June 23, 2026

Today the church is wrestling with who Jesus actually is — and whether that conviction still shapes how Christians live, parent, vote, and endure. The Gospel Coalition and The Aquila Report are both insisting on Christology this week, not as doctrine for its own sake but as the load-bearing wall under everything else. TGC puts it in terms of belonging — you are not your own, and that changes the grammar of your entire life. Aquila Report says the same Lord who governs the cosmos is present in your specific discouragement. Neither piece is soft. Both are pressing against a Christianity that has quietly drifted into self-help with a cross in the corner. O. Alan Noble adds something harder — hope isn't optimism, and confusing the two is its own kind of failure. Real hope is a theological act, not a mood. That question about what we're actually anchoring to hasn't gone away — earlier this week the conversation was about desire and whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things.

World Magazine runs a piece that pulls in a different direction — Britain's institutional abuse scandals, where church and civic bodies protected predators for decades. The theological problem there isn't obscure: it's what happens when authority stops being accountable to truth. Ligonier is asking how Christian parents raise children in a sexualized culture, which is the same institutional failure at the household level — what do you hand down, and does it hold. Samuel James pushes back on Christians who treat technology as the villain in all of this, arguing the criticism is too blunt to be useful. He's probably right that bad formation predates the smartphone. Meanwhile Christianity Today reports evangelicals in Colombia are divided over a right-wing political outsider — a reminder that the question of how Christian conviction translates into civic life doesn't resolve cleanly anywhere in the world, not just here.