No One Told These Ink-Stained Dreamers to Make Books. They Just Did.

An Oxford professor traces the history of publishing through the lives of its most daring and dedicated pioneers.

Illustration by Doug Bell

I have been making books my entire life.

In grade school, my teacher assigned a series of reports on the provinces of Canada. After writing one each week, I gathered them up, added a table of contents and a title page, and bound them with yarn. No one told me to do that. I just did.

In high school, a friend and I self-published a novelty humor book and sold hundreds of copies to friends and family. That was decades before self-publishing was a thing.

No wonder that when I joined the editorial staff of InterVarsity Press 50 years ago, I felt like the town drunk who was given charge of the local distillery.

Unsurprisingly, then, I drank in Adam Smyth’s The Book-Makers, which celebrates the characters who have crafted books over the past half millennium. Through the lenses of 18 lives, Smyth, a professor at Balliol College, Oxford, provides not a complete history of the physical aspects of bookmaking but a representative and very human story centered in England.

We meet dedicated bookbinders, ambitious entrepreneurs, clever (and impoverished) inventors, innovative distributors, pioneering typographers, obsessed artisans, renegade publishers, and dreamers … always some dreamers. They dream of making art, of making money, of making a difference.

Smyth’s narrative begins in 1501 with Wynkyn de Worde, one of the first and most prominent printers on London’s Fleet Street, soon to become the center of British publishing. De Worde arrived as an immigrant from Germany, where Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press had originated only decades prior.

In this early era of printing, much of England’s publishing industry relied on skilled workers from the continent. But this dependence generated pushback. Within a few decades, England passed laws limiting foreign workers. Yet “significant numbers of skilled bookmen continued to arrive from abroad,” writes Smyth, “particularly in periods of crisis.”

De Worde enjoyed some patronage from the aristocrats of his era, but his publishing model looked beyond the interests of the powerful to serve a wider range of readers. He combined what publishers have needed ever since—business know-how and a savvy understanding of one’s audience. He printed not only religious texts but also popular works such as Sebastian Brant’s highly successful 1494 satire, The Ship of Fools.

In emphasizing the physical nature of books, Smyth engages all our senses as he transports us back 500 years to de Worde’s workshop.

The place is surely cramped, and probably dark; too hot in the summer. Candles flicker. Just-printed sheets hang from high ropes like drying laundry. The windows are paper, not glass, a cheap way to block sunlight from the printed pages. But—in winter—so cold. Scraps of paper lie around—old proof pages, torn sheets—ready for reuse as improvised window covers, or wrappers, or to fill a thin space between wobbly letters: there is a thriftiness to everything, a spirit of maximal extraction. And the place stinks: from bodies printing 250 sheets an hour for twelve-hour days; from the strongly alkali lye, bubbling in a tub, used to clean the lead type; from the beer spilt on the floor, brought in every couple of hours by the young apprentice; from the linseed oil boiling in a cauldron over logs, nearly ready to be mixed with carbon and amber resin to make ink; and from the buckets of urine in which the inking balls’ leather covers soak and soften overnight.

Smyth has fun with his material, and as a result, so do readers. Take, for instance, his account of the delightfully named William Wildgoose, a prominent bookbinder of the era. “We might think it’s unlikely,” he writes, “that there were dozens of individuals named William Wildgoose honking around Oxford, but in fact records suggest an extended family in the Oxfordshire area in the seventeenth century.”

Wildgoose worked at a time when printers sold books as unbound stacks of paper, allowing customers to find a preferred bookbinder. The famed Bodleian Library at Oxford (founded in 1602) often turned to Wildgoose in its early years.

Typography receives its due in Smyth’s portrait of John Baskerville, a Birmingham-based printer, and his wife and business partner, Sarah Eaves, who brought stability and expertise to their joint enterprise. Beyond creating an elegant mid-18th-century typeface, Baskerville immersed himself in each aspect of the book—the paper, the ink, the page design, and the printing process itself. Baskerville’s books were objects of craft to be admired in themselves.

In Baskerville’s time, the world’s most famous American was a scientist, an inventor, a political activist, a diplomat, and a writer. But he most commonly identified himself as a printer. Benjamin Franklin learned that trade in Boston, Philadelphia, and London. (The recent Apple TV+ series Franklin shows him employing that training to illegally print pamphlets in France supporting the American Revolution.)

Consistent with centuries-old trends in his trade, the bulk of Franklin’s printing was transient and ephemeral. He made his fortune and reputation on job printing. Pamphlets, sermons, lottery tickets, paper currency, newspapers, government documents—these were Franklin’s daily diet. The major exception was his yearly almanac, which also had a temporary character despite taking the form of a book.

When Smyth turns to the history of paper, he reminds us that the human penchant for prejudice has been constant over millennia.

The Chinese invented papermaking 2,000 years ago, before their methods transitioned to the Arab world 800 years later. These techniques finally arrived in Europe around the 11th century. At first, Europeans distrusted paper because it was introduced by Jews and Arabs. Once they understood its value, writes Smyth, “they set about systematically forgetting its Arabic, Chinese past, appropriating paper as their own, and refashioning its history into a story of European ingenuity.”

The tale of Nicholas-Louis Robert delivers another blow to human nature’s reputation. Though the Frenchman gained a patent in 1799 for the first papermaking machine, he suffered from the greed of those who blatantly stole his designs, robbing him of recognition and remuneration alike.

The case of Charles Edward Mudie also proves there is nothing new under the book-publishing sun. A century and a half before Jeff Bezos and Amazon, Mudie dominated book distribution. This 19th-century purveyor of British culture “found a very cheap way for hundreds of thousands of new readers, including women, including those far from London, including those, indeed, scattered across the globe, to have access to books they could otherwise not afford.” His scheme was to loan books for an annual subscription price that cost less than three novels. And for those living in London, he even provided free delivery. Sound familiar?

Books have not been the sole domain of entrepreneurs. They have also been objects of devotion, even obsession. One fad straddling the 18th and 19th centuries was epitomized by collectors Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland. They (and many others) would take a volume of, say, British history and augment it with hundreds of separate portraits and illustrations. This could entail expanding a single book into dozens of oversized, beautifully bound volumes, all for personal delight rather than public consumption.

Another monument to obsessive book artistry was the career of English bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, who produced a landmark five-volume Bible in 1904, followed by deluxe editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Cobden-Sanderson had commissioned a new, meticulously crafted metal-type font modeled after 15th-century designs. But his devotion turned monomaniacal in his last years, when he worried that second-rate mechanical printing outfits would deploy his handiwork without honoring his care and craftsmanship. In 1916, over several months, he secretly dumped hundreds of pounds of precious type and tools into the River Thames.

Smyth brings us into the last hundred years by highlighting the literary efforts of two small British presses—Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press and Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press. Their community of authors included Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, E. M. Forster, Gertrude Stein, Sigmund Freud, and John Maynard Keynes. Emphasizing the manual (rather than mechanical) press and catering to specialized tastes, this movement sought “to uncouple publishing from the restrictions of the market.” In this, Cunard succeeded admirably, since her Hours Press lasted only three years before being sold off.

The Book-Makers compels us to ask, from the perspective of our digital world: Is reviewing the history of print merely an exercise in nostalgia or irrelevance? We may remember apocalyptic predictions from 20 years ago that print books were doomed. Yet they have survived.

Today, according to Association of American Publishers data, about three print books are sold for every digital book (ebook or audio), a ratio that has held steady in recent years. Within the US, combined sales have also remained stable, hovering around a billion units each year. That is bad in an economic system that often relies on growth for survival, but it is remarkably strong in the face of illiteracy trends, entertainment options, and the flood of news and social media. As readers and citizens, we are drowning in information yet starved for wisdom.

That is why, amid all the activities described in The Book-Makers, the gravitational center comes, for me, in chapter 3, where the book slows to a meditational pace. In the 1600s, there was a religious community at Little Gidding, 30 miles northwest of Cambridge, England. There, over decades, Mary and Anna Collett labored with great care and workmanship, cutting and pasting personal editions of the Bible to create a single harmony of the Scriptures. While this may look like an act of destruction, it embodied a posture of deep reading—of emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually encountering the text, all enhanced by physically engaging with the printed page. Though Smyth exhibits no overt religious commitments, he reveals rare sensitivity. He does not treat the Colletts with cynicism or ridicule, as would be so easy. He rather accepts them for who they are, much as they saw themselves: two people in community, seeking to grapple with the Word, to meditate on it deeply, and to let it change them.

Andrew T. Le Peau headed the editorial department at InterVarsity Press for three decades. He is the author of Write Better and Mark Through Old Testament Eyes, and he blogs regularly at Andy Unedited.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Binding Commitments".

- More from Andrew T. Le Peau

Books

Review

Good Readers Need More Than Good Reads

Matthew Mullins

Without intentional practices for reading virtuously, even virtuous books can end up furthering vice.

Illustration by Changyu Zou

Magazine articles, Substack newsletters, blog entries, Wikipedia pages, Tumblr feeds, Reddit threads, Facebook posts, AI overviews, WhatsApp messages, YouTube notes, TikTok captions, Instagram posts: These, and more, are the stuff of reading in the 21st century.

And this landscape doesn’t even account for the proliferation of books in many different forms. Audio, digital, and physical books are more widely available than ever. Given current rates of literacy, ready access to technology, and the sheer volume of words produced, we probably read more today than at any other time in history.

Has all our reading made us smarter? In some ways, it has. Though stretches of the internet are wastelands of misinformation, the average person can access answers to a dizzying array of questions, from the abstract and philosophical to the immediate and practical.

