Review: ‘Project Hail Mary’

CT Staff

Ryan Gosling’s new science fiction movie shows an astronaut who saves the world and dies to self.

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary.

Jonathan Olley / Amazon MGM Studios

We modern people have a tendency to give in proportion to what we get. If I reach out to someone else to grab coffee and catch up, I expect that person to initiate next. If I give someone a book recommendation, it becomes the other person’s turn to give me one. If I drive some friends to the airport, then they will (hopefully!) give me a ride when I need one.

Some of these patterns are not inherently bad, but deep friendships—ones that can combat the hollowness of modernity and our own loneliness—require risk and discomfort.

I thought a lot about friendship and sacrifice, puzzling through how to form rooted relationships, in an unlikely place recently: while seated in a movie theater, watching an astronaut and his alien friend save the world.

Project Hail Mary, an earnest science-fiction novel from Andy Weir, author of the hit book-turned-movie The Martian, captured hearts when it came out in 2021. The film will do the same, with a wholesome story, pitch-perfect casting, and gorgeous effects. And it emphasizes exactly what many people need in this moment: the courage to forge true, sacrificial friendships.

The film’s main character, Ryland Grace—a brilliant science teacher who stumbles into a last-ditch space mission to save humanity—doesn’t necessarily start out as the sacrificial type.

At one point, before being pushed to the brink, Grace (played by Ryan Gosling) doubts his ability to put his own life on the line, saying he does not have the gene that would make him brave. Another astronaut retorts, “You just need someone to be brave for.”

Grace finds that someone far out in space: a helpful alien named Rocky, a large spider-y creature with no face and stone-like skin. Together, they model something countercultural and beautiful throughout Project Hail Mary: a friendship that includes sacrifice.

Rocky and Grace meet after having been alone in space for years. They work across interplanetary cultural divides—vastly different languages, gravities, atmospheres, biologies, and assumptions about life and science—to cultivate a friendship while also trying to save both of their worlds.

Defying all odds, they learn to rely on each other. They are vulnerable with each other. They sacrifice for each other. Their survival and the survival of their planets end up in the hands of the other to varying degrees. They give without expectations of getting something in return. Their friendship alters how they view their missions, themselves, and their lives. They show love to one another by dying to themselves.

This is the heart of the film. It’s not a preachy movie, to be clear. It’s completely charming, with the cast easily carrying a high-stakes premise convincingly, grounding its science-fiction elements in truly human performances. Gosling is hilarious, and Sandra Hüller as the stonefaced coordinator behind saving the entire planet humanizes the blunt character Eva Stratt from the book.

Grace is also relatable as an ordinary person picked for an extraordinary task, much like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Our hero is flawed, scared, and sometimes stupid, which makes the film all the more entertaining.

The film’s score is also masterfully done, adapting to various environments subtly so as not to distract the audience while still drawing out the cultural differences between characters. The use of practical special effects instead of CGI to depict Rocky was charming and made for an impressive showing by the artists who worked on the film. The cinematography and visual effects are beautiful. The editing brings humor to an apocalypse.

The story takes place in a not-too-distant future. A strange substance called astrophage is eating the sun’s energy, threatening human life as we know it. Scientists and governments from around the world work together to come up with a solution, and their best option is—well, a Hail Mary.

Literally, they send a ship called the Hail Mary on a one-way mission to another planetary system that is also infected with astrophage but has a sun that is not losing its energy. The astronauts on board are signing up for a suicide mission in a last-ditch attempt to learn what secret this other system knows, hopefully saving the entire human race in the process.

Christians can find plenty to love in that story line alone, with the mission itself a dim echo of Christ’s saving death that really did rescue the world—although Grace is a very reluctant savior. The film’s exploration of Grace’s friendship with Rocky pushes the theme even further, demonstrating a love that lays “down one’s life for one’s friend” (John 15:13) and carries “each other’s burdens” (Gal. 6:2).

