August 6, 2026

Today the church is grappling with numbness — spiritual, moral, civic — and whether Christians have the clarity left to feel anything rightly. Russell Moore's piece in Christianity Today lands hard: technology isn't just distracting us, it's restructuring how we think. The Aquila Report picks up the same thread from a different angle, diagnosing gospel numbness as the slow drift of people who still show up but no longer feel the weight of what they're hearing. TGC adds a behavioral layer — Christians reflexively taking bait, getting offended, performing outrage — as if the feelings are real but aimed entirely wrong. All three are describing the same person. Someone still in the pew. Still following the discourse. But gradually losing the capacity to be moved by the things that should move them. Earlier this week we were watching this same tension play out around desire and formation. It hasn't resolved.

What makes the numbness dangerous is what it leaves us unable to see. Desiring God draws a straight line from Pharaoh's ambition to the abortion of children today — a provocation, but not an unfair one. World Magazine's dispatch from Congo shows something adjacent: distrust killing faster than Ebola, communities unable to receive help because the conditions for trust have collapsed. Allen Guelzo, on Mohler's program, warns that Western civilization's coherence is eroding from within. And Ligonier's piece on young adults asks a quieter version of the same question — whether college forms people who have no category for why the church would matter at all. First Things offers old books as the answer to digital chaos, which sounds quaint until you realize they might be right. The TGC piece on the Psalms cuts through all of it: Jesus owns your complaints, even the angry ones. The lament tradition assumes you're still capable of feeling what's wrong. That capacity is exactly what's at stake.