Yet for all our added smarts, are we wiser and more virtuous? A quick look at a typical day’s headlines, feeds, or threads might lead us to answer pessimistically. Perhaps the problem, then, is that we’re reading the wrong things.

Maybe by reading virtuous books rather than whatever the algorithms feed us, we would become more virtuous. In Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age, authors and English professors Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts assent to this idea, but only partly. If we want to derive intellectual and spiritual formation from our reading, they argue, then reading virtuous books is important—but ultimately insufficient.

More than some “perfect reading list,” the authors insist, “we need practices that will help us acknowledge and grapple with the distractions of the digital age, the hostility of a polarized culture—particularly for minority-culture groups—and Western consumerism with its demands that every action be marketable.” In other words, it’s not simply what we read that matters but also how.

Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts focus on overarching reading practices rather than on specific reading recommendations because we can’t separate reading from our technological, social, and economic environments. As they contend, the very realities that make reading so ubiquitous also contribute to various social ills. Even when the content we’re reading promotes virtue, the form that content takes can nurture vice.

You might, for example, read a devotional about the humanizing virtue of paying close attention to your family and friends. But what if you read it on a smartphone loaded with applications designed by companies to keep you as distracted as possible? Intellectually, you might encounter sound insights on the virtue of attention. Still, the more you scroll, the more you reinforce the vice of distraction.

The same principle applies to hostility and consumerism, the other cultural vices mentioned in the book’s subtitle. Even as we click on articles about charitable political discourse or the joys of tithing, we’re flooded with ads, pop-ups, and recommended stories enticing us toward the pleasures of gossiping and shopping. To enjoy the wealth of wisdom found in virtuous writing, we need practices that can keep countervailing vices at bay.

Following an introduction that provides a robust explanation of these problems, Deep Reading proceeds in three main parts. Each part takes up one of the three vices the book emphasizes, explaining the double bind it imposes on anyone who wants to read well: making us more distracted, hostile, and consumerist; and compounding the damage by compromising our ability to read well.

In part 1, the authors argue that distraction is not merely a detriment to attention spans but also a vice that disorders our lives. By itself, the challenge of distraction is nothing new. But as the authors observe, “recent advancements in information technology have exacerbated this problem, exponentially increasing our ability to access anything we might desire while simultaneously making us less able to temper our desires and focus our attention in meaningful ways.” This dynamic exposes how distraction is a spiritual and not just a cognitive problem.

Griffis, Ooms, and Roberts argue that we can subvert the vice of distraction with the virtue of temperance, or “inner order,” as philosopher Josef Pieper defines it. Deep reading combats distraction, the authors say, because it “requires practices of attention that not only train us to discern what and how much information is good for us but also enable us to order properly—to temper—our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.” The book offers detailed explanations of five practices that aid this tempering process. These include well-known traditions of meditation and prayer like lectio divina but also more unexpected exercises like field trips.

The latter might conjure memories of elementary school, but the authors argue that field trips are valuable for people of all ages, independent of any formal educational setting. While we cannot always visit an author’s birthplace or the locale in which a book is set, we can get off the couch to involve our entire selves in the reading process.

Griffis, for instance, took her students to a wildlife refuge as they read a book about a Native American tribe living on the Great Plains. She hoped to give them a vivid, eye-catching experience that would cast their patterns of distracted reading into sharp relief. When you observe a bison up close, there’s no room for fooling around on a tablet with Netflix playing in the background while a book sits lazily in your lap. Field trips compel a heightened focus on one’s immediate surroundings. In this way, they can foster better reading habits by teaching us to temper the various thoughts, impulses, and desires vying for our attention.

The second chapter of part 1 outlines five practices to counteract the effects of distraction as we read. These include reading and responding to books in group settings and reflecting on our current practices by taking a reading inventory, for which the authors supply diagnostic questions. Each practice provides an opportunity to isolate distractions while strengthening focus on the task at hand.

It shouldn’t take much to convince people that we live in an age of hostility. In the first chapter of part 2, the authors concentrate on evangelical education, where the concept of worldviews organizes the ideological landscape into mutually exclusive bodies of thought such as Christianity, secular humanism, and Marxism, treating each as a closed system.

One benefit of this approach is the framework it provides for classifying and evaluating anything we read. The authors worry, however, that it can turn reading into an exercise in hostility, encouraging us to judge everything we read by tests of ideological purity. In their view, we should recognize that “authors, texts, and readers alike are shaped by historical and cultural forces that often, perhaps inevitably, include oppressive ideology.” We err when we regard written works purely as “vehicles for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ” thinking.

Reading deeply does not require switching off our critical faculties or simply accepting the bad with the good. Rather, it demands the cultivation of prudence, or practical wisdom, a virtue that supplies “wisdom about both everyday decisions and the meaning of life itself.” To combat hostility and develop prudence, the authors recommend reading books from different time periods and imagining their authors as neighbors today, among other practices.

They also pair ideas for diversifying required reading at colleges and universities with an attention to history and Christian tradition, which could help students measure their own convictions against others’. They even tackle divisive topics such as trigger and content warnings. The second chapter of part 2 offers practices for what the authors call reading “promiscuously,” which entails venturing outside “the echo chamber of one’s own perspective and biases.”

The final part of Deep Reading addresses consumerism, perhaps the most pervasive vice of our age in the authors’ telling. The consumerist mindset treats reading—and everything else—as a means to an end, reducing the value of reading to whatever measurable returns we receive from the time and money invested.

To break the hold of consumerism on our lives, the authors argue for infusing our reading practices with a spirit of generosity. Specifically, they encourage us to think of reading as an exercise in gift giving, in which we share what we learn and love with others, thus building a network of reciprocal relationships.

The authors also advocate the sheer joy of reading as a countermeasure to consumerism. Reading for the sake of enjoyment renders it resistant to cost-benefit analysis. A favorite practice the authors recommend is keeping a “commonplace book,” a kind of journal for jotting down memorable lines from whatever you’re reading. In my own commonplace book, I record things that move me, whether to tears or laughter or insight. Such practices upend the marketplace mindset by encouraging us to produce rather than merely consume.

Deep Reading concludes by touting the most subversive practice for anyone who wants to overcome distraction, hostility, and consumerism: rereading. Journeying through a written work more than once is radically antithetical to our age because it entails a willingness to revisit a task we feel we’ve already completed. All of us reread on the sentence-by-sentence level—one consequence of constant distraction—but the authors commend a patient dedication to understanding the shape of an argument as it develops and progresses.

If put into action, the practices outlined in Deep Reading have the power to renew our minds and facilitate greater spiritual maturity. Perhaps they may even further our capacity for meditation, that most biblical of practices. (Psalm 119 mentions it repeatedly.) If reading and rereading can transform both ourselves and our cultures, then surely we can say the same—and more—of reading and rereading God’s Word.

Matthew Mullins is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Subversive Reading".

- More from Matthew Mullins

Books

New & Noteworthy 2025

Matt Reynolds

Seven books we’re looking forward to in the new year.

Illustration by E S Kibele Yarman

The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World

David Zahl (Brazos Press)

The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism

Brad Edwards (Zondervan)

Bearing Witness: What the Church Can Learn from Early Abolitionists

Daniel Lee Hill (Baker Academic)

Made to Tremble: How Anxiety Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to My Faith

Blair Linne (B&H)

Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World

Lee Strobel (Zondervan)

Beyond Church and Parachurch: From Competition to Missional Extension

Angie Ward (InterVarsity Press)

Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age

Edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa (Crossway)

- More from Matt Reynolds

Church Life

How Do I Find My Identity in Christ When I So Want to Be Married?

Beth Moore, Kevin Antlitz, and Kiara John-Charles

CT advice columnists also weigh in on neighborhood church events and Christian conspiracy theorizing.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: Our small church is deliberately focused on three adjacent neighborhoods. One family, though, lives 25 minutes away, and they clearly feel a bit left out—for instance, we don’t want to host all-church events at their house. How do we explain we’re glad to have them but unwilling to drop the neighborhood model? —Stumped in South Dakota

Beth Moore: I love that your question is how to explain rather than whether you should explain. That’s a healthy start! I’m a big believer in clear communication, especially in a case like this, where you know a family in your community feels excluded.

I recommend meeting with them and approaching the issue with something like this: “Our church is devoted to a neighborhood model, but we are so glad you’re here and don’t want you to feel left out. While we need to stay within these three neighborhoods for our all-church events, let’s talk through ways you could feel more included.”

Be willing to get creative. For example, could they host a one-time or once-in-a-while special occasion gathering at their house for a small group? Perhaps a gathering for staff and spouses? Or peer couples? That kind of thing, every now and then, could go a long way toward welcoming them without changing the feel of congregational life.

Whenever possible in this kind of situation, do your best to find an alternative yes when the main answer must be no. This is a way to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (Col. 3:12). Then, when you still have to say no, at least this family will understand how much they matter to your church. I applaud how wonderful your church community must be for them to make the 25-minute trip!

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Beth Moore and her husband, Keith, reside outside Houston. She has two daughters and an armful of grandchildren. Beth leads Living Proof Ministries, helping women know and love Jesus through Scripture.

Q: How do you respond to Christian—or church—family members when they espouse baseless conspiracy theories? I’m especially thinking in terms of public witness. It’s already a tall order to get people outside the church to take our faith seriously in this day and age. Why would they believe our witness about the Resurrection, for example, if we lack discernment on lesser matters? —On Edge in Oregon

Kevin Antlitz: When someone shares a conspiracy theory, I’m tempted to respond with “the facts.” Or worse, with incredulity, asking, “How could you possibly believe that?” But counterarguments are usually ineffective. Mockery never works. Unless we already have a very close relationship, the other person is likely to tune me out.

