April 28, 2026

Today the church is asking whether virtue is even possible when attention itself is broken. Mere Orthodoxy reviewed four new books on vice and character this week, and the cumulative picture is not flattering — modern life is not just morally difficult, it's structurally hostile to the slow work formation requires. The Gospel Coalition lands in the same place: wisdom takes time, and time is what the age refuses to give. Relevant Magazine frames it as a noise problem — more information, less guidance. Christianity Today says discernment doesn't end at graduation; it compounds. That question hasn't gone away — on March 30 several writers were already asking whether our minds are capable of wanting the right things. The answer coming back this week is: not without a fight.

Challies is more concrete about what the fight looks like. His piece on pornography names specific steps, not just spiritual dispositions — formation as practice, not just posture. The Aquila Report takes a different angle on embodiment, arguing that women's body image struggles require repentance, not just therapy. That's a harder pastoral word. In the background, First Things is making the philosophical case that materialism — the worldview underneath so much of this — contains its own undoing. And Lifeway Research dropped new data on religious decline this week: the numbers call for action, not panic. The church forming virtue in a distracted age is the same church watching its cultural moment narrow. Both things are true at once, and neither cancels the other.