May 26, 2026

Today the church is asking what we owe the past — and whether we're honest enough to receive it. Bethel McGrew's Memorial Day piece at Further Up pushes against the sentimentality that swallows the holiday whole. The names on the wall represent a specific sacrifice, she argues, made for a specific inheritance — and we are spending it carelessly. World Magazine's podcast on borrowed greatness makes the same accusation more bluntly: America has forgotten what earlier generations actually paid. The Gospel Coalition's review of a Schaeffer retrospective adds the theological floor beneath both pieces — Schaeffer saw cultural pressure on Christians not as a modern emergency but as a permanent condition, one that requires honest formation, not panic. O. Alan Noble's newsletter goes one level deeper: the prerequisite for receiving any of this inheritance is humility, the kind that admits you might be wrong before the evidence forces you to.

Mere Orthodoxy ran a piece on Augustine's hidden vices this week — the sins that look like virtues from the outside, the pride dressed as pastoral zeal. It fits. A day that calls for gratitude and honest reckoning is also a day that exposes how badly we see ourselves. First Things has a harder story: military wives make up 1% of America and 20% of commercial surrogates. Financial pressure, deployment cycles, and institutional vulnerability — the piece names the mechanism by which a vulnerable population gets absorbed into a commercial arrangement sold as generosity. World Magazine is also tracking a Utah legal battle over frozen embryos and when life begins. These aren't separate stories. They're the same question about what we count as ours to control. TGC's piece on autonomy calls it plainly: the desire for complete self-determination doesn't liberate — it kills the capacity for wonder, and eventually for gratitude. On Memorial Day, that's not an abstract diagnosis.