As difficult as it may be, I recommend compassion and curiosity for engaging someone who espouses conspiracy theories.

First, compassion. Psychologists have found that people believe conspiracy theories because they promise certainty and control in a confusing and frightening world. They also reinforce a positive image of oneself and one’s tribe. These are desires we all share. Leading with compassion humanizes us and the people we’re engaging and helps keep the temperature down.

Second, curiosity. Be sincerely curious even if you want to lecture or jeer. Ask questions like “Where did you hear that?” and “Why are you confident it’s true?” Encourage them to dig deeper and wider, to explore other sources that might verify or debunk what they’re claiming. You may learn something too, and you’re effectively encouraging them to be like the noble Bereans who “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).

If someone is deep down the rabbit hole, they won’t change their mind quickly, if ever. But compassion and curiosity can open real dialogue where you can challenge false beliefs and hold more firmly to the truth.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kevin Antlitz is an Anglican priest at a Pittsburgh church positively overflowing with kids. He and his wife have three children under ten, whom they pray will never know a day apart from Jesus.

Q: I’m 29 and still single. I’ve never had a boyfriend. My pastor talks about making Christ my identity, but I’m not sure what that looks like when I so want to be married. Should I be trying to better embrace my singleness and, if yes, how? I don’t want to make my relationship status my entire identity, but it’s a big part of my life. —Matchless in Massachusetts

Kiara John-Charles: As I read your question, my heart went out to you. Unfulfilled life desires can be deeply challenging, and church culture often elevates marriage to the point that it may feel like life hasn’t begun until you get married. However, church history and Scripture, such as Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 7, suggest singleness too is valuable and blessed.

During your season of singleness, discover the richness of abiding in Christ. Study Scripture, cultivate a healthy prayer life, spend quality time with Jesus, and develop a healthy faith community. Learn to trust that God alone satisfies your soul, regardless of marital status. Hope for marriage can coexist with a full embrace of singleness.

In practice, singleness offers freedom to serve Christ (1 Cor. 7:32–35) and set your own schedule. Use that liberty well (Gal. 5:13). Explore spiritual disciplines. As you draw near to God, he draws near to you (James 4:8). Also, delight in the pleasures of life, such as traveling, learning new hobbies, playing sports, and nurturing meaningful relationships with friends and family.

Cultivate a life honoring God, full of purpose and joy. Cherish the time you have to dedicate yourself wholly to Jesus. When the right person enters your life, he’ll enhance that joy. Find your identity in being a daughter of God in Christ. Embrace this season; you are not waiting for life to begin.

Illustration by Jack Richardson

Kiara John-Charles is an LA native with Caribbean roots and a love for travel and food. She works as a pediatric occupational therapist and serves at her local church in Long Beach, California.

Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Qualms & Proverbs".

Qualms & Proverbs: Got a question for CT’s advice columnists? Email advice@christianitytoday.com. Queries may be edited for brevity and clarity.

News

How NYC Churches Guard Endangered Languages

Emily Belz in New York

New York isn’t just a haven for Christians from around the world; it’s also a sanctuary for their rare and dying dialects.

Illustration by Valero Doval

On any given Sunday in New York City, an evangelical church of Guatemalan immigrants in Brooklyn worships in the indigenous Mayan language K’iche’; a South Indian Orthodox church in Queens chants liturgies in Syriac, the first-century descendant of Aramaic; and a Mennonite church in the Bronx conducts services in Garifuna, a rare language developed from the marriages of West African slaves and Indigenous Caribbean people.

New York, a longtime haven for people fleeing persecution, has developed a staggering ecosystem of endangered languages and cultures.

Some cultural groups landed here after surviving genocide, like Armenians, the Roma, and Jews. At least half of all Yiddish speakers were killed in the Holocaust; now, enough of them live in New York that Yiddish is used in the city’s public service announcements.

The city has become the most linguistically diverse metropolis in human history, according to Columbia University linguist Ross Perlin, the author of a new book called Language City. He and his colleagues at the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) have documented nearly 700 languages in the city. (By contrast, Google Translate supports only 243.)

Churches are key in preserving these myriad dialects. Christians speak 82 percent of the world’s languages as mother tongues, according to Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Todd Johnson, making Christianity by far the most linguistically diverse religion in the world. And that diversity is reflected in New York City’s churches.

Worshipers at one evangelical Chinese church in Flushing, Queens, speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Fujianese (historically related to Taiwanese), and Wenzhounese (from the Chinese city of Wenzhou). A worship leader in Manhattan recently composed new music in Coptic, an endangered language that was associated with first-century Christians but has roots in the time of the Pharaohs.

More recent refugees to the city include Liberians who fled their country’s civil war. Living in a tight-knit community on Staten Island, they form perhaps the largest Liberian diaspora outside West Africa and speak 17 languages, according to Language City. Liberians fill the borough’s evangelical churches.

One Brooklyn church gathers Ukrainians who fled the Russian invasion of their country; refugees from the former Soviet Union; and Koryo-saram, ethnic Koreans from Uzbekistan whose families spoke an endangered Korean-adjacent dialect, Koryo-mar.

On a recent Sunday, the Koryo-saram pastor of All Nations Baptist Church preached in Russian, spoke to the worship leader in Korean, and peppered his lunch conversation with English.

During the service, church members lifted their hands as they sang the Fanny Crosby hymn “Blessed Assurance” in Russian. They ate lunch together in the church basement afterward: an Uzbek meat-and-potatoes dish with cucumber kimchi on paper plates.

Longtime Bible translator Harriet Hill wrote in 2006 about the importance God places on different vernacular languages, shown at Pentecost in Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit enabled people from around the world to hear the gospel in their own tongues.

“That the Holy Spirit broke through the ordinary language of communication and spoke to people in their mother tongue shows the importance of people’s linguistic and ethnic identity in the plan of God,” Hill wrote. “This point is underlined again in the Book of Revelation, where the multitudes gathered around God’s throne include saints ‘from every tribe and language’ (5:9; see also 7:9). When God speaks to us in the language we learned in our mother’s arms, the message of his acceptance of our identity penetrates the very fiber of our being.”

While documenting languages used for religious liturgies in the city, Perlin and the ELA researchers found the following rare tongues: Abakuá (from the Caribbean), Avestan (from India and Iran), Church Slavonic (Russia), Coptic (Egypt), Classical Armenian, Ge`ez (Ethiopia and Eritrea), Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (Israel), Koine Greek, Syro-Malankara Syriac (India), and Syriac (Middle East).

But most endangered languages are only spoken, not written. Churches like All Nations Baptist, with Koryo-saram members and other migrants, are one part of this organic preservation of cultural memory. Immigrants to New York might drop their primary languages in favor of a language spoken by the majority, but the city also has large enough minority communities that preservation is possible.

Saving endangered dialects is not a given. Global trends move toward fewer languages, a phenomenon Perlin calls a “linguistic hierarchy” that erases minority cultures less powerful than the dominant one. Conquest or political domination can remove a culture, like the Arab conquest of Egypt that almost wiped out the Coptic language. Colonists in the Caribbean are largely responsible for the disappearance of indigenous languages there.

Some linguists consider English a “killer language” of less dominant tongues, but Perlin notes that on the streets of New York, English is often a “vital lingua franca, not a linguistic overlord” between different groups.

Some researchers have argued that the precipitous decline in world languages is complex because it involves some beneficial socioeconomic changes. For example, it likely indicates more people are seeking higher education.

So why bother to protect endangered languages? One significant reason is that the loss of a language is the loss of a unique culture. Languages are “ways of seeing,” Perlin writes. Preserving these endangered languages, then, preserves the identity of a people group.

Bible translators have made preserving endangered dialects a priority too. Many languages today are only documented in writing through Scripture translations. Translation projects involve multiple community members who speak the languages, a relationship-based process that can revive flagging interest in the dialects. And working on the translations might give speakers new insights into their own tongues, translators say.

“We find that when we start to work on a language, people who were starting to shift away from it may actually come back and gain strength because people have a better self-image about speaking that language,” Andy Keener, executive vice president for global partnerships at Wycliffe Bible Translators, told CT in 2019. Because speakers of rare languages see the dominant language as the “useful” language, “some people don’t realize how rich their language is.”

One of the central arguments of church historian Andrew Walls is that the process of translating the gospel into different cultures—as Paul did starting with Greek in the first century—enriches theology too, through “radical” attempts to apply the mind of Christ within particular cultures.

Walls argued that the Christian faith is both indigenous—at home in any culture—and pilgrim—moving toward a better home. That indigenous-pilgrim identity, of being home and not at home, sounds like the experience of many New York immigrants who try to hold onto their mother languages while starting new lives in a new place.

Perlin studied endangered languages while living in the Chinese Himalayas before returning to New York about ten years ago. He now helps lead the ELA, which over the past decade has mapped the languages spoken in New York, many of which had not been documented by linguists or governments.

“In general, these are not the kinds of things that you would see while going into the middle of Manhattan and walking around, or that you can easily Google,” Perlin said. The research itself is relational: “You have to get out there and meet people and slowly get to know them.”

Speakers of these endangered languages often live in the city’s outer boroughs. Their churches are often small congregations renting storefront spaces, Perlin said.

ELA’s map of the city shows where endangered languages are concentrated and documents the history of how they arrived in the city. Guarani, for example, an indigenous language of Paraguay, is recorded on the map at a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, where speakers gather to converse.

