When the Times Were ‘A-Changin’’

Daniel Silliman

CT reported on 1967 “message music,” the radicalism on American college campuses, and how the Six-Day War fit into biblical prophecy.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

CT readers learned that singers—including Bob Dylan, Sonny Bono, Bobby Goldsboro, and Paul Simon (mistakenly called “Pete Simon”)—were putting out music with a message.

Message music is not a style of music, like rhythm and blues or swing. It is a song in any style that speaks directly or indirectly to a basic problem of mankind. Not all rock ’n’ roll songs are message songs. Most of them are about the traditional topics of popular songwriters: love desired, love fought for, love gained, and love lost. But there are songs that are far more serious. They speak of fear, anxiety, war, loneliness, hope, and the difficulties and contradictions of life in the twentieth century. …

They lay bare hypocrisy, hidden fears, the doubts and inadequacies of our generation; they reveal the difficulties of living when the “times they are a-changin’.”

Some of the messages were alarming. On college campuses, a growing number of students embraced radicalism and calls for revolution. CT published FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s 3,500-word analysis of the “New Left” and its dangerous “gospel of nihilism.”

To dismiss the New Left, as some do, as a collection of simpletons, eccentrics, and jocular fools is to commit a grave mistake. Its adherents should not, as so often happens, be judged strictly by their Beatnik dress and ways (repugnant as they may be to most Americans). …

Basic to the New Left’s mood is the idea that contemporary American society (contemptuously called the “Establishment”) is corrupt, evil, and malignant—and must be destroyed. To reform it, to change it for the better, is impossible. It must—along with its Judaic-Christian values—be liquidated. “Let’s face it. It is, to use the crudest psychological terminology, a sick, sick, sick society in which we live. It is, finally, a society which approaches collective insanity—a system of authority-dependency relationships which destroys life and health and strength and creates debility, dependency, and deathliness.”

For that reason, members of the New Left take great delight in desecrating the American flag, mocking American heroes, and disparaging American history. They contemptuously hiss and boo officials of our government and show scornful disdain for opinions with which they disagree (the New Left at heart is extremely totalitarian, intolerant, and opinionated in nature). They urge resistance to the draft (even on occasions try to interfere physically with the legitimate activities of armed-services personnel on college campuses present for the purpose of recruiting), burn or mutilate draft cards, endeavor to dictate to university administrative officials how these institutions should be run.

One evangelical group sought to engage students directly with the Christian account of what made society “sick, sick, sick” and tell them about the cure that could be found in Jesus. Seven hundred Campus Crusade for Christ staff members spent a week evangelizing students at the University of California, Berkeley.

CCC activists buttonholed students with straightforward, person-to-person gospel appeals. They staged noon rallies before thousands and conducted evening meetings in scores of residence halls. They infiltrated “The Forum,” a popular Telegraph Avenue coffeehouse frequented by hippies and budding political radicals, and scored many conversions there. Nightly they put on high-quality programs at a 3,000-seat theater. They saturated surrounding neighborhoods with a visitation campaign, and in the campus Plaza area they manned Christian literature tables next to tables run by such groups as the Campus Sexual Rights Forum, the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, and the Maoist-oriented Progressive Labor Party.

By the end of the week almost 1,000 decision slips were tabulated. … Widespread criticism resulted. The Daily Californian editorialized … “there are limits to these activities which should not be overstepped, and this group of zealots has managed to transgress those boundaries with gay abandon.” It complained that students had been roused from bed by early-morning telephone calls—a charge [Campus Crusade for Christ leadership] denied.

CT reported efforts to loosen legal restrictions on abortion and ongoing public debates about the ethics of abortion.

Prestigious leaders representing religion and ethics, law, medicine, and the social sciences disputed, debated, and defended the world’s abortion practices during a three-day International Conference on Abortion held this month in Washington, D. C. …

Dr. Herbert Richardson of the Harvard Divinity School, one of the conference conveners, summarized the ethicists’ closed-session discussions: Human life begins at conception, or at least no later than eight days after conception. Abortion should be performed—if at all—only in exceptional cases. Both theists and non-theists saw human life as qualitatively different from all other earthly life, and therefore worthy of special respect. And theists agreed among themselves that religious affirmations are relevant: God is creator of man and the author of life; man is created in the image of God; man is the steward of the gift of life and not its complete master.

Beyond this, opinion diverged. Some moralists deemed it morally possible to take the life of an unborn child under certain conditions as a “human response to God’s love and his neighbor.” Others held that the fetus has inviolable rights; no individual or society has the right to say which shall live and which shall die.

CT also looked at new developments in birth control and asked, “Which Methods Are Moral?”

The pill—which is relatively expensive and must be taken daily—is popular among affluent, sophisticated people, while the IUD is the most feasible means of mass birth control for developing nations. Though only about 95 per cent effective, the IUD is inexpensive and, once the small loop or ring is inserted in a five-minute operation, requires little attention. An estimated 1.3 million women now use the IUD in India, and South Korea credits 400,000 IUD insertions with a significant drop in its birth rate. …

The U. S. Food and Drug Administration is studying the safety and effectiveness of IUDs and should report by mid-year. Although ethical discussions on birth control tend to be divorced from biology, scientific evidence leads such Christians as William F. Campbell, a missionary doctor in Morocco, to fear that use of the IUD is “a kind of abortion.”

The biological question is at what point the IUD stops human life—before or after the male sperm fertilizes the female egg. The ethical question is whether a fertilized egg is a human being—whether the IUD may be the mechanism for microscopic murder.

Internationally, CT reported a revival in Indonesia.

“It’s too early to put all the pieces together,” says Dr. Clyde W. Taylor, executive secretary of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, “but there can be no doubt that revival has broken out.”

Taylor says the best estimates show at least 200,000 conversions from Islam to Christianity within the last eighteen months. Mission boards are assigning top priority to getting help to the workers in Indonesia, now the world’s fifth-largest country. Nowhere before has there ever been a comparable response from Muslims—missionary experts often regard them as among the hardest people in the world to reach.

The success of Wycliffe Bible Translators was also encouraging. CT reported that in 1967, Wycliffe had become “the world’s largest Protestant missionary organization.”

Evangelical breakthroughs almost invariably occur under strong leaders. Bob Pierce has been the Billy Graham of the evangelically rooted World Vision movement and through plaintive pleas and skillful promotion raises millions of dollars annually for orphan care and general relief work in the Far East. Dapper Bill Bright has led Campus Crusade for Christ, with its simple but intensive evangelistic zeal, into hundreds of colleges in the United States and abroad. In the case of Wycliffe, the genius has been that of soft-spoken W. Cameron Townsend, now 71, whose diplomacy has won him entrée to scores of traditionally anti-Protestant government residences in Latin America.

Fifty years ago this month, Townsend, product of a California farm family, arrived in Guatemala as a $25-a-month salesman for the Bible House of Los Angeles. The real challenge came with his discovery that the Scriptures were of no use to the Indians because they could not read Spanish. Prodded by their complaint that “God doesn’t know our language,” Townsend set out to translate the New Testament into the then-unwritten Cakchiquel dialect. Although it took twelve years, Townsend not only achieved that goal but also inspired similar projects across Latin America and subsequently in other parts of the world.

Out of these projects grew Wycliffe, which was incorporated in 1942 and today operates on a budget of about $5,000,000.

Several Communist countries seemed to grow more accommodating and tolerant toward Christians. As CT editors surveyed the global situation, they grew concerned that the temporary ideological compromises of dictators would deceive naive Christians.

Never has the religious situation in Communist countries been more confused and ambiguous than it is today.

Except for Mao’s China, where the fury of the barbaric “cultural revolution” strikes hard against Buddhists and Muslims as well as Protestants and Catholics, a relative calm and a sort of “peaceful coexistence” now seems to prevail between governments and various religious groups. Church delegations from Communist countries visit the United States and other Western nations almost routinely. Various churches of the Soviet Union and other Communist nations have been permitted to join the World Council of Churches and international denominational bodies.

The greatest breakthrough in church-state relations in the Soviet Union was the first visit of the head of the Soviet Union to the Vatican in January of this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Church dignitaries are now more often invited to official state receptions in Communist capitals though they are not yet asked to say grace at banquets given by Communist leaders. …

A superficial observer might be easily tempted to misinterpret such phenomena. He might conclude, hastily and optimistically, that … a promising new era of a dialogue between Christians and Marxists is at hand. American churchmen, knowing neither the language nor the extent of complex problems in these areas, often make inaccurate and misleading appraisals of the religious situation. Their opinions tend to reflect wishful thinking rather than historical realities.

Evangelicals were struggling in Cuba, eight years after the takeover of Communist Fidel Castro.

The harassment continues more subtly than in 1965, when fifty-three Baptists were arrested simultaneously. Thirty-four of them were brought to trial and sentenced for a variety of offenses, from espionage to “twisting biblical texts for the purpose of ideological diversionism.” To go about with Bible in hand is still an offense. Informers have infiltrated the churches—a fact not only admitted but boasted about by Dr. Falipe Carneado, director of the government’s department of religious matters. Churches cannot build. Theological students are whisked away to military service or to work camps. Unbelievers have been known to attend a church service, stand up at a given moment and sing the national anthem, then accuse those who do not join in of disrespect.

