through suffering and lament. Today it's showing up in courtrooms and pharmacies. Reformation21 adds a different kind of pressure: how should the church speak to celibate gay Christians who are doing everything asked of them, and still find themselves theologically stranded? Fidelity without belonging is its own kind of exile. The church keeps being asked whether it will stand in the hard places — not just the visible ones.