Restaurants are one avenue of language preservation; churches are another. Freedom of religion in the US allows people to worship and engage in other cultural activities that they might not be able to do in their home regions.

“Every type of Christian in the world is represented in New York City, basically,” Perlin said. “[Church] might be the main connection they have to their culture—to bring their kids where they can show them where they are coming from.”

Garifuna speakers, for instance, are descended from West African slaves who were taken to the Caribbean and then later forcibly removed to Central America after an insurrection. Many Garifuna coming to New York now are fleeing violence in Honduras, according to the ELA.

The Mennonite church of Garifuna speakers in the Bronx is one community that preserves their tongue, which is part of the indigenous Arawakan group of languages. Perlin says New York may be the largest community of remaining Garifuna speakers. The city even has a Miss Garifuna contest where contestants must use the language.

Knowing Garifuna is “itaraliña lasubudiriniua katabu la”—“how it is known who you are”—one Garifuna speaker, Alex Kwabena Colon, told the ELA.

Iglesia Jovenes Cristianos, a network of NYC churches, offers church services featuring several rare indigenous Central and South American languages, such as Mam and Quechua.

More Central American languages are finding their way into the United States as people seek asylum. In 2019, half of the Guatemalan migrants apprehended at the US border were Mayan.

Translators of these languages were in high demand at the border, according to a New Yorker report. The Guatemalan descendants of Mayans typically face more discrimination in their home country than Guatemalans of other backgrounds, sometimes enough to justify an asylum claim.

At one Iglesia Jovenes Cristianos in Brooklyn, most everyone speaks K’iche’, a Mayan dialect from the Guatemalan highlands. The church is in Bensonhurst, a neighborhood known as “Little Guatemala.”

“Not many people speak that in the world,” said the church’s pastor, Erick Salgado. The K’iche’ speakers have very limited Spanish, he added—especially the women, because they often didn’t go to school.

The church usually delivers sermons in Spanish, but the worship songs are in K’iche’ and originate from churches in Guatemala. It’s mostly older people who speak K’iche’; younger people are focused on learning Spanish and English, Salgado said.

“But they keep coming; there’s always new people coming,” he added. Some people at Salgado’s church also speak Mam, another Mayan language from Guatemala.

“One of the most interesting stories is around indigenous Latin American languages being used in churches,” said Perlin. “There are so few spaces outside of people’s homes to use those languages. …It’s linguistically important.”

Church leaders told CT that preserving dialects and cultures isn’t really their goal—teaching the gospel is—but it happens organically as worship songs, recipes, and other traditions are passed down.

New York churches aren’t the only ones helping save endangered languages and cultures. More US cities are sheltering minority groups, including Kurds in Nashville and the Zomi in Tulsa. But New York has a long history as a refuge of languages and cultures. Perlin documents a report in 1643 that showed 18 different languages among 400 Manhattan settlers.

In the 1940s, a Presbyterian church in Brooklyn began using Mohawk, an Iroquois dialect, in its services. It even developed a translation of the Gospel of Luke and a hymnal in the language. Cuyler Presbyterian Church drew members from a nearby community of Iroquois who had come to New York as steel and iron workers. The pastor, David Cory, learned the language with the help of the congregation. The Iroquois churchgoers worked on the translations, and the hymnal was a hit.

Illustration by Valero Doval

“Once reprinted, the supply of the hymnal has been exhausted, and there has been demand for a new and improved edition not only from the Indians in the Brooklyn colony, but from the home reservation at Caughnawaga, from which the great majority come,” read a Brooklyn Record news article in 1957.

In present-day Brooklyn, a rare language may be found not in the pages of a hymnal but rather on the lips of worshipers chatting after a service.

“Religious spaces are very multi-lingual in New York,” Perlin said. “Sermon is in one language, hymn is in another, chatter is in another.”

All Nations Baptist, the Koryo-saram church in Brooklyn, embodies Perlin’s point. The church worships in multiple languages. (This church is not to be confused with All Nations Baptist in Queens, which has services in English, Spanish, and Bangla.)

The Baptist church in Brooklyn has its roots in a migration story from the 1800s spanning multiple countries. Koreans seeking to earn a living immigrated to Russia in the 1800s. More Koreans fled to Russia when their country came under the rule of Japan in 1905. They formed their own culture from the amalgamation of Russian and Korean identities and were known as Koryo-saram.

A few decades later, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forcibly rounded up the Koreans on trains bound for Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to work. Many Koryo-saram died during the journey.

All Nations Baptist pastor Leonid Kim, 73, is Koryo-saram. His parents and grandparents survived Stalin’s ethnic cleansing and ended up in Uzbekistan.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Texas missionaries of Korean descent came to Uzbekistan. Kim started going to their church—“not because of Jesus,” but to learn Korean.He knew Koryo-mar, the unique dialect of Koryo-saram, but not traditional Korean. Kim has since forgotten Koryo-mar; his wife still remembers a little bit.

Through the missionaries, Kim became a Christian and eventually won a green card lottery to the United States. In 2002, he founded the New York church, which became a home for surviving Koryo-saram.

Among the church members are Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Uzbek immigrants, because All Nations has a reputation for helping those seeking asylum fill out paperwork, get jobs, and find immigration lawyers.

“Jesus is my family, and whoever comes to his house is my family,” said one member, Asselya. She is a Muslim convert to Christianity who sought asylum from Kazakhstan, and she declined to share her full name for safety reasons.

Kim said he wants to preserve the Koryo-saram culture, but, he added, “My main purpose is to lead them to Jesus, not culture. Not language.”

The pastor and church members regularly go to Brighton Beach, a predominantly Russian neighborhood in Brooklyn, to tell people about Jesus in Russian and to invite them to church.

Kim has also done missionary work in Ukraine, so he finds points of cultural connection with many of his congregants.

For example, everyone in the church can make the roast beef dish zharkoye (жаркое), the one they serve at lunches with kimchi. “Even me,” Kim said. “But everyone makes his own style.”

While this church has watched the Koryo-mar dialect disappear, it is preserving culture in its own way. And other churches with endangered languages have enough speakers to keep those languages going.

“There are so many challenges about maintaining a language in a new context like New York or the US, when there are new pressures to speak English,” Perlin said. “But that church or community institution might be the only place where people can use the language.”

In October, Salgado’s church of Mayans speaking K’iche’ participated in a Hispanic Heritage Day parade in Brooklyn.

A portable speaker blasted worship music sung in Spanish, and the parade ended in front of the K’iche’-speaking church.

Church members carried flags from the various countries represented in the congregation—the US, Mexico, Guatemala. Among the colorful array, one person carried a simple red flag that said in English, “Jesus is King.”

Emily Belz is a news writer for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "An Unexpected Linguistic Sanctuary".

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Ideas

AI and All Its Splendors

Jeffrey Bilbro

Long before generative AI became a reality, its false promises of ease and justice appeared in science fiction—and the desert temptation of Christ.

Illustration by Jeffrey Kam

Every few weeks, it seems, another AI achievement sets the world abuzz. It speaks! It paints! It digests a whole book and spits out a 10-minute podcast!

This is generative AI, the large computing models that dazzle and worry us with their humanlike output. We’ve become accustomed to hearing about AI, but have we considered what it really offers us? Most simply: a promise of ease and justice.

With the proper application of AI, its enthusiasts tell us, we won’t have to work so hard. Our economy will be more equitable, our laws and their enforcement closer to impartial, the slow and faulty human element bypassed altogether. We will achieve a painless and mechanistic fairness.

Here, rather than dwell on any individual technological feat, I want to examine those two tempting offers. Long before generative AI became a reality, these temptations were offered elsewhere: by science fiction villains and by the Devil when he came to Jesus in the wilderness.

That fiction can be an illuminating warning, and Jesus’ response to temptation—and the manner of his ministry—can help us respond to AI in ways befitting our vocation as creatures made in the image of God.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen may be the most prominent advocate for AI’s disruptive potential. In 2023, he published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” beginning with an epigraph from Catholic novelist Walker Percy: “You live in a deranged age—more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”

Andreessen is right that questions about human nature and purpose are central here. Yet his manifesto quickly made clear how much he differs from Percy’s Christian anthropology.

“I am here to bring the good news,” Andreessen wrote in downright messianic terms, announcing “that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” With enough tech, he insisted, we’ll make “everyone rich, everything cheap, and everything abundant.”

That’s the ease. Then there’s the justice. Technology, Andreessen said, is inherently liberatory: “of human potential”; “of the human soul”; and of “what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive.”

By this logic, slowing technological progress would be unjust. Andreessen acknowledges there may be hiccups along the way, but in his view, our only moral option is to proceed at maximum speed to the prosperous, free, and just future that AI and its attendant technologies will provide.

“It is easy for me to imagine,” wrote the farmer-poet Wendell Berry in 2001, “that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

The vision of humanity behind Andreessen-style paeans to AI belongs to the latter camp. It sees humans not as creatures called to participate in God’s restoration of the world but machines to be optimized and regulated by other, better machines.

Science fiction authors have long warned readers about the risks of the machine world, many sketching its temptations from the same pattern I’ve traced in Andreessen’s manifesto: ease and justice.

Consider, for example, Paul Kingsnorth’s 2020 novel Alexandria, set in the distant future. Civilization has collapsed after humans made the world uninhabitable. In a last-ditch effort to save the world—or, perhaps, to avoid the work required to live differently—humans have created an AI called Wayland to take over and preserve the planet’s dwindling resources.