A common device is the street plan. Both ends of a street where a church is located are roped off. …

All in all, the picture is dark. One Cuban expressed it this way: “Our experiences are very sour. We breathe an atmosphere of insolence, tyranny, blasphemy, hypocrisy, lies, betrayal, and indignity. Our palm trees are so sad that they seem to be weeping, and our rivers are dry one moment and flooding at the other. This island is a huge prison with international jailers. We have returned to the time of the Vandals. The only thing we can do is raise our eyes to our blue skies, to the shining sun, to the twinkling stars, and to our God.”

The Castro regime also imprisoned Christian missionaries. CT reported on the experience of two American evangelicals who went to Cuba to plead for their son.

The Rev. and Mrs. Clifton Fite returned to Waynesboro, Georgia, believing the Cuban government will “deal kindly” with requests to release their missionary son David from prison. …

The Fites had tried to see their son since he was imprisoned two years ago on charges of currency-exchange violations. They finally succeeded, through the Cuban ambassador in Mexico. Officials “listened with reverence and responded with courtesy” during the fifty-one-day stay in Cuba, Fite reported.

In June, Israel went to war with Egypt and a coalition of Arab nations. CT published firsthand accounts from evangelicals in Jerusalem and Beirut and analyzed the political, military, and eschatological context of the Six-Day War.

Israel, hedged on three sides by Arab foes and outnumbered twenty to one, began fighting to ensure its survival as a nation. After mounting swift air strikes against Egyptian forces, Israeli troops in three short days circled and captured the old city of Jerusalem, controlled the Gaza strip, reopened the Gulf of Aqaba and reached the Suez Canal. …

The Christian can best understand the imbroglio in the Middle East through his knowledge of the prophetic Scriptures. Although the Bible does not describe future developments in detail, it offers much in the way of broad prophetic outline. … The believer will not be bewildered by the tides that sweep the world, nor will he despair over the headlines. …

The prophetic clock of God is ticking while history moves inexorably toward the final climax. And as that clock ticks, the Christian believer lifts his head high, for he knows that a glorious redemption draws near.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Ideas

From Panic Attacks to Physical Discipline

Justin Whitmel Earley

How one new year turned my life around spiritually and physically.

Andrik Langfield / Unsplash

Ten years ago, I was at the unhealthiest moment of my life.

I was a former missionary who had become a corporate lawyer. I had a head filled with great theology, but my job in mergers and acquisitions at an international law firm—combined with parenting two young sons—had driven my body into the ground. I suffered from constant panic attacks and insomnia, the kind that left me with suicidal thoughts and no sleep unless I took sleeping pills or had a few drinks.

I am no longer that person. I now run a law firm; I have four young boys; I write books. My life is certainly not less complicated, but panic attacks are a distant memory and I’m arguably in the best shape of my life.

Lest that sound boastful, let me be clear—God saved me. When I was spiraling out of control, I didn’t know what to do. But God used the grace of spiritual and physical disciplines to change everything about my life.

It started with a new year’s conversation I still remember to this day. I sat down with two of my best friends and asked them to keep me accountable to a few daily and weekly rhythms in the new year.

A decade later, I’m still wrestling with why habits are so spiritual—including health-related ones. Here are four things that I’ve learned.

First, you are mostly your habits. From Aristotle to James Clear, most of humanity has been clear on what makes up a life: our habits. According to one study, about two-thirds of daily actions are not choices we consciously make; they are the product of habit.

This is particularly important when it comes to our bad habits. Take mine at that time: scrolling emails constantly at home, eating things that make me feel horrible, snapping at my kids. All of us know better.

But the part of our brain that knows better is not the part that is churning along in habit. So we become the way I was: a good head with bad routines.

The problem is, when your head goes one way and your habit goes another, your heart tends to follow the habit. Habits start to get really spiritual really quick.

Second, habits are worship drivers. We are living in a resurgence of liturgy. Liturgies are the things in a worship service we put on repeat because we want to be formed in the image of the God we worship. But notice the similarity of habits and liturgy: Both things we do over and over, both things form us.

The big difference is that liturgy admits that it’s about worship. In our day-to-day lives, our patterns often obscure what we worship. But that doesn’t mean we’re not worshiping. The only question is what we are worshiping.

Third, your body is spiritual. It’s impossible to talk about habit without talking about embodiment, because we’re talking about a lower brain function. The impact of habit is very different from the impact of head knowledge. One does not automatically transfer to the other. You have to take knowledge and put it into practice. And that’s when whole-life transformation begins to happen. Jesus illustrated this very colorfully for us (Matt. 7:24–27).

Modern Christians tend to get nervous here, because we think that when we talk about the body, we are leaving the realm of spirituality. But this is not how the Bible sees the world. God made our bodies. He called them good. He saved us by the body of his Son. He is going to raise our bodies to new life. As C. S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, it’s no use trying to be more spiritual than God.

This is precisely why the spiritual disciplines are so physical, and why physical disciplines are so spiritual. It’s we who divide up the world into sacred and secular. Well, us and the Enemy. But it is not God. He’s very clear on this: Our bodies are sacred—and our habits are too.

Fourth, physical disciplines are spiritual disciplines. This means that the ways we eat and exercise are as spiritual as the ways we fast and pray. I am a living testimony to this. I will attest that spiritual disciplines like morning kneeling prayer and putting Scripture before phone absolutely changed my life ten years ago. But I am a lawyer, and I would not be telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth if I did not say that respecting sleep, embracing a healthy diet, and practicing regular exercise changed my mental health as much as the spiritual disciplines.

This is because anxiety is never just a head problem; it’s always a habit problem too. (The reverse is true as well, by the way.)

But I used to worry this fact somehow meant I was admitting that “the world’s” solutions to my mental health were better than God’s solutions. I don’t know when I forgot that all truth is God’s truth. I don’t know where I missed that everything biological is also theological. I don’t know why I didn’t take “honor God with your bodies” (1 Cor. 6:20) as seriously as “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19).

But I didn’t. I was a product of our modern, gnostic moment like we all are, and I had limited Christianity to a head project. But even people who love the head like Abraham Kuyper said that Christ calls out “Mine!” over every square inch of the universe. That means bodies too.

When you put all of the above together, you realize that your embodied habits have an enormous spiritual impact on what the Bible calls “the heart.” The way I like to put this is that the body teaches the soul. By that, I mean that God doesn’t just use our knowledge of him to shape our habits; he also uses our habits to shape our knowledge of him.

For example, moderate exercise is not only good for our health but also trains our heart to respect discipline of all kinds. For the sake of loving our families better and for the sake of self-control, Christians should see some form of exercise, however limited, as holy and useful to the Christian life.

Likewise, eating simply and healthily is not only good for our physical and mental health. It’s central to interrupting everyday idolatries such as gluttony and vanity. Christians should see a healthy diet as central to stewarding their body to love neighbor, and as central to rejecting loving anything more than God.

And a sleep rhythm is as spiritually formative as a sabbath rhythm is physically formative. Christians cannot be people who preach a gospel of peace while living in the unrest of incessant work. Calling it a night or taking a day off to sabbath are central ways we proclaim the truth of the gospel—and central ways we enjoy the truth of the gospel. On the cross, Jesus said “It is finished” partly so that you can calm down and take a nap.

If I could go back ten years and meet myself in the midst of my anxiety crisis, I would want to encourage that version of myself: “Embrace the new year health habits! God made your body. Caring for it does not have to be vanity. Stewarding your mental health is necessary to loving God and neighbor. So do it for love.”

This new year, I want to encourage you to do the same. Our bodies bear the image of God, and God is love! We shouldn’t idolize our bodies, but we shouldn’t ignore them either. We should image God through them by stewarding them for the sake of loving God and loving others.

Habits won’t change God’s love for you. But God’s love for you should change your habits.

Justin Whitmel Earley is a lawyer, speaker, and author from Richmond, Virginia. He is the CEO of Avodah Legal and the author of numerous bestselling books, including Habits of the Household and, most recently, The Body Teaches the Soul.

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Books

Reexamining Thomas Jefferson

Thomas S. Kidd

Three books on history to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today.

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

**Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025)**

Walter Isaacson’s brief book The Greatest Sentence Ever Written marks America’s 250th birthday by considering the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence and its “self-evident truths” of equal rights by God’s endowment. The Greatest Sentence is a great concept for a book, focusing on an undeniably great sentence. But the book doesn’t live up to its potential.

Isaacson, the author of popular biographies, including one on Benjamin Franklin, gives surprisingly sparse attention to what the declaration’s second sentence actually says. Instead, he is mainly concerned with using the sentence to offer anodyne comments about American capitalism needing communitarian constraints. Many Christians would agree with him about how a free society also must inculcate care for one’s neighbors.

But Isaacson seems ambivalent about the second sentence’s invocation of God’s created order as the basis for human equality. On the book’s first page, Isaacson claims that the Declaration based fundamental human rights “on reason, not the dictates or dogma of religion.”

