June 11, 2026

Today the church is wrestling with a single uncomfortable question: whether Christians are actually capable of forming convictions anymore, or whether something has quietly replaced that capacity. The Gospel Coalition says the attention economy is the culprit — hot takes and outrage cycles have trained us out of the slow, costly work of holding a belief. Mere Orthodoxy sharpens the stakes: AI chatbots are now teaching the Nicene Creed, and the church isn't ready to respond — not because the technology is new, but because the church abdicated the teaching role long before the chatbots showed up. Lifeway Research wants congregations to get ahead of it with biblical wisdom frameworks. That's good advice. It's also a little late.

First Things goes deeper than policy or pedagogy — asking what covenantal imagination we're surrendering when we outsource judgment to machines. That question cuts. Aquila Report ran two pieces that belong in the same conversation: one on bitterness rotting Christian marriages from the inside, one on complaint as a sin so comfortable we rarely name it. Both are about the same erosion — a heart that has quietly stopped trusting God's governance and started auditing it instead. On the March 30 dispatch we were watching desire and discernment pull against each other; today the tension has moved downstream, into what happens to communities — marriages, churches, institutions — when formation never happened. Mere Orthodoxy also took on the HBO show *Hacks* and its assisted-dying subplot, arguing that the stories we tell about graceful exits are doing theological work whether we acknowledge it or not. A World Magazine piece about a surgeon who left a U.S. career to return to Congo for the Ebola fight sits quietly beside all of this. No argument. Just a life that answers the question.