But it’s not clear what they’ve really made. By the time the novel takes place, most humans have “ascended” into a disembodied state of existence hosted by Wayland, leaving the Earth to slowly recover. Only a few humans remain in remnant communities, holding out against Wayland’s tempting offer to free them from the sorrows of embodied, primitive life.

The father of this remnant characterizes Wayland as the latest iteration of the primordial temptation: “We made Him so we could live forever. Oldest dream. To be gods.”

The character K is a retainer, a kind of artificial human whom Wayland uses to persuade these few remaining people to leave their bodies behind. K’s proposition to potential customers (or victims) relies on the familiar twofold appeal: Ascending to Wayland’s grid will provide both ease and justice.

One member of the still-human order summarizes K’s appeal as offering “escape from grief, from pain.” K puts it this way: “If your life on Earth is going to be a hardscrabble in dying soil, or a struggle to survive in a lawless megacity slum, why continue it any longer than necessary?” This is the promise of ease.

More subtly, though, K also describes Wayland’s offer as the path of necessary “relinquishment.” Humans destroy the earth through their insatiable appetites, so to save the ecosystem, people must give up their bodies and shift their consciousness to a less energy-intensive medium. This is the promise of justice.

Wayland offers to restore balance to the cosmos, to eliminate suffering and violence, to bring about a rational order. And if violence, as K claims, “is bred into [human] flesh,” then the only way to eliminate it is to liberate humans from their bodies.

Many other sci-fi stories frame the temptations of technology in similar terms. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satiric short story “The Celestial Railroad,” preachers like Rev. Dr. Wind-of-doctrine offer “erudition without the trouble of even learning to read” while a steam train ostensibly speeds everyone to heaven.

In Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, precogs—mutated humans who can foresee future crimes—are plugged into a computer to do the police’s work for them. In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, a whole host of imagined technologies offer a wraparound utopia. And in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a disembodied brain promises to “assume all the pain, all the responsibility, all the burdens of thought and decision,” if only the heroes will let it.

What’s fascinating to me about these literary examples is that regardless of the technology they imagine, the appeal is consistent: The means are deemed morally insignificant, and the only relevant consideration is whether the tech makes just and comfortable outcomes easier to obtain.

All of these stories predate ChatGPT, but the temptations in them are far older than computers or the Industrial Revolution. In fact, they eerily recall the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13.

Satan had no app to dangle in front of the Messiah, but he too offered justice without effort or pain. He offered Jesus victory without the Cross.

The Devil begins by questioning Jesus’ identity: “If you are the Son of God …” The reality of Jesus’ divinity, the Devil insinuates, hinges on the efficacy of his acts: his ability to turn stones into bread or jump off the top of the temple without being hurt. These are the temptations of ease.

Later in the Gospels, Jesus goes on to perform miracles as impressive as these, but he refuses to accept the Devil’s premise. He refuses to link his divine nature to his ability to do a magic trick. As he reminds the Devil, the highest human good is not merely physical life preserved. It is life sustained by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

The final temptation—to rule over all the kingdoms of the world at the price of worshiping Satan—is the temptation to justice. It reveals the deadly division the Devil is trying to introduce between means and ends: He offers Jesus the proper and just end without the difficult means.

Yet as Christ’s ministry and passion make clear, the difficult means are inextricable from the kingdom he comes to inaugurate. Much to the frustration of the crowds who flocked to him, Jesus insisted that his rule must come via his slow, personal ministry and painful death. This pattern repeats throughout his life.

As was made clear when he healed the centurion’s servant from afar or fed the 5,000, Jesus could have performed miracles at scale during his earthly ministry. He could have eliminated all suffering, oppression, and every other effect of the Fall. He could’ve more than fulfilled each promise Andreessen and his ilk now make on behalf of AI, transforming the cosmos into a perfectly functioning machine.

But he didn’t. Instead, the ministry of Jesus was reliably marked by an inefficiency and partiality that can be maddening to those of us who dwell in a machine age.

It was maddening even to many who witnessed it. After Jesus fed the 5,000, the people wanted to make him king by force (John 6:15). They wanted a magical ruler who’d feed the nation and, presumably, trounce the Romans.

But the feeding was the exception that proved the rule. It’s the only miracle included in all four Gospels and the only mass miracle (apart from the very similar feeding of the 4,000). In Luke, Jesus followed it by telling his disciples that he “must suffer many things” and be killed, and that “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (9:21–23).

Illustration by Jeffrey Kam

God’s redemptive presence in a broken creation is not typically an easy poof of justice magically imposed. For us as for Jesus, it is the painful, messy work of personal attention and care.

Why must the kingdom of God come through sacrifice and suffering? Because it is not a matter of equal outcomes and hedonistic plenty; it is God’s presence with us.

As Jesus tells the befuddled Pharisees, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed … because the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20–21). Or, as he prays in John 17:3, “This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”

Such an encounter with God and his kingdom is necessarily slow and inefficient. The means of the Incarnation are its ends, and divine presence can’t be automated any more than human presence can be. Jesus must heal person by person, touch by touch.

It is significant, I think, that Jesus never tells us to love the world. God so loves the world, but Jesus tells us to love our neighbor. And the parable of the Good Samaritan, which he tells to identify our neighbors, reminds us how tempting it is to avoid the personal work of love (Luke 10:25–37).

The priest and the Levite could rationalize their lack of concern for the wounded man in terms of efficiency and abstract justice. They had more important work to do, work that would make a bigger impact than helping one man. But our obligation isn’t to maximize our efficacy; it is to care for the sufferer who lies before us, just as the Samaritan did.

When Jesus concluded the parable by telling his hearers to “go and do likewise,” he was commanding us to love our neighbors in the slow, difficult, sacrificial manner of his own earthly ministry.

Our vocation as Christ followers, then, is to follow the path that Jesus trod, to walk slowly with others, to suffer, and—ultimately—to become capable of embodying God’s presence to others. The means are essential to this calling. As Berry reminds us, “Hope lives in the means, not the ends.”

Jesus did good things slowly, and so must we. As the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama writes in Three Mile an Hour God, “God walks ‘slowly’ because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster.” Jesus didn’t jet around the world; he walked around Judea. He didn’t proclaim his message instantly across continents; he slowly discipled fishermen and tax collectors. As tempting as ease may be, we must refuse technologies that promise to automate our relationships with the world and with one another.

There’s no economic justification for boiling the sap from the maple trees in my backyard, playing dolls with my daughter, or listening to my first-year students read their essays and engaging with them about their writing. These things are slow, inefficient, and—in some ways—difficult. But they constitute relationships of attention and care between me and those I’m called to love. If I choose ease instead, I forgo the opportunity to have the God who is love abide in me.

Jesus also did good things inefficiently. This may seem blasphemous, but think of the time he spat on the blind man’s eyes, laid his hands on him, and asked him if he could see. The man said people “look like trees walking around” (Mark 8:24). Jesus laid his hands on the man’s eyes again, and then he could see clearly.

Mark placed this faltering healing amid conversations Jesus had with his disciples in which he asked them why, despite all they’d seen, they still understood so little. Then, as if to illustrate the disciples’ flickering recognition of Jesus’ identity, Mark tells in quick succession the stories in which Peter confesses his belief that Jesus is the Christ then rebukes Jesus for saying he’ll die.

Even Jesus’ own disciples—even his right-hand man, Peter—often only dimly perceived who he was. Was Jesus a mediocre teacher, unable to explain himself? Perhaps the point is rather that the disciples—and we—have the opportunity to participate in Jesus’ life and ministry.

The work of the church will be faltering too. We are not precise computers, and that shows when we pray and make music to God, when we do theology, when we try to serve our needy neighbors. But such means are essential to our vocation as divine image bearers. We cannot offload these tasks to ChatGPT. If we try, we’ll fail, no matter how brilliantly the AI performs.

This is not an excuse to be careless or to callously ignore suffering that might be alleviated by judicious use of technology. Still, we should remember that trying to optimize ease and justice often has unintended consequences. Many technologies are useful, but we should be suspicious of any glowing claim that we can use them to magically help others with no effort or virtue on our part.

Finally, Jesus did good things gratuitously. In one of his parables about the kingdom of God, those who begin working in the fields at dawn and those who come at the close of the day receive the same reward (Matt. 20:1–16). That doesn’t seem just. But divine grace—thankfully—flouts human standards. We receive what we could never deserve.

No algorithm can make sense of such incalculable grace. Similarly, when a woman poured a jar of perfume over Jesus, his disciples were indignant at the waste (Matt. 26:6–13). Shouldn’t this perfume have been sold to benefit the poor? Wouldn’t that be more effective altruism? Yet Jesus praised her gesture of love and honor, telling the grumbling disciples that her gratuitous act would be remembered wherever the gospel is proclaimed.

In our age of efficiency, opportunities for gratuity abound. Cook lovely meals for your family even if the kids will scarf it down. Write poems even if no one else will ever read them. As the writer Kurt Vonnegut advised high school students, “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming … to make your soul grow.”

If we follow in Jesus’ steps—if we live slowly, do good things however inefficiently, and share the extravagant grace we’ve been given—the temptations of AI, like all false promises and demonic temptations, will grow dim and unconvincing.

The Devil will leave us, and we’ll see the absurdity of his lies. We’ll shake our heads in disbelief that anyone could believe AI will make it easier to discern and enact the truth. And then we can set about the arduous but rewarding work of living as creatures made in the image of God in a world increasingly built for machines.

Jesus resisted the Devil’s temptations of easy justice rather than patient, painful, gracious presence. If we want to participate in his kingdom, we will have to follow his example.