In the next sentence, however, Isaacson acknowledges that Jefferson and his composition committee (including Franklin and John Adams) asserted that God created us equal and endowed us with fundamental rights. Isaacson assumes but does not demonstrate that Jefferson wouldn’t have explained the grounds of our rights in religious terms. He speculates that John Adams suggested the “endowed by their Creator” phrase.

**Louis P. Masur, A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025).**

More rewarding than Isaacson’s book is Louis P. Masur’s gem A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship. This book is a microhistory of Jefferson and Madison’s six-week trip in 1791 to the northern states, which solidified the Virginians’ friendship and political alliance for the next 35 years.

The six-week journey itself doesn’t yield much source material. But Masur imaginatively uses highlights of the trip to illumine Madison and Jefferson’s views on topics such as science, race, and language.

The men’s Federalist opponents swore that Jefferson and Madison were in the north to bolster the incipient Democratic-Republican Party. (New England was the nation’s stronghold for the Federalist Party of George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.) Masur insists that the trip was not primarily political but was for “health, recreation, and curiosity,” as Madison put it.

Madison and Jefferson fished, hunted, and studied plants and trees. They stayed at dozens of inns, which Jefferson diligently rated in his journals. (He would have loved posting Google Reviews.)

Masur is fully aware of the men’s failings, especially regarding slavery. He represents these founders as the curious, humane, and imperfect people they were. They were admirably capable of learning. Jefferson, as on many scholarly topics, became nearly obsessed with the science behind New England’s sugar maples. He tried to grow them in Virginia for decades; alas, the climate there was too warm.

One of their most fascinating encounters was with Black farmer Prince Taylor of Fort George, New York. Taylor, a Continental Army veteran, owned a 250-acre farm “which he cultivates with 6 white hirelings … and by his industry and good management turns to good account,” Madison noted. Such an arrangement of Black ownership and white labor would have been incomprehensible in Virginia. Madison didn’t comment further on Taylor, but the experience reminded the slaveholders that the principles bolstering Virginia plantation slavery did not hold true everywhere, even in the America of 1791.

**Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Beacon Press, 1948)**

Daniel J. Boorstin’s classic book The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson helps us fathom the cosmology that lay underneath Jefferson and Madison’s curiosity about sugar maples. Boorstin, a historian and librarian of Congress, mapped Jefferson’s intellectual world and those of colleagues affiliated with the American Philosophical Society (APS), which Jefferson served as president. These associates included the radical democrat and skeptic Thomas Paine and the English Unitarian minister and scientist Joseph Priestley. Priestley’s writings on Unitarianism profoundly influenced Jefferson’s mature religious views.

Boorstin shows that Jefferson and his APS circle viewed God as the “Supreme Maker” and the great “Architect and Builder” of the world. Jefferson’s views about nature and political rights depended on a created order. While his specific beliefs (including his denial of the Trinity) contradicted the great tradition of Christian theology, Jefferson could never dispense with the eternal God as the creative force behind the observable world.

Whether discussing human equality or botanical science, Jefferson assumed that nature operated according to predictable rules and that a rational Creator stood behind those rules. Jefferson thus doubted specific Christian doctrines, but his views of creation were conventional among Americans of the founding generation.

Thomas S. Kidd is research professor of church history at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Ideas

Where Your Heart Is, There Your Habits Will Be Also

Elise Brandon

CT Staff

We won’t want to change until we know why we need to and what we’re aiming for.

Tuesday, 7:45 a.m. The alarm clock glowed in my face, reminding me that I needed to log in to work in 15 minutes. I said good morning to my husband, jumped into a pair of sweatpants, brushed my teeth, and grabbed a bowl of cereal to eat while catching up on messages from my coworkers.

This is how every day went for months.

I didn’t see any problem with my routine—I’m not a morning person and don’t like to be up any earlier than I have to—but my husband gently pointed out that my priorities seemed out of order.

“I want to start the day by connecting with you,” Zack said. “When you check your phone first thing in the morning, it feels like it is more important to you than I am.”

Then it hit me. Does God feel the same way? I wondered.

I realized that my habits were reinforcing my tendency to prioritize work over my relationship with Zack and my relationship with God. I asked myself, What am I saying to myself when work is the first thing on my mind when I wake up? Who am I prioritizing? Why?

We’ve since found some answers and built a new routine for our mornings, and it’s stuck for five months and counting. In asking myself why it’s so much easier to stick with this rhythm than following ideas from social media or sporadic urges to do better, I realized I’ve given this routine more thought and care than I have most habits.

We won’t want to change until we know why we need to. We won’t know how to change until we know what we’re really aiming for. As the Bible continually emphasizes, good habits start with questions about our own motivations.

In many cases, we hardly have to convince ourselves that we need to change. We’re aware that we reach for desserts too often, we neglect the exercise our bodies were made for, and prayer often can be our last resort. We could all come up with a number of habits we’d like to change.

But we often miss the chance to go a layer deeper and think about who we are becoming. We often forget to see ourselves as characters in the story of the gospel, living it out or rejecting its truth in our daily actions.

Justin Whitmel Earley, author of Habits of the Household, says, “Our routines become who we are, become the story and culture of our families.” Earley calls habits “little routines of worship, and worship changes what we love.”

When I woke up 15 minutes before work, I was prioritizing comfort, sleep, and a prompt work attendance over so many other things: a few minutes of prayer, a healthy breakfast, a hug for Zack. I shaped myself in habits of hurry; I worshiped productivity.

The problem wasn’t that I was starting early or had a short morning before work. It was that I had allowed my heart to worship work, and thus I neglected the other responsibilities God had given me. I was starting to love success and recognition over all else. I would check work messages on evenings and weekends and respond immediately to coworkers even during designated off-hours. Without realizing it, I was telling myself every morning that success at my job was the most important thing in my life.

The Bible has much to say about the rhythms of our daily lives, including an entire book (Leviticus) with detailed instructions for what to eat, how to deal with medical issues, and how to celebrate holidays. Moses reveals the reason for attending to these details: They are “so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your God as long as you live by keeping all his decrees and commands that I give you, and so that you may enjoy long life” (Deut. 6:1–2).

Habits are worship—or lack thereof—and good habits prime us to love God. Then, our love for God primes us for good habits.

“Seemingly tiny habits cause major spiritual growth,” writes Hanna Seymour, author of the forthcoming book Everyday Spiritual Habits. She adds that our “run-of-the-mill and even chaotic days are fertile soil for producing a spiritually deep and rich life.”

As Jesus said, “Those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop” (Luke 8:15). When I was offering the first fruits of my time and energy on the altar of work, my life did not produce a crop. My fields of righteousness were withering. I had the fruit of ambition, not the fruit of the Spirit.

When we find problems in our priorities, we shouldn’t immediately try to change our behavior. We should start with our hearts.

One of my college professors once assigned an essay from Miroslav Volf about “plumbing the depths”—diving into our own hearts with prayer and honesty to discover the motives under our actions. Reflection brings meaning, my professor said. This isn’t something we need to do every day or even every week, but some practice of reflection is essential for an intentional life.

“Desire and reward drive our habits,” writes David Mathis, an editor at Desiring God, and “the ultimate goal of cultivating holy habits is having Jesus.”

Practically, this often looks like asking ourselves questions, and the new year offers a fresh opportunity to do so. Some good starting questions are “Why isn’t this habit working?” or “Who am I becoming in light of this habit?” Seymour suggests asking, “Who do I want to become, and what small spiritual habits can I start to help get me there?” Then, like little children, we can ask ourselves why again and again. And we finally start to go deeper.

What hasn’t been working? I’m having trouble getting up in the morning. Why? I go to bed late and don’t get enough sleep. Why? I scroll Instagram because I don’t want to go to bed. Why? I’ll be stressed and tired tomorrow morning. Why? Work is my top priority, and I’m scared to mess up.

There’s my real reason: I am idolizing work. Once I see my logic out in the open, I can ask God to rework that narrative and rewire my heart.

James gets to the root of a problem through a similar type of questioning:

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. (4:1–3)

There’s the root: “You ask with wrong motives.” “You do not ask.” That answer seems a long way from “What causes fights?” Similarly, the roots of our behavior might seem far from our habits. We might be surprised by what God unearths as we prayerfully examine our hearts.

After we find the root, we can start a process of thoughtful trial and error: Starting a new habit that forms us to be more like God, asking him for help, and receiving his grace as we fail and try again.

“We can’t be holy in the abstract,” says Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary. “We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life.”

Of course, even with intentional reflection and thoughtful plans, it takes time and perseverance to unlearn old habits and replace them with better ones.

Mathis writes, “Christian perseverance is not passive.” One of the few times the English word habit is used in the New Testament, Mathis says, it is talking about perseverance (Heb. 10:24–25). We need Spirit-fueled strength and accountability in the church to make lasting habits. (To fight cycles of sin or addiction, we often need more—but never less—than introspection and accountability.)

Sometimes, though, our habits only last a few weeks. Some habits don’t work in our lives, even when we care about our goals and think we understand the root issues. We try—and fail. When that happens, another round of reflection often helps us discover what’s not working. That helps us understand whether we need to change a habit or ask God to change our hearts.