It’s a beautiful sight to behold, especially in an era that has exaggerated the importance of emotional boundaries, transactionalism, and self-care over self-sacrifice.

It is much safer to give only what you expect to receive in return. And in this day and age, we harbor so many reasons to cut off relationships that we are often on edge with new friends. What if I find out my small group leader voted for someone different than I did? What if the person I chatted with at a meet and greet at church has a different stance on vaccinations? What if the person sitting across from me at work or at school uses artificial intelligence in a way I do not see as ethical?

Emotional boundaries are important, but our overuse of them in forming friendships might inhibit our relationships from maturing beyond offering reciprocal airport rides. Relationships shouldn’t be like objects we review every once in a while under some Marie Kondo philosophy, throwing the ones that don’t spark joy into the trash.

This is true particularly for Christians: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16).

Like Grace, we need to learn to see the people around us as worth our lives—and worth dying to ourselves.

It’s easy to slip into fear: fear of unreciprocated love, of looking foolish, of sacrificing too much. But a friendship based on quid pro quo won’t get much deeper than the surface—it will only get to a point of knowing about people rather than truly knowing them.

Relationships are how we experience the gospel and Christ through one another. We just need to be brave enough to be known and to know one another. With God’s help, we don’t have to go to outer space to learn how to do it.

Mia Staub is editorial project manager at Christianity Today.

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Books

Excerpt

C.S. Lewis on the ‘Solemn Fun’ of Nearing the End

C.S. Lewis

An excerpt from Letters on Living the Faith.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, HarperOne

On facing a possibly terminal illness

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, JUNE 17, 1963

Pain is terrible, but surely you need not have fear as well? Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you: like taking off a hair-shirt or getting out of a dungeon. What is there to be afraid of? You have long attempted (and none of us does more) a Christian life. Your sins are confessed and absolved. Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Remember, tho’ we struggle against things because we are afraid of them, it is often the other way round—we get afraid because we struggle. Are you struggling, resisting? Don’t you think Our Lord says to you “Peace, child, peace. Relax. Let go. Underneath are the everlasting arms. Let go, I will catch you. Do you trust me so little?”

Of course this may not be the end. Then make it a good rehearsal.

Yours (and like you a tired traveler, near the journey’s end) *

*Lewis died about five months after this letter was written. The correspondent lived another 12 years.

Coping with physical and mental decline

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE, JUNE 28, 1963

I think the best way to cope with the mental debility and total inertia is to submit to it entirely. Don’t try to concentrate. Pretend you are a dormouse or even a turnip. But of course I know the acceptance of inertia is much easier for men than for women. We are the lazy sex. Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth; waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.

The “solemn fun” of nearing the end

TO SISTER PENELOPE, SEPTEMBER 17, 1963

I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma—and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it—but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage and one almost (but nella sua voluntade e nostra pace*) regrets having the door shut in one’s face. Ought we to honor Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.

If you die first, and if “prison visiting” is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.

It is all rather fun—solemn fun—isn’t it? **

*“in His will is our peace”

**C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963.

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Theology

A More Literal View of ‘the Body of Christ’

Thomas Anderson

Scripture’s description of the church is more than a comparison to human anatomy.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons

I have preached 1 Corinthians 12 more times than I can count. I have preached it at staff retreats with lukewarm coffee and chairs arranged in a circle that no one wanted to sit in. I have preached it at volunteer-appreciation dinners, between the baked ziti and the certificates. I have preached it to a teenager in my office who could not stop crying and wanted to know if she mattered. Every time, I said roughly the same thing: The church is like a body. We all have different gifts. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” Find your role. Play your part. Do your thing.

All this is true. And nearly all of it is also very thin. It is thin the way a postcard of the Grand Canyon is thin—accurate enough, as far as it goes, but what it leaves out is the depth, the dizzying scale, the holy terror of standing at the edge of something that does not care whether you are ready for it.