Jeffrey Bilbro is associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

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News

The Good Book for Baby Names

Daniel Silliman

Americans are less religious than ever. But we’re still a nation of Noahs and Elizabeths.

Illustration by Mallory Rentsch Tlapek / Source Images: Getty

The influence of Christianity has declined in the United States. Yet in maternity wards across the country, when newborns scrunch up their tiny faces and fill their lungs with their first breaths of air, parents regularly turn to Scripture. They give their children biblical names.

Some Bible names are more popular than ever. One hundred years ago, for example, Noah was the 400th most common newborn name in America. But in the early 1990s, the number of babies named after the ark-building patriarch rose rapidly. By 1996, Noah was the 50th most popular baby name for boys, and by 2009, it was in the top 10. For the past decade, Noah has been the No. 1 or No. 2 name for boys.

A few names, such as Mary and Martha, have become less popular, but other Bible names appear resistant to cultural change. A girl born in America today is about as likely to be named Elizabeth as she would have been a century ago. David was the 28th most popular boy name in 1920. It was 25th in 2020.

America has changed a lot in 100 years. But when it comes to naming babies, plenty of people still go back to the Bible.

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Books

Review

The Best Books for Christian Men Aren’t Always About Being Men

Matt Reynolds

Some should tiptoe onto gender-role battlegrounds. But most should stay on safer scriptural turf.

Illustration by E S Kibele Yarman

In some ways, all eras of evangelical journalism are remarkably alike. It’s too cynical to conclude, with Ecclesiastes, that there’s nothing new under the sun, but similar issues and challenges continually bob up to the surface.

This lesson hit home a few months ago as I combed through bound archives of Christianity Today spanning decades. The names and faces change (to say nothing of fashions in graphic design and hairstyles). But the headlines signal persistent worries about religious liberty, political division, church scandal, missions, and biblical literacy, among other hardy perennials.

My research in the archives was born of our plans for this issue, with its focus on books and reading. After considering (and mercifully rejecting) a proposal to retroactively bestow a slate of CT Book Awards upon books published before these annual honors existed, we landed on a less fanciful alternative: I would identify a single significant book that CT had undercovered or neglected entirely. And this column—already devoted to my own leisure-reading sweet spot of old but not too old books—would try to give that book its due.

Thus began a circuitous investigation, full of false starts and dead ends. But eventually, it led to a book I’ve been curious to read for years: R. Kent Hughes’s Disciplines of a Godly Man.

In 19 briskly paced chapters, Hughes offers biblical counsel on matters of sexual purity, family rhythms, devotional diligence, moral character, and church fellowship. First published in 1991, the book had updated editions in 2006 and 2019, which testifies to its enduring appeal—especially within Reformed circles, where Hughes labored for decades as a pastor and seminary professor.

From what I can gather, CT never commissioned a review. Why? Even with long personal experience overseeing our books coverage, I can only hazard wild guesses.

Review decisions are hardly an exact science. Editors bring a bundle of instincts and hunches to our deliberations. Judgments of quality and relevance reflect differing backgrounds, convictions, and temperaments. And as I’m painfully aware, our ambitions to cover every worthwhile book bump up against scarcities of magazine space and hours in the day. My own coverage plans have embarrassing omissions every year.

Thinking back to the early ’90s, one possible reason for skipping Disciplines was a publishing market already saturated with kindred titles. Christian books, like Christian magazines, revisit the same topics from generation to generation, and there are always lots of Christian men telling other Christian men how to become better Christian men.

Some of these authors, like Man in the Mirror founder Patrick Morley, emphasize practical guidance rooted in Scripture. Others, like John Eldredge in Wild at Heart, probe for some swashbuckling spirit of masculinity. The genres, approaches, and author spokesmen are legion, so a book like Disciplines may seem undistinctive, even if everything it says is resoundingly true.

Another factor that influences my review decisions is whether a book fulfills the promise of its title, and that’s an open question with Disciplines of a Godly Man. With a few inconsequential tweaks, it might easily bear the title Disciplines of a Godly Christian in General. The great bulk of Hughes’s advice to believing men applies with equal force to believing women.

Yes, some of his language and illustrations lean on men’s-retreat motifs. There are anecdotes from professional sports, allusions to Winston Churchill, and scattered exhortations to “man up” in some area of Christian obedience. The book’s dominant picture of discipline evokes 1 Timothy 4:7, where Paul admonishes his protégé to train himself in godliness. Hughes revels in images of vigorous, sweat-drenched workouts.

By and large, however, the book keeps a polite distance from gender specifics. Long stretches pass without any mention of men, women, or anything authentically (or even stereotypically) male or female. Chapters on godly fathers and husbands contain wisdom equally suited to godly mothers and wives.

In a typical section, Hughes might unfold several pages of straightforward biblical instruction on prayer, Bible study, worship, or fellowship before inserting a pithy, pointed gut check: Men, are you serious about this? By the time the question arrives, you’ve forgotten that men were being addressed in the first place.

Hughes does occasionally single out domains of discipline, like sustaining deep friendships and cultivating rich devotional lives, where he sees godliness gaps between men and women. But the comparisons rely on underdeveloped throwaway lines. “We all know,” to quote one example, “that men, by nature, are not as relational as women.” And “they are not as spiritually sensitive and open as women,” to quote another. Perhaps he’s right. If so, it’s worth unpacking why.

By now, it might sound like Disciplines of a Godly Man disappointed me. But in fact, it gradually won me over. For all my frustrations with its commingling of guidance for Christ-ian men and guidance for Christians in general, it sidesteps a more serious pitfall: commingling biblical teaching with cultural dross.

Sometimes this error takes fairly innocuous (or mildly amusing) forms, as when books marketed to men play up themes of getting fit, grilling meat, and grooming beards. Sometimes it veers off in nastier directions, as with recent polemics like The Manliness of Christ: How the Masculinity of Jesus Eradicates Effeminate Christianity. In hewing closely to Scripture, even at the cost of forsaking more man-centered entreaties, Hughes stays on sure ground.

I do believe some authors are called to tiptoe onto riskier territory. In an era when men are often confused about our roles and responsibilities—and beguiled by vulgar (or worse) “influencers” online—it behooves us to have comprehensive portraits of biblical manhood in the family, church, and workplace. Hopefully we can draw these portraits with nuance and sensitivity instead of sketching bizarre or demeaning caricatures.

But Disciplines of a Godly Man holds a counterintuitive lesson: Perhaps the books that best serve men do so precisely by serving the whole body of Christ.

Matt Reynolds is senior books editor for Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Christian Men Are Christians First".

The Beckoning Nightstand

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Ideas

The Bestseller that Made Church Cool—and Optional

Ashley Hales

‘Blue Like Jazz’ spoke for a generation and left disillusioned evangelicals more dissatisfied.

Illustration by John Lee

In summer 2003, American evangelicals’ book-buying habits appeared to be fueled by fear around political destabilization from the 9/11 attacks, war in the Middle East, and potential financial fallout around Y2K. The fictional series Left Behind sold over 80 million copies, and Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover sold 1 million copies around that time.

The idea of church was being reimagined: Gone were the lights, smoke machines, and conservative politics of megachurch practice; in their stead came icons, meeting in the round, and a decentering of the sermon in favor of liturgical elements, offering a sort of artsy smorgasbord for the spiritually curious.

This was the world in which Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality became a sensation, sitting on The New York Times bestseller list for weeks and selling a million copies by 2008. The spiritual memoir captured “the emerging momentum of the Christian hipster set,” Brett McCracken wrote in Christianity Today in 2009 about those reacting against slick marketing in favor of liturgical practices.

In the two decades since, white American evangelical subcultures of the ’90s and ’00s have been scrutinized, reevaluated, and deconstructed in books, pulpits, and counseling offices, especially around purity culture, gender hierarchies, and abuse of power. But few evangelical writers have looked closely at Blue Like Jazz.

What was it about this memoir that captured an evangelical imagination for a whole generation? How did it speak to the hopes and fears of American evangelicals around the turn of the century? Blue Like Jazz attempted to correct a Christianity conflated with conservativism, but it has not offered a satisfying alternative. Both solutions—of legalism or license—ultimately are remnants of evangelical individualism. Both have left our pews empty.

Miller’s memoir joins a long line of confessional testimonial narratives, from Augustine’s Confessions to early American conversion narratives—with an important difference. This 21st-century testimony is not a rite of passage for entrance into a community but the record of an individual standing outside it, or at least alongside it—an observer reckoning with the evangelical experience while still longing to know Jesus.

The book’s “gritty” style—which CT described at the time as “Anne Lamott with testosterone”—was its appeal: a bit bloggy and conversational, slightly irreverent, more at ease with dissonance than tidy answers. And it resonated with disillusioned evangelicals.

Bookstore owner, publisher at InterVarsity Press, and current Evangelical Christian Publishers Association president Jeff Crosby watched Miller’s rise. He noted in an email interview with me that Miller’s titles “tapped into those early days of the ‘emerging church’ and ‘spiritual but not religious’ ideas being bandied about.”

He said Miller’s first two hits—Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles in a Thousand Years—“scratched the itch we readers felt (but weren’t sure we could talk about) regarding the paradoxes of faith.” Jazz’s conversational familiarity was its success, and in 2012, it was made into a film.

While this “spiritual but not religious” tone was often associated with the emergent church movement, Miller never identified himself with emergent leaders like Brian McLaren or Rob Bell. But the tone and style of Miller’s prose resonates with what philosopher James K. A. Smith then wrote of the emergent church: Rather than a movement, “it’s better understood as a growing sensibility in the contemporary church.”

