May 13, 2026

Today the church is asking whether its habits of prayer, presence, and imagination are actually forming it for anything — or whether efficiency has quietly replaced faithfulness. The Gospel Coalition and First Things are both wrestling with AI this week, but the real argument isn't about technology. TGC warns that algorithmic efficiency reshapes how we think before we notice it happening. First Things goes further: love requires something algorithms structurally cannot give — presence, risk, irreversibility. That's a theological claim, not a tech take. Meanwhile, Chris Martin says performative busyness has become a form of identity, and Christians aren't exempt. We signal effort instead of doing work. The pace question we were watching on March 30 hasn't gone away — it's just wearing a different face this week.

Mere Orthodoxy's portrait of Colorado Springs lands hard next to all of this. The institutional evangelical infrastructure built there — the ministries, the culture-war machinery, the sense that Christians were winning something — is hollowing out. Not because the culture beat it. Because it was built on a vision of influence that never asked what it was actually for. William Cavanaugh's piece in Christianity Today makes a related point: politics runs on imagination, and the state has always known that. The church's task isn't to capture that imagination but to offer a different one entirely. Nijay Gupta's review of Paul's theology pushes the same direction — Paul didn't fantasize about escape from the world, he trained for engagement with it. Prayer, in that frame, isn't a retreat. It's preparation.