For years, I preached Paul’s most radical claim about the nature of the church while reducing it to a motivational poster for volunteerism. I was not alone in this. The phrase shows up everywhere in evangelical life. It’s in our leadership books, our vision statements, and websites. And nearly everywhere it appears, it has been drained of almost everything Paul put into it. At the same time, we find ourselves fracturing along every imaginable line: race, politics, theology, and sometimes even class.

My aim here is to argue—carefully, and from within the Reformed tradition that I love—that when Paul calls the church “the body of Christ,” he means something far stranger, far more demanding, and far more beautiful than what we have allowed him to mean. He is not merely reaching for a metaphor. He is making a claim about what is real—about who Christ is, who we are in him, and what it means concretely for the risen Son of God to remain present in the world through a people. If that claim is true, it should shake up how we practice church, not eventually but now.

Throughout the New Testament, Paul has a lot to say about the church. To the believers at Corinth, he writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, ESV throughout). So it is with Christ. Not “so it is with the church,” which could have been the analogy. But Paul says Christ.

He had already laid the foundation for this statement six chapters earlier, saying sexual immorality is bad not on abstract moral grounds but based on the body: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (6:15). The argument, however, only works if “body of Christ” is not a mere metaphor. Our bodies truly belong to Christ, and by the Spirit, we are united to the risen Lord in such a way that what we do in our bodies is done as members of him.

It is no accident that between chapters 6 and 12, Paul gives his most-extended teaching on the Lord’s Supper: “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (10:16–17). At the table, Christians participate in their union with Christ while remembering his broken body and confessing the life they now share (11:26).

From here, the conclusion is, again, not a metaphor. “Now you are the body of Christ,” Paul concludes, “and individually members of it” (12:27). Not “you are like a body.” You are the body. A present tense statement of fact about the deepest reality of the existence of the church. Sever any link in that chain, and Paul’s claim thins into illustration.

Paul is equally insistent in Ephesians: “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:22–23). John Calvin, no mystic and no sentimentalist, read this verse and wrote something that should stop us in our tracks:

This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete!

The Son of God, who fills all in all, “reckons himself in some measure” imperfect apart from his church? Yes. Not because Christ lacks anything in his divine nature but because he has chosen, in the mystery of the Incarnation, to bind himself so completely to a ragged, beautiful, maddening community of people that he will not be regarded as complete without us.

Various theologians, spanning from Thomas F. Torrance and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to contemporary academics like Simon Chan, have affirmed this view of the church. Some evangelicals might feel it gets too close to mysticism. But it is incarnational theology carried to its conclusion. The whole meaning of in-carna-tion, to be made into flesh, to be embodied, is that God entered bodily existence. And the force of our union with Christ means this bodily existence now includes ours.

Let me be precise here. To say the church is Christ’s body is not to collapse the distinction between Creator and creature. It is not to divinize the church. Christ is not reducible to the church any more than the head is reducible to the body. That distinction between head and members remains and must remain, or we turn ecclesiology into idolatry.

But saying the church is Christ’s body means, by the Spirit, our visible community genuinely carries Christ’s presence in the world. That’s why the grounds of our unity are not a comparison drawn from human anatomy but a person: the risen, incarnate Son of God.

If we take Paul at his word—and I mean seriously enough to let it rearrange the furniture of our churches, our budgets, and our consciences—several things about our common life come into sharper focus.

First, racial division becomes a crisis of Christ’s body. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes that Christ “has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (v. 14). The reconciliation of Jew and Gentile was accomplished in and through the body of Christ on the cross. To claim reconciliation with God while maintaining division from one another is, in Paul’s logic, incoherent.

But the history of the American church shows people have long tried to resurrect what Christ has torn down. If we really internalized the dividing wall came down in Christ’s flesh, Sunday morning would not revolve around preference or familiarity but would feel, quietly and stubbornly, like a gathering of distinct voices displaying Christ.