Readers bought Blue Like Jazz because of this sensibility. As Dale Huntington, lead pastor of City Life Church in San Diego, told me, “Miller didn’t preach at you. He sat you down to dinner, made a self-deprecating joke, and poured you a glass of wine.”

This connection resonated for religious and irreligious people alike and even led to conversions. Huntington’s father raised him in the Baha’i faith, but Huntington became a Christian at age 16. At age 20, his father was hospitalized from Parkinson’s disease. During the stay, Huntington read Blue Like Jazz to him aloud, and years later his father came to faith, largely through the influence of the book. Miller’s prose invited in those who lived on evangelicalism’s edges.

In the early 2000s, I had a different view of the American evangelical landscape. Newly married, my husband and I embarked on a journey across the Atlantic Ocean for seminary (him) and a PhD (me) in Edinburgh. In our years there, we were connected to both a small Scottish denominational seminary and a large research university; we joined a Church of Scotland parish church, yet we also looked with interest at the conversations happening back home.

While I knew of Blue Like Jazz in 2003, I read it only recently. Its punch and grit don’t quite land the same way 20 years later. The book is of its time and genre—more blog than memoir, oversharing in places (“I feel like a complete loser when I don’t have money”) yet trying just a bit too hard to be profound (“You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic”).

At the time, Blue Like Jazz offered a compelling story for American evangelicals to have Jesus without his bride. Jesus was presented as sensitive to the issues Miller and his fellow Christians faced in places like urban Portland. But the book’s style and message increasingly center the individual. In that way, it simply dresses the seeker-sensitive movement in a beanie and skinny jeans. In one passage, Miller prioritizes human decision over the cosmic work of Christ—he writes that there must be “something inside [him]” that earned Jesus’ redemptive work.

Miller recounts how he never really liked church and although he realized institutions were necessary, he didn’t like them. Yet his experience at one particular church, Imago Dei in Portland, was different. In 2005, Miller commented that this experience of a local church made him “feel parented and not alone.”

But by 2014, things had changed. Miller shared with his followers on social media that “church is not a huge part of my life. … Part of it [not attending church] was I’d disagree with what was taught. … I can’t get with the certainty.”

Christian outlets wrote with consternation about Miller’s shift away from the church, but it should not have come as a surprise. The signs were there. In Blue Like Jazz, Miller recounted, “The beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.”

Paul himself calls the gospel to Jews and Gentiles a mystery (Eph. 3:8–9; 5:32), and the good news of Jesus is personal and experiential, but Miller’s language is abstract and, over time, made it easy for him to distance himself from church. The sort of faith Miller pursued fails to mention Jesus, God’s Word, or Jesus’ church (as well as Paul’s many metaphors of the church as foundation, temple, or bride).

Where does one go to find this “nonpolitical mysterious system”? In what sorts of activities would one participate? Does it require others, or can I continually redefine through my own experience what is “experienced but not explained”? The language Miller uses about his Christian spirituality could equally be applied to psychedelics or witchcraft.

Some critics recognized this loose theological wordplay at the time, and others later. Tim Challies said, “Big box Christianity spawned…a rebellion” about which Miller and others wrote. Author Rachel Joy Welcher told me, “There wasn’t a category for what Miller was doing, but we knew we liked it. It felt edgy.” More recently, when writing on purity culture, she asked,

How do the ideas in these books I grew up reading hold up next to Scripture? What I found were so many extrabiblical rules and ideas that had no foundation in Bible truth, and yet were blindly followed by an entire generation of church kids like me.

Disaffected evangelicals found a home in Miller’s book and reached for new expressions of church. But a generation later, these disaffected evangelicals (and their children) aren’t moving from one tradition into another, from megachurch to hipster church. If Blue Like Jazz gave its readers permission to leave their parents’ Christianity, these same readers—like Miller himself—are now more likely to leave church altogether.

Given the amount and breadth of impact from church scandals in recent years, it makes sense that Miller and his original readers would desire to leave a broken institution. But in 2003, Miller named several Christian leaders to whom he looked with optimism because of their expressions of a relevant church in the 21st century. “The Cussing Pastor” Mark Driscoll, apologist Ravi Zacharias, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye author Joshua Harris were just a few.

Miller credited now-scandal-ridden Driscoll with encouraging him to attend Imago Dei church in Portland. He mentioned the late Ravi Zacharias’s teaching on the good of community—all while, we know today, Zacharias was abusing his power and sexually assaulting women. And he described Harris as “a vibrant kid who read a lot of the Bible,” “good-looking and obsessed with dating.” Today, Harris (once a part of C. J. Mahaney’s Sovereign Grace Church movement) and his wife are divorced and have walked away from Christian faith.

If the type of Christian spirituality that Blue Like Jazz enacts is detached from institutional guardrails and accountability and is not lived out in a spirit of communal renewal, repentance, and reliance on Christ, perhaps it’s not surprising to see the wreckage of the leaders Miller holds up.

We must be clear: No single commitment to theological or ecclesiastical tradition will insulate us from moral failure, abuse, suffering, doubt, or loss of faith. Following a sort of “nonpolitical mysterious system” did not insulate Miller or the leaders to whom he looked for guidance from falling into the trap of sin—through either abuse or sloth. However, this does not mean we need to end up where Miller or the tens of millions who have dechurched have landed.

In a passage near the end of the book (and from whence comes his title), Miller writes, “I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music,” a “music birthed out of freedom.” The phrase music birthed out of freedom requires us to ask: What is the end or goal of such freedom? For the generation coming out of the evils of chattel slavery in the US, freedom was thoroughly social, economic, political, and spiritual.

The freedom Miller explores in Blue Like Jazz is of an infinitely lesser variety: less potent; more platform-oriented and individualized; and ultimately untethered from place, accountability, and the unchanging Word of God.

Works of art shake us from our complacency even when they are of this lesser variety of freedom. We need new forms of art to awaken us. Especially when our institutions are healthy, we are afforded space to critique them and try out new, energizing forms—the sort of thing Miller does in Blue Like Jazz.

But when our institutions are weak and frayed, as many say they are now, the mature response is to root out bureaucratic rot while also strengthening our common bonds—the approach of a spade in one hand and sword in the other we see in Nehemiah 4:17. We defend and build simultaneously. We cannot simply critique church without seeking its peace and purity. We cannot tear down without also building up. We cannot sever spiritual growth from the manner and place in which Jesus says it takes place: the church.

Yuval Levin recently reminded us in the journal The New Atlantis that such institutional building is others-centered. We must take attention away from self to build for other (future) people. Levin’s criticism is sharp: “The inability to value those other people and judge them worthy of our work and sacrifice is a characteristic failing of a decadent society.” When we focus exclusively on our self-experience to the detriment of others, in the present or future, our cultural artifacts resemble a stagnant pond. There is no life there.

In 2020, Ross Douthat identified American society as being in a period of decadence, “something that comes on civilizations when they’ve reached a certain stage, and it’s not clear where they go next.” Decadence, Douthat believes, happens after the ladder of success has been climbed: a sort of stalemate of cultural production and dialogue. Movies rehash the same stories, and sequels rule the day. We often see this stagnation in form before we see it play out in content.

Blue Like Jazz’s form felt new and edgy for young millennials and Gen Xers in 2003. In hindsight, the fruit it bore is that of a decadent society where the self is ultimately authoritative, where individuals self-select into churches that feed their values (rather than sharpen like iron on iron), and where our Christian message is no different from the world’s—if we stay in the church at all.

There are other paths to take, however. When my husband and I moved to Edinburgh, the parish church we joined was evangelical in its history and sentiments. We sang weekly with organ accompaniment, drank tea with octogenarians, and worshiped with more than 27 other nationalities in a historic stone church building. This multicultural, multigenerational, and rather traditional church became the touchtone of my husband’s and my ministry and thinking then, and its tone still resonates with us today.

Because of that church, we value prayer for the global church, remembering we are a part of a diverse body across space and time. We remember in word and deed that our identity takes shape as we are built together into Christ’s body. In our 20s, we dreamed of church planting in a cosmopolitan city center, deeply motivated by Tim Keller’s rise to public prominence as we considered our future in terms of pluralism, contextualization, and gospel-centeredness.

These same values permeated our ministry wherever we’ve lived and served: in campus ministry, in the suburbs, and now at a church in a college town. For all the wounds we have received from the church and all the ways we have unintentionally wounded others, the church still provides us more than a provocative form or tone of spirituality. The church is the radiant bride of Christ himself.

Like Donald Miller’s own story, the books we write and the legacies they bequeath to future generations are complicated. Miller correctly concludes in his book, “I think the most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.”

But we must remember too that Jesus loves his bride. She is not perfect, but Jesus cleanses her of unrighteousness—in part now and fully at the fullness of time. We, as members of Christ’s body, must love her too.

Ashley Hales is editorial director for print at Christianity Today.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Overplaying 'Blue Like Jazz'".

- More from Ashley Hales

Ideas

At My Mother’s Deathbed, I Discovered the Symmetry of a Long Life

Jen Wilkin

The chiastic pattern I’d come to love in Scripture also shows up in God’s design for aging.

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

As a self-professed Bible nerd and a lover of symmetry, no discovery has made me happier than that of the chiasm, a literary structure beloved by writers in the ancient Near East.

Chiasms are a kind of mirror-image parallelism, using repetition to trace an idea. They litter the Old Testament and the New; once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.

