June 17, 2026

Today the church is asking what formation actually requires of us — and whether we're willing to do the slow, unglamorous work it demands. Mere Orthodoxy went to Augustine to make the point: habits of unbelief don't break easily. They calcify. The will doesn't just choose its way out. That sits uncomfortably alongside a piece from Carey Nieuwhof urging churches to get ahead of AI — five conversations, can't wait. Tim Challies pushed back on exactly that energy, quietly and directly: technology is fast, sanctification is slow, and Claude can't do it for you. These two pieces don't agree. One says urgency; the other says patience. Earlier this week we were watching that same tension between pace and formation play out — it hasn't resolved.

Christianity Today ran a piece on Ephesians 6:4 and toddler tantrums — small in scope, serious in what it's asking. Can ordinary parenting be a site of genuine discipleship, or does that framing sentimentalize both? Ligonier said Christian parents are failing their kids on hard conversations, and the reason matters: not cruelty or neglect, but avoidance. The gospel gets soft when we refuse to say hard things. On a different front, the Supreme Court blocked a nitrogen gas execution — Christianity Today reported the man on death row runs a prison ministry. The legal story is small. The theological weight is not. And The Gospel Coalition reviewed Bessel van der Kolk's trauma framework and found it missing something: the mind, the heart, and any account of the soul. Formation without anthropology doesn't hold.