Zack and I recently adjusted a habit that we’d had trouble sticking with: In the summer months, we took a 15-minute walk together after breakfast. As the weather got colder, we gradually fell out of the routine until one day we realized we had dropped it. We still wanted to maintain our time together in the morning—to us it communicated, “You are important to me”—but taking a walk felt miserable in the dark and freezing temperatures.

So we found an alternative. In the winter, instead of going outside, we spend a few extra minutes waking up together, cozy in bed. In this case, it was our habit, not our hearts, that needed to change.

It takes a lot of energy and time to get out of the ruts we’ve fallen into. But what’s more exhausting is staying there. As Earley says, “What’s heavy is continuing to do nothing. What’s burdensome is continuing to follow default cultural habits.”

Our old habits are heavy. Jesus’ burden is light. And when we cast our burdensome patterns at his feet in prayer and reflection, we can increase our clarity of mind to worship him.

Elise Brandon is a copy editor at Christianity Today.

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Culture

My New Year’s Resolution: No More ‘Content’

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis

I want something better than self-anesthetizing consumption.

In March of 2020, I was trying to finish my PhD while caring for a six-month-old and a two-year-old. Miraculously, I defended my dissertation that month in one of the first-ever virtual defenses at my institution, thanks in part to the availability of content. I limit screen time in our house, but I’m not an absolutist, and that month, I needed something that could hold my toddler’s attention. (A big thank you to Amazon’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series.)

Many parents will recognize my dilemma. With a pang of guilt, we turn on the TV to occupy our children’s attention, knowing that when we need to make dinner or talk to the pediatrician on the phone, our kids often need help passing the time. Even acknowledging this reality, we still worry (often appropriately) about how much iPad is too much for our elementary schoolers, and we fret over the time teens spend on TikTok and Snapchat.

Of course, screen time isn’t just a concern for kids. It’s an everybody issue, and we all know it, based on the language we use to describe our scrolling (“mindless”) or Netflix watching (“rotting”). As my toddler watched Moose bake muffins, the pandemic was changing adults’ relationship to content too. Stuck inside and socially isolated, many of us turned to streaming platforms and algorithms not only to engage with ideas, experience art, or unwind with loved ones but also simply to occupy ourselves. Grownups, too, needed color and sound to fill our quarantined days.

The entertainment industry responded to our demand. More podcasts launched during the first half of 2020 than in all of 2019. The number of streaming subscriptions worldwide surpassed 1 billion during the pandemic. Between October 2019 and August 2020, TikTok’s US user count jumped from 39 million to over 100 million.

Pre-2020, we were already watching Instagram clips and YouTube comedy shows. But five years ago, content started to imply something other than entertainment. I’m not the first person to point out how the meaning of the word has changed over the past decade. Content creator is now a recognizable label for a profession that involves simply making things to post on the internet. On social media, “content” can be an advertisement, a funny first-person monologue, a music video, or a Canva-generated text box with an inspirational quote. It’s a catchall for anything you might use to capture attention online.

In the world of content, process and form don’t matter. Any creator seeking views has every incentive to learn only one thing—how to attract and momentarily hold attention. On the consumer side, the term’s ubiquity has eroded our ability to distinguish between different art forms and modes of expression.

As a musicologist, I worry that the content ecosystem is distorting the public’s perception of the value of music. The late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote at length about human “practices” and the goods internal and external to them. He described the game of chess, for example, as a practice with internal goods (the logical puzzle, the learning process, the relationship with other players, the feel of a rook or knight in your palm) and external goods (winning competitions, becoming a world-famous player, securing prize money).

For an obscure singer-songwriter, the goods internal to making music are attainable simply by doing the making. These goods—the pleasure of hearing and producing different harmonies and timbres, the satisfaction of improving one’s skills on an instrument, or the connection with other musicians during a jam session—don’t rely on external acclaim, recognition, or economic reward. In fact, in MacIntyre’s framework, a musician who seeks primarily external goods isn’t a good musician.

Over the past century, technology has incrementally made it easier to separate consumable music from the process of music making itself. It’s easier to turn music into pure externalities, a straight shot of content. With a tap, you can generate a soundtrack for a video on TikTok or create a viral dance video. You can make an AI-generated Christmas song and hit the No. 1 spot on the iTunes Christian chart.

Not everyone thinks that’s a problem. When I wrote about the AI-generated soul singer Solomon Ray last month, I saw multiple variations of the same sentiment in the comments: If the music is good, who cares if it’s AI-generated?

But we can’t assume that something has value—internal or external—simply because it captures our attention. This will be obvious to parents who have had to think about whether to let their children watch shows like Cocomelon (at least one tech reporter has called AI video-generation platforms like Sora “Cocomelon for adults”). That cartoon may hold my baby’s attention. Does that make it good? No, but it does make it useful—useful to me, the parent who wants my child focused on something. Content is, above all, a tool of the attention economy.

Boosters of platforms like Suno, which generates AI music, are betting that our one-sided relationship with content is so entrenched that we won’t care if we’re listening to a song created by a program that steals, slices, and liquefies music made by human artists. To succeed, Suno needs a user base that does not value the goods internal to the process of music making—learning to creatively voice chords on a piano, figuring out how to play a guitar tuned in DADGAD, or collaborating with another singer. Earlier this year, Suno’s CEO admitted the platform is for people who don’t want to learn to play an instrument or even learn complex production software (and apparently, who don’t care that others learn either).

When we reduce our engagement with art to passive self-occupation, we treat ourselves like little machines that need to plug into a content-powered-battery for a little while. We think we’re getting what we need from a low-stakes Netflix drama or half an hour of scrolling through audio-visual miscellany, and we assume the provenance of what we’re watching doesn’t matter much, if at all. The proliferation of content has been so successful that we rarely think of our media intake as interaction with the creative output of other human beings.

There’s discussion to be had about the distinction (or whether there is one) between art and entertainment. Maybe we shouldn’t take our posture toward middlebrow television dramas so seriously. And what about Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author”? It’s debatable how central the identity or intent of a creator ought to be to a reader, viewer, or listener.

But at the moment, I’m convinced it’s no less urgent to resist the creep of AI-generated “unserious” media. I don’t want an AI version of The Great British Baking Show as much as I don’t want AI-generated poetry and symphonies.

Whether I’m watching You’ve Got Mail for the 50th time or listening to Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, encountering human creativity helps me better know my neighbor—and it helps me know something about God. This is why I find AI Bible content both worthless and disturbing. I want to see and hear how another human being imagines or experiences the divine. Art that depicts biblical stories or figures has value not because of its accuracy but because it is a meeting point between Scripture and the human imagination. The artists are interpreters, illuminators. Their art is meaningful because it represents God’s willingness to reveal beauty, goodness, and truth on human terms.

Through human-generated art, whether in a painting by one person or a film created by thousands, I learn something about my world and the people in it. Human-made art makes my world more legible; AI-generated art makes it murkier.

It doesn’t matter if the neural networks present in AI models somehow reflect the human brain (anyway, philosophers like Mary Midgley argue that these comparisons are entirely invented and incorrectly frame human thought as a mechanized function). If we believe humans are imbued with a unique potential for transcendence, to receive revelation and then participate in creation, AI’s pastiche of output is worthless.

The pandemic and the years after gave us permission to be content seekers, to cultivate a relationship with media that is entirely self-serving, even self-anesthetizing. I’m not saying that contemplating art should always be hard or that it shouldn’t bring pleasure, but just as I hope my kids mature in their relationship with art as they get older, I’m resolving in 2026 to start rehabilitating my selfish relationship with content.

To start, I’m looking for ways to rehumanize the entertainment I interact with—to find an artistic version of “Buy local.” How can I do more to strengthen the communities and institutions in my city that support artists? The pandemic weakened already-shrinking local music scenes, but they are still there. Instead of abstaining from Spotify entirely, I can fill more of my listening time with music made by local musicians. I can show up to hear them play at small shows, cultivating an appreciation for the DIY.

If content in the attention economy is, above all, useful, I want to find ways to subtly resist that system by creating and enjoying art that is decidedly not useful but undeniably good. I do this every week when I sing with my congregation on Sunday morning—church is one of the few places where Americans regularly make music together. The church can be a place where we start to reacquaint ourselves with the varied cacophony of unpracticed human voices singing with confidence. If I know your unfiltered voice and you know mine, we might be less likely to be satisfied with a polished AI facsimile.

If we don’t check our comfort with content now, AI will consume our capacity to recognize the value in human creativity and practices. The CEOs of Suno and Sora are betting against human connection and collaboration. It’s time to start that garage band you’ve been daydreaming about.

Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today and the author of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

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Church Life

Plan This Year’s Bible Reading for Endurance, not Speed

J. L. Gerhardt

Twelve-month Genesis-to-Revelation plans are popular, but most Christians will grow closer to God and his Word at a slower pace.

Emmanuel Phaeton / Unsplash

Last year, on January 1 alone, over 3 million people subscribed to one-year Bible reading plans on YouVersion. Millions more downloaded read-in-a-year podcasts; The Bible Recap was the most popular show of any genre on New Year’s Day 2024, and The Bible in a Year with Fr. Mike Schmitz wasn’t far behind.