A modern example of a short chiasm would be If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Jesus makes a pithy chiastic statement in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

But most chiastic structures are longer than one line, sometimes stretching across entire chapters, with a hinge point in the middle. Westerners are accustomed to a conclusion landing at the end, like the moral of the story or the punchline of a joke, but the ancient Near Eastern mind liked to embed the main idea dead center.

If we don’t recognize this structure as we read Scripture, from the Psalms to the words of Jesus, we risk placing the emphasis on the wrong point. As a Bible teacher, I see how chiasms honor the truism that repetition is the mother of learning. Chiasms are memory aids, God’s kindness to past generations of worshipers who likely never held Scripture in their hands as well as to modern Christians in our distracted age. They are meant to help us remember.

Modern readers may wonder why this particular form of parallelism appealed so heavily to the ancient Near Eastern mind. I certainly did—that is, until my mother died.

“I’m so sorry you have to take me to this appointment.” I looked over at my diminutive 79-year-old mother, perched in the passenger seat, eyes apologetic, fretting with her purse.

Like many in her generation, my mom found it difficult to accept even help that was easy to supply. “You are a person to love, not a problem to solve” had become my mantra to her each time she expressed dismay at having interrupted my life in any way.

Before you begin to assume that my mother and I had an enviable relationship, let me say we did not—but through much hard work, we found a real sweetness together in her final years. In December of 2021, her kids and grandkids moved her into an apartment five minutes from my home. We set up her antique furniture, hung her favorite pictures, and put out her favorite vase, the one with wisteria around the rim. I was excited to be able to drop in or run errands for her so easily.

I planned a family dinner for her 80th birthday that January. Three days before it, she texted that she had a stomach bug and wasn’t sure she would make it. She assured me she was fine. Please don’t come over. But she was sicker than she thought.

Her birthday passed in the ICU, and a week later she was placed on palliative care, coming home to my house for hospice. No more beeping monitors and sterile overhead lights. No more masks and visitor restrictions. Instead, a room flooded with sunshine, warm with color, and filled with loved ones.

She was, at this point, no longer communicative. But I knew if she could have spoken, she would have repeated the words she had strained to say again and again during her brief hospital stay: “I’m so sorry to be a burden.”

My brothers and I took our place at her bedside to keep a vigil familiar to many reading this. We listened as her breathing became more and more labored with each passing day. We witnessed the hard work of dying.

On the second day, the hospice nurse told me, “You know, you can coach her. Give her encouragement. Tell her she’s doing well.” I played her favorite hymns. I held her hand. I helped keep her clean and comfortable. I whispered a thousand times, “I’m so glad you’re home. You’re a person to love, not a problem to solve.”

At last, she reached the end of her travail. A final deep exhale, a crashing silence.

And it hit me: the marvelous and terrible symmetry of a long human life.

Eighty years earlier, hadn’t she entered this world in a similar way—through a great labor, with a deep inhale and a piercing wail? Had she not received much the same care in the hours after her birth that we provided in the hours before her death?

I suspect the reason the ancients loved a chiasm was because it is the recognizable shape of the sweep of life. Perhaps God, in his kindness, designed it to be such. Bookends. Repetition. Symmetry.

I reasoned that the other concentric layers of a human life could be mapped as well. Every human life is unique, but what might be the general pattern? I sketched out my thoughts.

The chiasm of a human life. The idea is not unique to me. I recall the saying that we are first children to our parents, then parents to our children, then parents to our parents, and finally children to our children.

If life is a chiasm, and if chiasms teach, what does the chiasm of life seek to teach us? If we become students of it, I believe it can “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

Remembering that seasons of life follow a patterned order helps us inhabit the season we are in and prioritize how to use the time we are given. Since death announced its presence in Genesis 3, our days have been numbered. Perhaps God, in his infinite kindness, gave us a chiasm, a patterned measuring rod, to number those days rightly.

Knowing that aging means the relinquishing of freedoms and abilities helps us embrace that process rather than hold onto self-reliance. It helps us to anticipate the next season, to savor the one we are in, and to be grateful for the ones we have already left behind.

Recognizing that in some seasons we give care and in some we receive care helps us accept care when it’s our turn to receive. We are not problems to solve in our extreme age any more than we were in our infancy. We are simply people to love, in a stage when others repay a debt of care they themselves received in their time.

The chiastic structure of life explains why we feel such shock when a life is cut short. We expect intuitively that human life should make a full arc. The asymmetry of a young or untimely death creates dissonance. No bookend. No parallel. No full circle. My mother’s death was a good one by many measures, not least because of its blessed symmetry.

But if a chiasm puts the main point at the middle, how are our middle years noteworthy? Midlife offers a unique opportunity, a moment of perspective at the crossroads. If we have paid close attention to how we entered the chiasm, we will be better able to exit it with grace and submission. Looking back over the first half of life can help us anticipate the second half—in both its losses and its gains.

If we focus just on our abilities and responsibilities, we see only gains in the first half of the chiasm of life and only parallel losses in the second. In a culture that values youth and vigor, we risk losing sight of what we learn over the years: wisdom. The wisdom of aging means that even as our bodies increasingly fail us, our internal lives grow richer and steadier. Bodies decline, but people develop.

At 55, I can already track the decline in my physical abilities. I am still in a stage where I am the supplier of help to others, but if the Lord grants me length of years, I will one day be only a recipient—fed and clothed and cared for by someone else’s hands and feet.

The days in which my body can yield help to others are numbered, and I want to number them rightly. My parents have helped me with the math. Watching them pass into old age has brought into focus for me the preciousness of the years I have left. My earliest caregivers have moved to receiving care. Their physical abilities grow more limited, but their insights are deepening.

Illustration by Danielle Del Plato

They are the evidence to me that, while failing joints and heart valves and eyesight and hearing may increasingly unsteady our bodies, wisdom increasingly steadies our souls. Bodies decline, people develop. The lamp of wisdom burns brighter as the oil of life experience grows in supply.

For the believer, old age is an invitation toward burgeoning luminosity.

In my attic is a relic of days gone by: a cassette player my husband owned as a teen. In the living room is another relic—the vase with wisteria trim. My mother’s, passed on to me. It’s not of enormous value, but unlike its electronic upstairs neighbor, its value is steadily growing with age.

Here is where we bump into the problem with the way our culture views not just aging but also the elderly. My husband, Jeff, and I are affectionately called “the Olds” by our kids, who thankfully still seek our advice and who regard us as a source of wisdom obtained through length of years. But our children are increasingly the exception.

So many cultural shifts have happened in so little time that many parents and children are estranged by their differing views. Whereas one’s elders used to be seen as those increasing in wisdom with every passing year, they are now likely to be seen as increasingly obsolete (“Okay, boomer”). Less like a vase, more like a cassette player.

When I listen to my 84-year-old father’s advice, it occurs to me that he always waits patiently for me to end my question before responding. At 55, I often sit with a younger person to hear about their difficulty in marriage, parenting, or ministry; recognize a familiar pattern a few minutes into the telling; and, at the right moment, offer the same advice I have given on similar occasions.

We have a way of hitting the same roadblocks. If I have acquired a modest level of wisdom in middle age, how much more does my father hold at 84? There is godly wisdom, a gift God grants, but there is also the wisdom of age—gained by sheer length of years and attention to those around us.

The wisdom of age is the basis for the fifth commandment’s requirement to honor father and mother, a command given not to children, as we often assume, but to adults. (Note that the commands following it deal with the very adult sins of murder, adultery, theft, bearing false witness, and covetousness.)

The fifth commandment is intended to instruct adult children to show honor to elderly parents. The Puritans interpret correctly its greater implications in the Westminster Catechism, noting that it included showing honor to all who are our superiors in age and experience.

Put succinctly: Honor the Olds. They know some things you don’t. Their bodies are declining, but their personhood is ever developing. We can miss this so easily. I once heard a woman in her 30s gently reminding an audience of younger women that “older Christian women are still valuable in the church.” In accordance with the fifth commandment, I would offer a slightly altered wording. Those older than us are not still valuable. They are, rather, increasingly valuable.

In a culture that fetishizes youth and views aging as a journey into irrelevance and uselessness, God’s family takes the view that people possess an ever-developing value, one that renders their contributions essential and indispensable.

Our elders have much to offer us—until they reach the stage in the chiasm of life when they don’t. At some point, old age will take from them even the ability to think or communicate. And yet, they will still teach us. Aging requires a fortitude like nothing else. Caring for the aged grants unforeseen blessings to the younger generation. Those who hold the hand of the dying learn secrets to make them wise. They learn that the elderly are not an obligation but a sacred trust. My mother was luminous in her dying.

The grand symmetry of the human life can yield wisdom if we give it our attention. We move from the helplessness of birth to seasons of growth and possibility under the watchful care of our parents. We become caregivers to our children, then to our parents. We watch growth and possibility turn to decline and limited ability in our own lives. We return to helplessness. And we leave this life much as we entered. How kind of the Lord to give us a roadmap for aging until our last enemy, death, is defeated.

Don’t believe the lie that the first half of life is to be clung to. When we behold the arc from beginning to end, we learn to value all of it. We learn not just to number our days but to cherish them—the days of our youth, the days of our twilight, and all the days in between.

Don’t let a youth-obsessed culture rob you of your sense of the value of all parts of life. We need our aging faces and slowing bodies to tell us the truth: that time is passing, and that it is exceedingly precious. Each season yields its own exquisite fruit. No need to cling to what was never meant to last. God is faithful in every season.

Jen Wilkin is an author, Bible teacher, and cohost of the Knowing Faith podcast.

This article appeared in the January/February 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "A Life’s Faithful Symmetry".

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