Furthermore, reconciliation events and discussions would not sit on the calendar as a program. Instead, we would have a posture of reconciliation. Congregants in the pew would not merely share theological convictions. They would share one another—bearing difference not as threat but as evidence of what crucified flesh had accomplished. And the unity on display would be explained not by affinity, taste, tribe, or strategy but by a Lord killed in the flesh and raised to gather strangers into one body.

We have already seen what this looks like. We can point to one example from 1906, at Azusa Street in Los Angeles. An interracial revival broke out under the leadership of William Seymour, a Black holiness preacher whose parents were once slaves. The revival violated every racial norm of Jim Crow as worshipers of all shades knelt at the same altar. Unfortunately, their gathering did not last. Charles Parham, Seymour’s former mentor, arrived and demanded segregation. Seymour refused and the fracture that followed between the two men persists within Pentecostalism to this day.

That story stays with me because it suggests that the body of Christ, when it functions the way Paul describes, is so disruptive that even Christians will reach for the saw. The story also suggests the Spirit keeps reassembling what we keep trying to pull apart.

Second, if we take Paul at his word, our treatment of the vulnerable becomes a statement about Christ. Here’s one verse that is almost never preached: “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22). Paul does not say the weaker parts deserve sympathy. He says they are indispensable. The body cannot function without them.

Research shows nearly one in three parents who have children with disabilities say they left their places of worship because they felt their children were not included or welcomed. The data we have cuts across various religions and isn’t tailored to the church. But it does include responses from Christian and evangelical parents.

Inside the church, the barriers when it comes to disability are often less about ramp access than about imagination: worship services designed with no thought for sensory differences, small groups that assume everyone processes language at the same speed, a theology of gifts that treats cognitive ability as the measure of contribution. When a congregation fails to meaningfully include these members, it is not simply falling short on hospitality. It is essentially telling Christ’s body it can function without parts he has called essential.

Third, Paul’s words make clear that every Christian is already a church member (v. 27). Emphasizing this could shift how people think about local gatherings in an age when attendance is casual and commitment negotiable. A body does not operate on preference or convenience. It does not have members who come and go at the whim of comfort. The presence of its members matters because their absence is felt. When a member withdraws, the body does not simply adjust its programming; it limps. Then, there’s the cost of Christian isolation. A hand that refuses to move with the body is not free. It is paralyzed.

Now, I should say here that this type of theology is costly. It costs us the freedom to choose whose pain we engage with. But the truth is, the pain of Christians already affects us. “If one member suffers,” Paul writes, “all suffer together” (v. 26). The only question is whether I will live inside that reality or pretend it is not true. The latter response is how “the body of Christ” becomes merely a teamwork illustration. But Paul’s real claim asks us to suffer with people we did not choose and regard the weakest among us not as a charity project but as structurally necessary to what Christ has formed.

So how do we then order our common life as though Paul is right? There are a lot of practical things we can do. We can teach church membership as covenant rather than convenience. We can examine our budgets, buildings, and Sunday-morning rhythms for the people who are absent and ask why. We can refuse to treat racial reconciliation as a silo project rather than a matter of the church’s bodily integrity. We can also practice the strangest Pauline conviction of all: that the person we find most difficult to love is not an obstacle to the body’s health but an essential part of it.

If the church really is what Paul says it is, Christ has not left us. He is still present, still embodied. And he has chosen, in the reckless mercy that characterizes everything he does, to be present in and through this fractured, faithful, and foolish collection of people who keep showing up on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, in hospital rooms and around dinner tables. Our churches are the way the risen Christ has chosen to remain in the world.

Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.

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News

Conservative Anglicans Nix Plan to Elect Rival to Archbishop of Canterbury

Emmanuel Nwachukwu in Abuja, Nigeria

Instead, Gafcon chose a committee-style leadership as it sought to reorder the communion due to Canterbury’s leftward shift.

Rwandan Bishop Laurent Mbanda, newly elected chairman of the Global Anglican Council, poses for a photograph in Abuja on March 5, 2026.