Old-fashioned paper Bible sales are up in general as well, and around the new year is presumably the most popular month to buy offerings like The One Year Chronological Bible or The Bible Recap 365-Day Chronological Study Bible. Empty checkboxes sit next to chapter numbers, just waiting to be ticked off.

This is all good news, right? Sort of.

Bible-in-a-year plans do offer a clear pathway to daily Scripture engagement. Ideally, they create sustained habits. They encourage readers to move beyond their favorite books and finally tackle tricky ones. For those who succeed, they provide a sense of accomplishment. All good things.

But the plans are also far from perfect, and given their increasing popularity, it’s essential to consider their drawbacks:

They prioritize quantity over quality, often leading to shallow understanding and low levels of retention while underplaying the role of meditation and prayer in processing Scripture.
They teach us to read Scripture quickly in isolation rather than slowly in church community.
They impose human ambitions on a living Word—a Word with its own purposes beyond ours.
Participants find themselves tempted by self-reliant pride when they’re keeping up the pace and shame when they fall behind.

Reading too cursorily is better than not reading at all. But in my experience, the latter is often the result of Bible-in-a-year plans, which are rarely completed. As a ministry leader, church volunteer, and Bible teacher, I’ve watched scores of people start January in Genesis—peers, older women, small group members. I can count on one hand the number who’ve made it to Revelation by December.

In the majority of cases, failure to keep the plan led those people to quit reading the Bible daily altogether. Maybe they’d have stopped spending time in Scripture no matter their strategy—that’s possible. But the scale and pace of these one-year plans seem particularly problematic.

YouVersion doesn’t publish completion rates for year-long plans, and download rates for podcasts aren’t particularly helpful information (most plan-beginners subscribe to a new show, meaning every episode is downloaded to their phones whether or not they listen). But in 2014, Bible Gateway did share its Bible-in-a-year statistics with Christianity Today.

Back then, plan participation peaked on January 1 and dropped 30 percent in the first week. By the end of February, reading plan traffic had dropped by a third, and by May, half. These numbers are only slightly higher than the percentage of people who persevere in keeping any given resolution.

Why are so many people quitting? Lots of reasons. Two stand out.

First, the state of reading. Consider the data: More than 50% of US adults haven’t finished a book in the past year, and 22% haven’t finished a book in three years. Less than 9% of American adults read poetry. (One-third of the Bible is poetry.) Approximately 20% of Americans have a reading disability that impairs their ability to read quickly and in large quantities, and 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level (the NIV Bible is translated at an eighth-grade level).

According to the National Endowment for the Arts, “Reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice.” If Americans aren’t practicing the skill of reading, we cannot expect them to be competent Bible readers.

Podcasts and audio Bibles help in this regard, but they’re not a magic bullet. Other than for folks with reading disabilities, listening likely won’t result in better comprehension and retention than reading printed text. And audio doesn’t address the related crises of declining attention spans and waning critical thinking skills.

Americans aren’t very good at reading, and the Bible is a difficult book to read. Read it in a year? Three chapters a day, every day? The average church attendee is doomed from the start.

One-year plans often do “work” for habitual readers. In their cases, the difficulty of the task is a stretch but not a leap. Personally, I’ve read the Bible in a year three times—but reading is my occupation and I had read most of Scripture at least once before my attempt. Even then, reading in a year was difficult (and I never hit the infamous “just 20 minutes a day” benchmark). Which introduces the next reason most people fail.

The established goal of read-the-Bible-in-a-year plans is straightforward—but in order to achieve it, most readers need to develop a habit of daily reading. Unfortunately, one-year plans aren’t structured in a way that optimizes habit-building.

According to behavioral scientists, habits are made by setting small, easy goals and adjusting those goals incrementally over time. That’s the principle at the heart of the hugely popular book Atomic Habits. As author James Clear writes, “Rather than trying to do something amazing from the beginning, start small and gradually improve. Along the way, your willpower and motivation will increase, which will make it easier to stick to your habit for good.”

Clear’s work also emphasizes the importance of making habits enjoyable by prioritizing systems over results: “When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”

One-year plans divide the Bible into large, equal-sized chunks rather than starting small. They quickly arrive at some of the most complicated books, like Leviticus. And they provide little along-the-way training to help Bible readers become better readers—it’s impossible to both cover the material and offer substantive assistance in 20 minutes per day.

In my experience reading the Bible with Christian college students, most need to stop every two or three verses for explanation. They may need help with theological vocabulary words. They may have questions about God’s character. They may wonder what’s going on when their values bump up against what they’re reading.

But most of their questions are ones of simple comprehension: Who is that again? What did he do? What’s he saying? Why did he say that? Rushing by these clarifications means missing out on even a shallow understanding of what’s happening. Does reading the Bible count as reading the Bible if you don’t know what it means?

I have seen young people fall in love with Bible reading, but reading fast is not the way.

Quick, big-goal plans drain willpower and overemphasize the importance of the stated goal (reading the whole Bible at pace) rather than fostering actual motivation for reading the Word. Readers can’t be satisfied anytime their system is running, because they’re usually falling behind in reaching their goals.

Sometimes it’s a fine idea to sit down and read a whole book of the Bible in one gulp or perhaps to listen to it read aloud that way, as the early church did. But sometimes is the operative word.

Say you want to read more Scripture this year. What’s most likely to work?

Because attention spans are short and habits are still being formed, new Bible readers should start small and go slow. A psalm a day. A gospel read at a manageable pace. Instead of skimming the entire Sermon on the Mount in one day (day 259 of a one-year plan) and moving on, take the text in digestible portions, allowing time to research your questions and consider applications.

Because most people don’t yet enjoy reading the Bible, new readers should integrate Bible reading into activities they do love and celebrate reaching milestones. Read the Bible with your morning coffee. Read it with someone you enjoy being with—a friend, a spouse. Read it on your porch. Read it right after exercise while flooded with endorphins. And then reward yourself for faithfully showing up. Buy a new highlighter or a scone at your favorite bakery. Listen to a favorite song that only gets played when you hit an established goal. Pray a psalm of celebration.

Because reading is difficult for many and the Bible an especially difficult book, new readers should also always seek out teachers—not just online voices but actual flesh-and-blood people who can answer questions in real time. This might look like weekly meetings with a mentor or an organized Bible study at a local church.

I built my appetite for Scripture alongside my grandfather. I followed him to Bible studies and watched his face as he explained the tricky parts to curious church members. He glowed with passion and joy. I wanted to love the Bible like he loved the Bible. Eventually I did.

I learned discipline in Bible reading at a church fellowship hall studying Daniel around white plastic tables. I was a young mother among a dozen retirees. Their dedication to study inspired me to be dedicated too. As the study progressed, I read more and more faithfully.

Over the years, I’ve appreciated booklong reading plans from YouVersion or BibleProject. I’ve read books of the Bible alongside recommended commentaries. I’ve read the Bible in groups using the latest Beth Moore or Priscilla Schirer study. And I’ve read the Bible with my kids.

But nothing worked as well as simply choosing a spot to read, leaving my Bible there, showing up every day with a hot coffee, and giving myself permission to read as little or as much as I wanted to. Some days that looked like ten verses. Some days a whole book. When I miss, I’m not devastated or embarrassed. There are no chapters to make up. Just a hot coffee and the spot on the couch I like and a book I love to read in the presence of a God I love to read about.

When readers have successfully developed both the appetite and discipline required to read the Bible, then it’s time to consider reading the whole thing. Passion and habit will lead the way.

Small goals and slow reading won’t appeal to everyone. Part of the reason yearlong plans are so popular is that they offer a quick path to the desired goal of “having read” the Bible.

Not unlike a bucket list (see all the national parks, eat at all the pizza places in a city, travel to every continent) or Pokémon (catch ’em all), this desire is often at least partly about acquisition and achievement.

Perhaps the first step for the modern American church is to forget about winning and scoring and “having done” a thing, and to learn to love the game—growing in love and knowledge of the Lord, however long that takes.

JL Gerhardt leads Bible meditation at Deep Water. Slow Reading. She’s the author of the audio memoir The Happiest Saddest People.

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Culture

Strongmen Strut the Stage

The Bulletin with Eliot Cohen

Shakespeare offers insights on how global leaders rise and fall.

Illustration by Rick Szuecs / Source images: Midjourney / Wikimedia Commons

Once in a while it’s good to step back from day-to-day political dramas and wonder what the greatest dramatist ever would do with contemporary characters. The Bulletin interviewed political scientist Eliot Cohen—professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, former counselor of the Department of State, and author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall—to learn more about Shakespeare’s perspective on global strongmen. Listen to the whole conversation in episode 201. Here are edited excerpts.

What drew you to write a book about Shakespeare and power?

My wife and I were seeing Henry VIII, and there’s this great moment where Henry VIII’s minister, Cardinal Wolsey, is suddenly deposed and he doesn’t see it coming. He says,

Farewell? A long farewell to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth. My high-blown pride
At length broke under me and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream that must forever hide me.

