October 26, 2026

Today the church is asking whether it has the courage to be strange — to resist the ambient pressure of a culture that is always offering a better version of what faith already provides. The Aquila Report ran a sharp piece on Mark Zuckerberg's AI vision, calling it a false god dressed in therapeutic language. The argument isn't that technology is neutral and misused. It's that Silicon Valley is forming people in a direction, and the church needs to name it. Mere Orthodoxy went somewhere adjacent — a piece on vice and virtue arguing that sin doesn't leave an empty space. Something always fills it. You don't defeat a vice by removing it. You replace it with a virtue, or you lose the ground. That same instinct shows up in the Aquila Report piece on suffering Christians who find joy in Christ alone — not because everything else is fine, but because everything else is gone. That's not optimism. That's the gospel under pressure.

O. Alan Noble wrote this week about the slow death of serious Christian journalism, and the piece lands harder when you read it next to the Christianity Today item on a megachurch pastor staging awkward neutrality beside Governor Abbott in the run-up to midterms. Noble's concern isn't really about institutions — it's about whether the church has the intellectual infrastructure to say anything true and costly about public life, or whether it's just reacting. Mere Orthodoxy asked a related question about worship and casualness — where do Christians find sacred air when the whole culture has decided nothing is sacred? TGC's piece on the Puritans and pastoral formation suggests that what today's ministers are missing isn't a strategy. It's a theology of suffering and slowness that the Puritans couldn't have avoided even if they'd wanted to. On March 30 we were watching this same tension between pace and formation play out — today it has a sharper edge. The question isn't just what the church believes. It's whether the church has the habits to believe it under pressure.