Light Oriye Tamunotonye / Getty

Ahead of last week’s gathering of conservative global Anglicans in Abuja, Nigeria, leaders were expected to elect a new “first among equals” spiritual leader to rival the Archbishop of Canterbury due to their opposition to growing liberalism in the denomination.

Instead, due to a “movement of the Holy Spirit,” the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Gafcon) decided to adopt a committee-style leadership, Paul Donison, Gafcon’s general secretary, revealed to attendees on Thursday. The newly rebranded Global Anglican Council would include primates (the chief archbishop or bishop of a province), bishops, clergy, and laypeople and would be headed by an elected primate. Leaders unanimously chose Archbishop of Rwanda Laurent Mbanda as its new chairman.

Donison told CT that Gafcon leaders, who largely represent the Global South, made the decision in order to “leave behind Canterbury’s failed instruments of communion” and instead embrace a more democratic system where every province, regardless of size or influence, has a vote.

“Normally in our world, people and institutions cling to the authority and power they have,” Donison said. “In this moment, in a gloriously unprecedented way, the Gafcon primates voted to actually share their power.”

Yassir Eric of Sudan, bishop of Ekkios, a nongeographical diocese for Muslim-background believers, found it humbling to see Gafcon do away with the “first among equals” title and to see leaders willing to sacrifice their power.

“To have some primates, like the Church of Nigeria, which is the largest church that we have here, agree to share power together [with] lay people, bishops and primates, that is actually the principle that is guiding and the humility that I saw in that room,” Eric said.

He noted that Ekkios spans from West Africa to Central Asia, regions with intense persecution and political instability. Most of the people with whom he works do not come from an Anglican background and live in areas where being associated with a Western church can be dangerous. “That’s why we align with the Global South,” he said.

Nearly 350 bishops and 120 lay and clerical leaders from more than 180 dioceses attended the conference, representing 80 percent of global Anglicans, Donison said. Gafcon believes it is not splitting from the wider Anglican church. It argues instead that the Anglican Communion’s “doctrinal and moral departures from the teaching of Scripture”—including on the issue of same-sex marriages—have disqualified Canterbury as the church’s true leadership.

“We are not a new Anglican communion,” said Justin Murff, Gafcon’s press secretary. “We are the Anglican communion reordered.”

Gafcon emerged in 2008 after a coalition of church leaders boycotted the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops and instead gathered in Jerusalem as they protested Western Anglican churches blessing same-sex unions and appointing gay and lesbian men and women as bishops. Gafcon also welcomed the Anglican Church in North America into its fold.

Then in 2023, Gafcon rejected recognition of then–Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby as head of the communion after the Anglican church agreed to bless same-sex marriages. (The proposal was later abandoned, although the synod said it would reconsider a future proposal.)

Things came to a head last October when the Church of England chose Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury. Gafcon said the church had abandoned global Anglicans by selecting a leader who promotes revisionist views on marriage and sexuality, as Mullally had brought forth the motion to offer blessings to same-sex couples.

Mbanda called on churches to choose between being part of Gafcon or the official Anglican Communion, requiring them to stop attending meetings and receiving funds from the church if they joined Gafcon.

Samuel Egesa, a Ugandan bishop, said Scripture clearly defines marriage to be between a man and a woman and Anglican churches shouldn’t be able to openly disobey God’s Word.

“We are saying the future is here,” Egesa said. “[Gafcon] is the original Anglican communion, which actually follows the gospel.”

While c ritics claim Gafcon rejects Mullally’s leadership because she is a woman, the conservative group counters that what it takes issue with is “whether scripture or contemporary culture governs the life of this church,” Murff told journalists at the conference.

A majority of global Anglicans believe in male-only bishops, Donison said, yet Gafcon does not have an official position on women’s ordination. Instead it leaves the decision to individual provinces and dioceses.

“This is a secondary matter that faithful Christians disagree on,” he said. “Gafcon’s job is not to solve all the questions for the world but to lead and hold the unity of the faith on the core doctrines.”