I heard that soliloquy and I said to myself, “I know that guy. I’ve known people in Washington like that.” I was so excited by this.

When you say you know that guy, tell me what that means to you.

I’ve seen what happens to people in high office. You get swollen with pride and ego and a sense of accomplishment. The nature of things is very precarious. And all of a sudden, you fall. You think you’re swimming in a sea of glory, but you are beyond your depth. This is what happens with Wolsey. He’s become wise too late. I’ve seen that happen to a number of people, and one of the conclusions I’ve come to over the course of a fairly long career is that power really is very bad for most people.

We’re living in a moment where we have more than our fair share of Shakespearean figures on the world stage: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, to name a few.

I’d prefer more boring times. Shakespeare portrays people, including his villains, with such vividness. Richard III is a fascinating character. He’s evil, and he can teach us a lot about evil people. He orders the big crime, the murder of his two nephews in the tower, and when his subordinate gives him a funny look, Richard says, Let me make myself plain. I want the bastards dead and wish it done suddenly.

A certain kind of authoritarian personality may start by covering their tracks, but then at some point they don’t feel they have to anymore. That was the case with Putin, and for better or for worse, we’re living in a time where these very pronounced characters are having a disproportionate effect on all of our lives.

Shakespeare is focused on personality. He doesn’t particularly focus on ideology. He was living in a somewhat ideological period between Catholics and Protestants, and I think he was being careful not to show his hand. If you made a mistake that way, you could end up in the Tower of London.

I suspect it’s also because he believes that, at the end of the day, personality and psychology and character overwhelm ideology. We’re living in a populist moment that can be ideological, but it’s also very much about the leader. Shakespeare is telling us to first look at the leading characters and then talk about ideology.

You talk a fair amount about Abraham Lincoln, who saw Shakespeare as his secular Bible, this book that he read and reread and quoted from often.

The two books that shaped Lincoln’s thinking about the world were the Bible and Shakespeare’s works. There are echoes of both in his writing and rhetoric. Shakespeare makes you question yourself and your own motivations and look within. We know that was true with Lincoln.

There’s this very haunting moment where he’s returning from Richmond after it’s been finally occupied by Union forces, and he begins reciting this passage from Macbeth to his colleagues on this steamer going back to Alexandria and then on to Washington.

Better be with the dead,
Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace,
Than on the torture of the mind to lie
In restless ecstasy.

Why does that passage resonate with Lincoln? He knows he sent a lot of men off to die. He didn’t doubt the necessity of it. I don’t think he ever really second-guessed himself in the way that some people might, but he felt the penalty that you pay for that.

One of the virtues of Shakespeare is a prod to a certain kind of introspection. Along with deep-seated religious and moral belief, introspection is one of the ways that you come to know and establish yourself as a person.

Shakespeare illuminates that historical moment. Can he shed light on the changes in US politics?

One of the things Shakespeare has to teach us is empathy, and I think that is something sorely lacking now. Empathy is not the same thing as sympathy. Sympathy is “I feel sorry for you. I wish I could make things better for you.” In many cases it is a wonderful attitude to have.

Empathy is “I can imagine what it is like to be you, to really get inside your head and think like you—why you are you the way you are, why you believe and do the things you do.”

There’s this phenomenal soliloquy that Richard III gives before he’s become king where you see the roots of his insane ambition are to be king. His ambition comes from the fact that he’s physically deformed. He knows that he’s repulsive to women, that he’s not a lovable human being at all. Imagine that you really believe you are a completely unlovable person. That takes you to a very dark place very quickly. Shakespeare reveals this vulnerability as an act of empathy for a complicated figure, and he displays that great strength over and over in his work. I think we have lost that.

The second is this: We live in a world where there’s no particular reverence for actual facts. Everybody gets the right to their own truth. That’s also a path of madness, and Shakespeare speaks to that as well. Many of his characters come to grief because they’re fantasists.

Unfortunately, whether because of social media or other reasons, people want to believe their own truths. Within the American context, you have narratives like the 1619 Project—that the entire American project is fundamentally about slavery. Then you have the Trump administration trying to thoroughly whitewash American history in which there is no Trail of Tears or slavery. That’s rubbish too. Shakespeare reveals the folly of this kind of thinking.

In your book you say that Brutus is right—the murder of Julius Caesar was a savage betrayal—and the conspirators were also right that Julius Caesar was a looming tyrant. There are no simple heroes and villains in Shakespeare. They’re complex human beings.

This is part of what makes Shakespeare so compelling. The characters are always changing. It’s amazing to me: In two to three hours on a stage, you can see a human being evolve in a thoroughly fascinating way. We sometimes miss that, particularly when we talk about political figures. While people’s characters do get formed by the time they’re in their 20s or 30s, they still can change throughout the rest of their lives—and they do.

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History

Evangelism and All That Jazz

Daniel Silliman

In 1966, CT reported on church activities but also on LSD, The Beatles, and the war in Vietnam.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty

CT started 1966 with a review of one church’s attempt to jazz up evangelism.

Protestants have tinkered with jazz in worship for years. Now some see it as an evangelistic wedge. … [Presbyterian] pastor Bryant Kirkland said the [Duke] Ellington concerts were “an attempt to establish contact with people normally outside the church” and “churchgoers who are not ministered to by the usual presentations.”

Ellington hoped his concerts would “help to bring people into the fold.” One of his favorite words is “communication,” and he contends that informal words and jazz music can put across spiritual truths to many people when “good English would fly by them like a kite.”

So in New York he permitted publicity, an RCA recording, and a CBS-TV taping for broadcast January 16. … The choirs chanted the books of the Old Testament (nearly inaudible to concert-goers) while tenor sax man Paul Gonsalves screwed up his face with a hard rock solo in his famous Newport Jazz Festival idiom. After a screech solo by trumpeter “Cat” Anderson, Ellington quipped, “That’s as high as we go.” …

The whole bit was more of a maybe than a yes.

Many Protestants had turned against the idea of evangelism and personal confessions of faith in Christ. CT reported the development with concern, surveying the positions of a wide variety of church leaders, starting with Methodists:

Evangelism is the lifeline of Christianity. Since apostolic times it has been hard, controversial work. And it has always produced opposition outside the Church.

Today, however, there is a struggle over evangelism within the Church. Methodists were informed at a recent evangelism conference that revival services are now ill advised, in fact unchristian. The speaker, the Rev. Dr. Edmund Perry, a religious historian at Methodist-rooted Northwestern University, told the Miami Herald’s Adon Taft, “I abhor the notion of individual salvation.”

Traditional methods for proclaiming the good news of the gospel seemed to be fading fast in the late 1960s. CT reported that “there are fewer tent meetings and sawdust trails” and “altar calls in evangelical churches are probably hitting a new low this year.” But other new approaches were emerging.

Traditional evangelistic methods based on hit-or-miss, take-it-or-leave-it proclamation of the Gospel are seen to be giving way to more specialized, in-depth approaches. Evangelicals in North America and abroad are realizing anew that deeds are fully as important as words, that positive dialogue is more effective than legalistic argumentation, and that winning converts is not primarily the task of paid clergymen. …

At Daytona Beach, Florida, two Bob Jones University-trained folk singers roamed the sands with an inter-religious entertainment and evangelism team during Easter week. Many hundreds of the 75,000 vacationing college students were counseled, and some (including at least one Hebrew) professed initial commitment to Christ. At Fort Lauderdale, some 250 miles south, where thousands of other students were soaking in the sun, an Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship team set up an evangelistic effort.

In New York, Pentecostalist youth worker David Wilkerson planned to open a new training program for converts this week. His Teen Challenge organization, meanwhile, has begun holding Saturday night rallies at a theater on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

In Colorado, evangelist Jack Wyrtzen conducted a three-day camp retreat attended by cadets of the Air Force Academy. A spokesman for Wyrtzen said “many cadets responded to the gospel invitation to receive Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour.”

The magazine published a special issue on evangelism and a second on the presentation of the gospel in the inner city—the first issue with a cover printed in color. CT profiled an urban church in Pittsburgh, talked to a Young Life leader reaching out to gang members, and caught up with a Christian college training social workers.

At Philadelphia College of Bible, a new prong has been added to the long-established ministry to the city. In the new social-work undergraduate curriculum, the college is acknowledging and dealing with today’s inner-city crises.

Concern in this area is not new at the college. It saw extreme inner-city conditions in the second decade of this century, when it began. Since then, through days of prosperity and days of depression, it has consistently ministered to the poor, even before the word “poverty” was rediscovered. This ministry was carried on through the practical-work departments of the two Bible institutes that later merged to form the present college, and it is continuing through the present Department of Christian Service. The “new prong”—the Department of Social Work—will augment the general thrust by training workers for urban areas. …

Christian social agencies very much need born-again workers, especially those who go on to graduate school and qualify to become administrators. State laws more and more are requiring executives to have the master’s degree in social work. Lack of administrators with this level of training often jeopardizes the start or continuation of new agencies and services.

Throughout the year, CT reminded readers that every Christian was called to evangelize, with evangelism being “The Order of the Day.”

