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CT Daily Briefing – 09-30-2025

September 29, 2025
September 29, 2025
CT Daily Briefing

This edition is sponsored by Reach

Today’s Briefing

While condemning the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Black Christians say his harmful rhetoric on race should inform his legacy. 

Presbyterian pastor and former CT board member John Huffman has died at 85. He was the only minister who pushed Richard Nixon to confess during the Watergate scandal—and he helped CT through the 2008 financial crisis.

The Story of the Trinity is a highly readable, highly accessible book on Nicaea without resorting to Dan Brown’s popular pitfalls.

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new manifesto identifies dependence as a fact of life.

Behind the Story

From senior staff writer Emily Belz: I recently came across a 2006 conference talk from David Neff, a retired CT editor, that later appeared in the book J. I. Packer and the Evangelical Future, published in 2009. (Dare we look back at what we thought the evangelical future was in 2009?) 

Neff analyzes Packer’s approach to journalism and to thinking, and then gives these principles for journalism, which I find a helpful plumb line for my work in 2025. From Neff:  

  • Know your place in history. That means, first, remembering the struggles and achievements of those who have gone before in order to avoid reinventing what doesn’t need invention, and to appropriate the wisdom and emulate the courage that allowed them to meet their challenges so that we can meet those God in his providence has set for us.
  • Truth trumps everything. Truth is health giving, and it should be the main drug in our pharmacopoeia, as well as the main course on our menu.
  • Truth must be tempered, however, by wisdom and charity. Remember [Packer’s] words about the ministry of Christian criticism? “To think of sustained denunciation as the essence of faithful witness, and of the mindset that will not see any good in what is not totally good as a Christian virtue, is very wrong.”
  • Truth must also be communicated with imagination and impact. If God’s word is a gleaming, two-edged blade, why should our communication dull its edge? Truth must be a fire alarm to the sleeping soul and the aroma of a boeuf bourguignon to a hungry spirit.
  • Bridge building is better than bomb throwing.
  • Appreciate the good in those with whom you disagree, and understand the motives of those whose deeds are evil. 
  • Remember the evil in your own heart. 

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In Other News

Today in Christian History

September 30, 1452: The first section of the Gutenberg Bible was finished in Mainz, Germany, by the printer Johannes Gutenberg. It is unclear when Gutenberg conceived of his Bible project, though he was clearly in production by 1452.

in case you missed it

An Ode to the Long Season

Major League Baseball, what’s not to love? A lot of people don’t love it, and for good reason. Some batters swing for home runs, even with two strikes, instead of…

The Pastor Who Rescues People from Japan’s ‘Suicide Cliff’

Most people visit Shirahama, a resort town along Japan’s southern coast, for its sandy beaches and restorative onsens (hot springs). But some travel there because they want to die. At…

Black Clergy and Christians Grapple with Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Many Black pastors and Christians are contesting the fond memorialization of conservative activist Charlie Kirk within the political right and pockets of evangelicalism, saying they denounce Kirk’s assassination but can’t…

Is This Heaven? No, It’s Banana Ball

“Is this heaven?”“No, it’s Iowa.” That iconic exchange from the classic baseball film Field of Dreams captures something deeper than nostalgia—it hints at the possibility that sport, when rightly ordered,…

in the magazine

The Christian story shows us that grace often comes from where we least expect. In this issue, we look at the corners of God’s kingdom and chronicle in often-overlooked people, places, and things the possibility of God’s redemptive work. We introduce the Compassion Awards, which report on seven nonprofits doing good work in their communities. We look at the spirituality underneath gambling, the ways contemporary Christian music was instrumental in one historian’s conversion, and the steady witness of what may be Wendell Berry’s last novel. All these pieces remind us that there is no person or place too small for God’s gracious and cataclysmic reversal.

CT Daily Briefing

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