The Anglican Communion plans to discuss proposals on how to deal with the disagreements between the Church of England and global Anglican churches at a conference in Belfast in June and July, yet Gafcon has said it would take part. Donison added that Gafcon has no relationship with the Archbishop of Canterbury and would only accept her if “she has a change of heart biblically.”

However, another group of conservative Anglicans, the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), stated that they remained in communion with the Church of England. ] Donison noted that Gafcon and GSFA have overlaps and often engage with each other. “We pray for each other and support each other,” he said. “Most of them are actually already in with us. Not all of them are, but for those who aren’t, [our] arms are open wide.”

Eric, the bishop of Ekkios, noted that Gafcon is a good fit for the population he serves. A former Muslim extremist, Eric became a Christian after God miraculously healed his cousin. Since his conversion in 1991, Eric has worked to help Christians converts like himself.

“When we come to know Jesus, we kind of lose everything—community, identity, belonging,” Eric said. “We seek to provide a home for such people. And we don’t fit the structure of Canterbury.”

Eric said members of Ekkios need a community where new converts are cared for and advocated for, a community centered on Scripture and the truth. He likened the church to a mother (umma in Arabic) who embraces and tends a child from the womb.

“When you leave Islam for Christianity, you are looking for an umma,” he said. “And for us, the global Anglican church is our umma. It’s our community, our mother—where we belong.”

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News

Texas Ministries Help International Students Face Job Uncertainty

Hannah Herrera

As H-1B visas become more difficult to obtain, ministry workers provide housing, community, and biblical hope.

The entrance to a U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) detention facility in Dallas, Texas.

Brandon Bell / Staff / Getty

In his 12 years serving international students at The University of Texas at Dallas, Daren Clements has done countless airport pickups—driving to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in his Ram pickup and loading large suitcases into the truck bed. For many students, he’s the first American they ever meet.

But in the past year, he’s also started doing airport drop-offs—leaving students at the airport with the same large suitcases they arrived with years before, waving goodbye as they head home. More are struggling to find jobs in the States due to hiring freezes in tech and finance industries and recent policy changes for foreign workers.

“I have never seen the kind of fear or caution from students as is going on right now,” Clements said. He’s found that many of the students he works with—especially those who come from honor-shame cultures where moving home is viewed as a failure—are struggling with depression. In the past year, he’s referred more students to Christian counselors than ever before.

Two weeks ago, one Indian student who couldn’t find a job in the US or India attempted to take his life, Clements said. In the Dallas area, there has been pushback from residents on the growing number of Indian professionals in the area.

Texas receives the third-most international students in the nation, and these students contribute $2.6 billion to the state’s economy. International workers often fill highly specialized roles, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math industries.

Despite their legal status in the US, international students have been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained some international students and faculty for their support of Palestine. The Trump administration also sought to ban international student enrollment at Harvard, a move which a federal judge temporarily blocked. In total, the State Department said it has revoked 8,000 student visas in the past year.

At the same time, the administration added a $100,000 fee for employers on some H-1B visas, which allow foreign nationals in specialty occupations to work temporarily in the US. They also began prioritizing applicants with higher salaries, making it more difficult for international students to find jobs in the US after graduation. The Trump administration is expected to roll out restrictions on Optional Practical Training, which allows students to work temporarily in the US after graduation for one to three years.

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott went even further and froze new H-1B visa petitions for public universities and agencies until 2027, stressing the need to “ensure that employment opportunities—particularly those funded with taxpayer dollars—are filled by Texans first.”

For international students like Nompumelelo “Mpume” Hlophe who are looking for teaching jobs or postdoctoral fellowships at Texas public universities, this is devastating news.

Hlophe, who is from South Africa, has lived and studied in the US for the past decade and is now pursuing a PhD in biological anthropology at Texas A&M University. The single mother of a 1-year-old, Hlophe noted that in her field, private jobs require advanced statistical abilities, which she doesn’t have, and because she’s not a citizen, she’s not eligible for most federal jobs.

