June 14, 2026

Today the church is asking what it means to live honestly with time — the past you carry, the present you've numbed yourself to, and the future you're afraid to trust. Two pieces from The Aquila Report press the same nerve: the problem isn't your circumstances, it's whether you're reading your life through God's faithfulness or your own feelings. Cold Bible reading, a cold view of your past — both are diagnosed as heart problems, not information problems. The Gospel Coalition takes that further with a piece aimed squarely at Gen Z, arguing that nostalgia is a theological trap — a way of editing God out of the present by romanticizing a past that probably wasn't what you remember. That question hasn't gone away — on March 30 several writers were circling the same problem from the angle of desire and formation, asking whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. Relevant Magazine adds a different cut: Christians are misdiagnosing burnout when what they actually have is boredom — a spiritual numbness dressed up as exhaustion. The thread running through all of it is the same. We are bad witnesses to our own interior lives.

Christianity Today has a quieter story that deserves more attention — Camp Blessing in Texas, a camp for people with special needs that has outlasted COVID, staffing shortages, and long odds, sustained almost entirely by volunteers who keep showing up. TGC runs a companion piece: a father writing about the breaking point of raising a disabled son, and what God did with it. Neither piece is inspirational in the easy sense. Both are about endurance that doesn't resolve neatly. Aaron Renn's piece on Blue America's shifting family values is something else — a data-heavy argument that secular elites are quietly converging toward traditional family structures while still rejecting the Christianity that produced them. The Southern Baptist vote barring women from the pulpit landed in Relevant Magazine's feed, and they ran a full counterargument; the SBC and the piece's authors are not talking past each other so much as talking about different things — authority, gifting, and ecclesial order don't map cleanly onto the same grid. Gavin Ortlund spent time this week defending Anselm's ontological argument, which is either the most relevant thing in the feed or the least, depending on what you think the church's intellectual task actually is right now. Sean McDowell surfaced an atheist's near-death experience of hell — not to score points, but because the comfortable narrative that NDEs are universally warm and affirming has a counterexample that won't stay quiet.