The Church has ever been under orders to evangelize. Are the orders less urgent in this time of apocalyptic siftings and transitions? We claim to see in our domestic and international upheavals, in our plunge toward the abyss of unbelief, an inexorable movement toward the great denouement of the human story; it would thus be tragic if we were to soften the thrust of evangelism in this fateful hour.

Choruses of despair sound from all sides. And why not? One need not be a prophet to discern the signs of the times. …

But why, as evangelicals, should we be surprised at all this? … This is no time to be beguiled by unbelieving scholars who disown God’s Word and dishonor his Son; it is rather a time for men to match the mission of evangelism. In a day of incredible unbelief, those who still believe must fill a vast vacuum.

One sign of the times was the increasing popularity of psychedelic drugs. CT reported on “The LSD Cult.”

A new cult is making its appearance across North America. The rationale, if it is to be taken seriously, is the bizarre theory of what its proponents call “expanding consciousness.” Principal promotion comes from the attention currently being given to lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, and other drugs that, taken internally, produce outlandish mental images.

High priest of the LSD cult is ex-Roman Catholic Timothy Leary, 45-year-old psychologist who in 1963 was fired from Harvard University for using students in LSD experiments. He then went on to become the world’s leading exponent of “mind-opening substances.”

“We regard him with the same special love and respect as was reserved by the early Christians for Jesus, by the Moslems for Mohammed, or the Buddhists for Gautama,” said Arthur Kleps in testimony last month before a United States Senate subcommittee. Kleps is identified as director of the “Neo-American Church,” which is supposed to have 500 members and churches in the Northeast, Florida, and California and is spreading.

CT noted the growth of the anti-war movement in the US. Unlike in previous military conflicts, the pacifists weren’t led by Christians.

Some have supposed that the protest marches about the war in South Viet Nam were chiefly an evidence of Christian opposition to war. This, however, is a really erroneous judgment. A great many of those who are protesters against the war are openly atheistic, and some are frankly Communists. For example, the leadership of the protest at Berkeley, California, is now known to be admittedly Communist, with no reference to the Christian faith whatever.

CT asked a retired general to explain the US military tactics and make the case that American evangelicals should support the bombing of North Vietnam.

The United States is faced with the alternatives of defeating the aggressor by military effort or of failing to do so. The latter would entail national humiliation, loss of prestige and influence in the world, and desertion of the South Vietnamese, who have every right to expect our full support and will be lost without it. It is probable that all of Southeast Asia would then fall to Communist military control. The worst effect, however, would very likely be the effect on the American people. This weakening of the moral fiber would bode ill for the future.

Wars are fought by men with weapons that can destroy life and property. Victory comes when one side destroys the other’s weapons and men faster than it loses its own, thus assuring the ultimate total destruction of its enemy’s forces if the conflict is continued. The greater the applied superiority, the quicker and cheaper the victory.

The prime minister of South Africa was assassinated in 1966. CT reported on his Christian faith and racist policies.

The son of a Dutch Reformed missionary who worshipped regularly at a Reformed church in Rondebosch, a suburb of the parliamentary city of Cape Town … [Hendrik] Verwoerd himself first achieved prominence as editor of Die Transvaler, organ of the then-minority Nationalists, as he backed Hitler to a degree and opposed South Africa’s participation in World War II. …

The succeeding years made Verwoerd a symbol of political success through racism. … In an August 26 cover story, Time characterized Verwoerd as “one of the ablest white leaders that Africa has ever produced. He has a photographic memory, an analytical mind and an endless capacity for work. He is a brilliant diplomat and an inventive politician.”

The full results of such abilities invested in the anachronistic cause of racial separation will only be known at the end of the current worldwide racial revolution.

The Roman Catholic Church entered a period of reform in the late 1960s, following the conclusion of Vatican II. CT editors noted that the church had not changed its position on the authority of the pope but that some Catholics were having “born again” experiences.

From scores of sources around the world reports filter in of priests, nuns, and laymen who have experienced the same kind of religious experience as their counterparts of Reformation and pre-Reformation days. Unlike the Reformers, who were forced out of the church, these modern disciples remain within the fold. Yet they have come to know Jesus Christ in an intimacy that sometimes surpasses the devotion of many Protestants. The reality of their experience we cannot question; the depth of their commitment and the open expression of joy in their newfound faith are good to behold. …

In the midst of change and renewal, evangelicals should reach out with heart and hand to those who, though they are in the church of Rome, are our spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ.

CT reported on Protestant leaders, including an Episcopal bishop who was “full of surprises.” That fall, he demanded the church try him for heresy.

The Episcopal House of Bishops attempted to head off heresy proceedings against Resigned Bishop James A. Pike last month by adopting, 103 to 36, a statement denouncing Pike’s conduct and doctrinal statements. The attempt failed, for though Pike’s accusers seemed satisfied, the statement was so abhorrent to Pike that he moved to put trial machinery in motion “to clear my name” …

The committee’s 1200-word statement, which was adopted by the house, rejected Pike’s “irresponsible” utterances, and said “his writing and speaking on profound realities with which Christian faith and worship are concerned are too often marred by caricatures of precious symbols and at the worst, by cheap vulgarizations of great expressions of faith” …

Pike charged that “this House is not interested in theology, but only public relations.” When he raised a theological point he was ruled out of order.

CT also encouraged readers to pay attention to a British pop band named The Beatles. The founding editor of the Methodist Good News magazine reported his experience listening to “the Fab Four”:

The real contribution of the Beatles and of other popular singers to theological dialogue is their songs. Listen to the words. Listen and you will learn how lots of people look at life.

As the father of five children, I have become, perforce, a student of popular music. At latest count, five radios are to be found from the basement to the attic of our parsonage. At almost any time of the day or night, “pop” music (or so they call it) pours from one if not all of these radios.

For a long time I tried to shut my ears to the caterwauling and the frenetic beat, beat, beat. But after a while my middle-aged eardrums capitulated, and I began to listen. What I heard caused me to listen seriously. For the “go-go” music that blares from millions of radios proclaims a popular philosophy of life—and sometimes a theology as well.

Evangelical Christians need to be listening, painful as this suggestion may seem, because pop music reveals what many, many people are thinking; what sort of values they admire; what idols are worshiped by the pagans in our midst. Pop music gives us an important clue to where the action really is—or should be—in our apologetics these days.

- More from Daniel Silliman

Books

Why The Body Matters

Justin Ariel Bailey

Three books on ministry and church life to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

This piece was adapted from CT’s books newsletter. Subscribe here.

**Justin Whitmel Earley, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life (Zondervan, 2025)**

When I was in high school, I was taught that the key to spiritual vitality was having a “quiet time,” which meant getting alone with God to read Scripture and pray. I am thankful for this practice, which is still foundational for my life with God. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve also felt the limitations of this approach. Prioritizing contemplation, I’ve often failed to appreciate the significance of my body. Prioritizing personal devotion, I’ve often undervalued the importance of the body of Christ.

Justin Whitmel Earley argues that rather than idolizing or ignoring our physical bodies, we should seek to image God through them. His title is a nod to Bessel van der Kolk’s popular book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score. Like van der Kolk, Earley frames recovery as a matter of both training and healing. We can “garden” our bodies to lead our souls in the right direction, and this is a matter of attention as much as action. As he puts it, “To live with close attention to your body is to live with close attention to your soul.” To this end, Earley combines biblical reflection with scientific research to prescribe ten domains of bodily attention.

Beginning with breath, he discusses what it means to integrate the brain and shows how exercise can lead to “antifragility” (where stress makes us stronger). Along the way, he gently reorients dysfunctional habits related to food, sex, rest, and technology. But Earley’s book is no endorsement of wellness culture or our endless quest self-optimization; my favorite chapters were about reckoning with illness and remembering death. Sickness and death are unavoidable reminders of a broken world, but also of the Christian hope—“the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:23).

**Carmen Imes, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2025)**

If Earley writes to convince readers that the Christian life is “a habit project” rather than a “head project,” Carmen Joy Imes shows that it is also a group project. In her book, she layers a powerful, cumulative case that God’s plan has never been simply to save solitary souls but to gather together a new family “from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Rev. 7:9). Extending the project of two earlier books (Being God’s Image and Bearing God’s Name), she offers a fresh retelling of the biblical narrative, cast in familial terms: family trauma (the exile), family reunion (the coming of Christ), and the family business (making disciples).

Imes is clear-eyed, deftly naming the failures of God’s family, from the mistreatment of Hagar by Abraham and Sarah to the misguided project of Christian nationalism. And yet, she writes with a hope rooted in the gospel, which allows us to glimpse God’s glory “at work in ordinary gatherings made up of all sorts of people.” Imes challenges Christians to find their home in the household of God, where God’s people gather to wait for God to do what only God can do.

**Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press, 1980)**

Andrew Louth’s book is older and does heavier theological lifting, the sort we might expect from an early church scholar. Nevertheless, Louth’s historical excavation underwrites the arguments of Imes and Earley in significant ways. Tradition is a complicated term, yet there is a reason why Louth’s book is found on theologian Sarah Coakley’s shortlist of essential works of recent theology.

