August 8, 2026

Today the church is wrestling with something it has always known but keeps forgetting: the self is not a project you build online, and the body is not an obstacle to transcend. Mere Orthodoxy ran a piece this week on digital identity — the version of yourself you perform and curate until you can't find the original. O. Alan Noble is writing about something adjacent: the quiet cost of adulthood, the way we learn to suffer alone and call it strength. Both pieces are really asking the same thing. Who are you when no one is watching — and does that person have a body that sleeps, grieves, and needs God? The Gospel Coalition says yes, and makes the point that sleep itself is an act of trust. You cannot be God while unconscious. That's the whole argument. Meanwhile Carey Nieuwhof is tracking the tech industry's newest promise — that AI can effectively erase death, preserve consciousness, let you live forever in the machine. His response is pastoral and clear: everything the church teaches about resurrection depends on death being real.

Relevant Magazine is documenting how Scripture gets weaponized in culture war arguments — verses yanked from context, turned into ammunition. That tension runs straight into the Aquila Report's piece on the "Jesus Never Knew You" passage, which pushes back on the idea that direction matters more than perfection in the Christian life. These two pieces don't agree, exactly. One warns against moralism dressed as orthodoxy; the other worries we've made grace so cheap it has no shape. Earlier this week we were watching a similar tension between desire and discernment — whether our minds are even capable of wanting the right things. That question is still open. Christianity Today is also running a piece on Black history education under the current administration, asking whose story the church is willing to defend. Small question on the surface. Underneath it: whether the common good is a theological conviction or just a political slogan that sounds nice when your side is winning.