May 17, 2026

O. Alan Noble is doing something this week that the church badly needs. In two separate pieces he's asking what it means to love — really love — and whether our habits of mind are helping or hurting us. His piece on OCD and intrusive thoughts is a pastoral gift: those thoughts aren't sin, they're noise, and conflating the two does real damage to real people. Then he turns around and argues that students using AI to skip hard work aren't just cheating — they're failing to love their teachers, their classmates, the whole project of learning together. Same writer. Same week. Two very different applications of one question: what are we actually responsible for?

That question about responsibility runs into Reformation21's piece on kinism infiltrating Reformed churches — a sharper, uglier problem. Racial separatism dressed in covenant theology. The piece doesn't hedge. Pew Research shows a majority of Americans now believe the country's best days are behind it, which is the cultural air all of this breathes. The Aquila Report pushes back with two pieces arguing discomfort is the saints' native condition and that rest, real rest, comes only at the new creation — not before. That's not pessimism. That's a different account of time entirely. Sudan's Christians are living that account right now: Christianity Today reports on believers racing to meet basic needs in makeshift refugee camps, not waiting for the world to stabilize first. Earlier this week we were watching the tension between urgency and faithfulness pull at writers from several angles. It's still pulling.