Louth shows how early church fathers wrestled with and resisted the development of a solitary and elitist spirituality, where “God and soul” are the only things that matter. To be sure, these Platonic streams exert a powerful gravity on Christian mysticism, one that lingers to the present day.

Louth concludes that the Fathers undermine “any tendency towards seeing mysticism as an elite, individualist quest for ‘peak’ experiences.” The spiritual (mystical) life is irreducibly embedded in the community of the church, and nourished by bodily practices that orient everyday experiences, not extraordinary ones.

We should keep getting alone with God, as Jesus did (Luke 5:16); but life with God includes so much more than “quiet times.” Spiritual vitality can never be purely “spiritual” or a solitary pursuit. It is something that can only occur as disciples pay attention to their bodies and find their place together in the body of Christ.

Justin Ariel Bailey is a professor of theology at Dordt University. He is the author of Interpreting Your World: Five Lenses for Engaging Theology and Culture.

- More from Justin Ariel Bailey

Church Life

Hark! The Boisterous Carolers Sing

Ann Harikeerthan

I grew up singing traditional English Christmas hymns. Then I went caroling with my church in India.

Edits by CT / Source Images: Rajesh Mishra, Unsplash

Last year, my husband and I went Christmas caroling with our church in Bhopal, a city in central India, one Sunday night. We brought along a mini djembe (an African drum) and an egg shaker, thinking we could add a fun percussive element to the singing.

We caught up with the crowd just as they were entering a church member’s home. The group of 30, predominantly teens and young adults, began singing their lungs out and clapping to the thumping of a bass drum.

“Sum sum sum sum sumbhavichallo, sumbhavichallo; Bethlehem goshalaya athu sumbhavichallo,”the carolers belted out with gusto. These Malayalam lyrics declared the miraculous joy of Jesus’ birth: It hap-hap-hap-hap-happened! It happened! In Bethlehem’s cowshed it happened!

More instruments joined in, including my husband with his djembe. Together, as if they could read one another’s minds, the percussionists progressively increased the tempo of the song.

Soon, the carolers broke out in dance. But instead of a gentle choral sway or synchronized choreography, people moved their bodies so spontaneously that I felt like I was in an unrestrained Bollywood-style celebration, like what takes place at local temple parades or Indian festivals like Holi and Diwali.

I had never seen Christians in India dance with such unbridled passion and energy before. “Is it acceptable for churchgoers to dance this way?” I thought to myself, feeling self-conscious and awkward as I attempted to move my body as enthusiastically as my fellow carolers.

There were other challenges: I am not fluent in Malayalam and could not pick up the words of the song and what they meant. The song’s exuberantly upbeat tempo didn’t help either.

Some of my discomfort around my Bhopal church’s caroling tradition probably stemmed from growing up in an Anglican church in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The carols I sang then were all in English, with two- or four-part harmonies and specific stringed instruments accompanying the vocals. We might have lit a candle or clapped a little, but aside from the person dressed as Santa Claus, no one would dance at church.

Glorifying God at Christmastime can feel formulaic: We go to church, sing a few Christmas songs together, listen to a sermon, wish each other “Merry Christmas!” and head home. But glorifying God isn’t always a comfortable or respectable experience. It can be heartfelt and spontaneous, even if it might feel confusing or bewildering at times.

I wonder what the heavenly hosts sounded like when they praised God and said, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests,” after an angel declared to a group of terrified shepherds that a Savior had been born (Luke 2:8–14).

In my imagination, they probably sounded like an orchestra singing something Handelian. But maybe the angelic company was not as restrained in its praises to God as I had envisioned. They probably worshiped God as loudly as my church friends in Bhopal did. Perhaps they also danced as vigorously as David, the shepherd-king from Bethlehem (2 Sam. 6:14).

Caroling in India—a tradition called “carol rounds”—is a hallmark of the Christmas season. Usually, the singing and dancing begins after sunset and lasts from anywhere from 4 to 12 hours. The carol rounds may also be held over several days or weeks, and sometimes until the New Year.

Church congregations and Christian communities usually create a meticulous itinerary of homes to visit, ensuring that no church member is missed out and that hosts have enough time to prepare their homes to welcome guests.

The carolers often sing songs in the local or tribal languages of their communities. These songs are usually decided beforehand so lyrics can be printed out, and vocals are accompanied by whatever instruments people know how to play.

Only 2 percent of the Indian population identify as Christian, and amid the constant threat of persecution, church leaders also often have to ensure the carolers’ personal safety. In some Indian states, this may include securing permission from village leaders and government officials to go on carol rounds, making safe travel arrangements from one house to the next, and requesting a police escort if necessary.

After singing a few carols at a church member’s home, the family usually offers the carolers something warm to drink, a seasonal snack, or a cash offering for the church.

No one needs to have professional qualifications or skills to be part of the carol rounds. You just show up, ready to sing or dance in ways that extol God—even if people around you feel embarrassed or do not understand why.

As my caroling experience in Bhopal demonstrated, we do not need to construct an elaborate song repertoire to glorify God. All we need is to be willing to express what uncontainable joy in the Lord looks and sounds like. In doing so, we bring to life that vivid, sensorially delightful image proclaimed in Revelation 5: “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!” (v. 13)

Several Indian Christmas carols reflect this powerful, and freeing, perspective on giving God glory. Take the Malayalam carol “Sumbhavichallo” (“It Happened”), which my church sang in Bhopal. The song’s composer, congregant K. S. Samkutty, wanted to communicate the incredulous news of Jesus’ birth in a humble stable through a dynamic, energetic tune. The lyrics’ catchy repetition, coupled with a rhythmic South Indian folk beat, makes this song a popular choice for collective rejoicing in my church.

Another Indian Christmas carol, “Jishu Gadi Aja Nenju”(“The Lord Jesus is Born”), was originally written in Kui, a language spoken by the Pano and Kandha tribes in the southeastern Indian state of Odisha. My pastor friend Kishore Digal translated it into English last month, as he had fond memories of singing and dancing to the song as a child.

Set to the thumping, rat-a-tat beats of several dalgus (tribal drums), the song urges believers to awaken from spiritual slumber and be jubilant in praising God:

Let us all be joyful today
Today the Lord Jesus is born
We will worship him today …
Rise-up! Rise-up, oh heavy sleepers!
The Light has come that we may see it.
By the sun beams of Jesus,
Follow the path of holiness.
For he has come as the light of the world
And chased the darkness away.

When our worship practices become too familiar or staid—especially at Christmas—we may fail to realize the magnitude of what it means for the son of God to come into this world as a helpless, crying infant. We lose out on understanding the full breadth of emotions and expressions that arise when we fully give ourselves over to glorifying God, whether in private or in public spaces like our churches or neighborhoods.

Songs like “Sumbhavichallo”and “Jishu Gadi Aja Nenju”call us to break out of our spiritual lethargy. They encourage us to participate communally in celebrating Christmas with our brothers and sisters in Christ, just as the heavenly host broke out in praise to God for Jesus’ birth in the Book of Luke. Even if the lyrics and instruments used feel unfamiliar or strange, these songs’ messages are clear: Come and rejoice, for our Savior is here.

The carol rounds that many Indian Christians often participate in are a way to embody the good news of Jesus’ incarnation. We glorify God not only through the words we sing but also through our bodies and our cultures. In doing so, we confess our gratitude and devotion to him and acknowledge his lordship over us. We respond in awe at how he has interrupted the darkness and complacency of our world with Jesus, our Immanuel, just as Mary proclaimed in the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55).

Glorifying God can look and sound messy. It can be boisterous and disorienting. And it is perfectly okay. I can’t wait to join my church in its carol rounds this year. It’s time I let loose and danced to “Sumbhavichallo.”

Ann Harikeerthan is a writer living in Bhopal, India.

- More from Ann Harikeerthan

4/15 EVENT

4/15 EVENT

When the Times Were ‘A-Changin’’

From Panic Attacks to Physical Discipline

Reexamining Thomas Jefferson

**Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025)**

**Louis P. Masur, A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025).**

**Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Beacon Press, 1948)**

Where Your Heart Is, There Your Habits Will Be Also

Plan This Year’s Bible Reading for Endurance, not Speed

Strongmen Strut the Stage

Evangelism and All That Jazz

Why The Body Matters

**Justin Whitmel Earley, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life (Zondervan, 2025)**

**Carmen Imes, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2025)**

**Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press, 1980)**

Hark! The Boisterous Carolers Sing

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Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

Louis P. Masur, A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Beacon Press, 1948)

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Justin Whitmel Earley, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life (Zondervan, 2025)

Carmen Imes, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2025)

Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press, 1980)

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**Walter Isaacson, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025)**

**Louis P. Masur, A Journey North: Jefferson, Madison, and the Forging of a Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2025).**

**Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Beacon Press, 1948)**

**Justin Whitmel Earley, The Body Teaches the Soul: Ten Essential Habits to Form a Healthy and Holy Life (Zondervan, 2025)**

**Carmen Imes, Becoming God’s Family: Why the Church Still Matters (IVP Academic, 2025)**

**Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford University Press, 1980)**