She wants to be an anthropology professor at her university after she completes her dissertation. But amid all the immigration policy changes, and especially with the latest H-1B visa freeze on public universities, everything feels uncertain.

“Right now I feel like I’m living more on a fear of ‘Oh, when I graduate I might actually have to leave the country and go back to South Africa,’ where before, when I came in, it was like, ‘I have that option whether I want to go back to South Africa,’” Hlophe said.

Hlophe said she understands the governor’s intention of protecting job opportunities for Texans, but at the end of the day, hiring should be skill based: “People get hired because your research is unique and because you’re great in what you’re doing,” she said.

Hlophe is a part of the campus ministry Reformed University Fellowship International (RUF International) and lives with a family she met through the fellowship. She said the prayer and support of the ministry and her church community have been invaluable as she tries to stay focused amid so much change.

“I think that’s why I’m a little bit calm about it, because at the end of the day, I feel like I have a body or community that’s just backing me up,” Hlophe said.

After the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp drop in the number of international students entering the country, US colleges experienced a surge in enrollment, surpassing pre-pandemic levels with more than 1 million students. But now the numbers are dropping again. According to The Dallas Express, The University of Texas at Dallas (commonly called UT Dallas) enrolled 5,603 foreign students in fall 2024 and 4,298 in fall 2025, a 23 percent decrease.

The University of North Texas (UNT), which has one of the highest international student enrollment in the state, is $45 million in debt. In a letter to staff, UNT president Harrison Keller said it was in large part due to a drop in international student enrollment. Studies show post-graduation job prospects greatly influence students’ choice of country for higher education.

Even though the governor’s H-1B visa freeze doesn’t directly affect private companies, Clements said it has a “trickle-down effect.”

“I think [private companies] are scared to invest because they don’t see a future with the student when the rules may change next week,” Clements said.

International students such as Catherine Andrews, a 2024 UT Dallas graduate from India, agree.

“I would interview [at] lots and lots of companies, and most of the applications … get rejected because I select the part where I need the visa sponsorship,” said Andrews, who has a master’s in business analytics. She added that companies have said they are looking for long-term hires.

Andrews wanted to study in the US because of its Christian reputation. Four generations ago, a missionary from Philadelphia shared the gospel with her family, and the faith was passed down to Andrews. But growing up, Andrews was surrounded by Hindu friends and longed for a robust Christian community.

At UT Dallas, she joined the campus ministry, International Students Inc., where she met her future husband, Viswas.

In October 2024, while Andrews was still searching for employment, Viswas lost his engineering job. The next day, he found out his parents had been in a serious car crash and would need surgery. He wanted to return to India, but unemployed H-1B visa holders have 60 days to find another job, and traveling out of the US terminates that grace period.

The couple also had a wedding scheduled for two months later in India, which they ended up canceling. If Viswas were to leave the country, he would need to find a new employer and apply for a new H-1B visa in India, which could be subject to the $100,000 fine. Their church in Texas stepped in and threw them a wedding nine months later.

The Andrewses said moving back to India would be a last resort. Despite its difficulties, the US still has the world’s leading tech companies, provides a higher quality of life, and has the best cutting-edge research opportunities. The Andrewses also don’t want to give up the Christian community they’ve found.

International students often find a lifeline in campus ministries. These groups provide a welcoming community, rides to the social security office and to grocery stores, furniture delivery, Bible studies, social events, an introduction to Texan and American culture, and connections to families from local churches.

Noel Coppedge, campus assistant at RUF International at The University of Texas at Austin, said he also sees an increased sense of insecurity among students.

Last semester, ICE took one of the ministry’s Middle Eastern students while she was shopping at the local H-E-B grocery store. She had her papers on her, but the masked agents refused to look at them, saying her detention was a routine check. The agents put her in a van and drove her to a facility an hour outside Austin, where she was detained overnight. She was not allowed to make a phone call. In the morning, they released her without explanation and without transportation back to Austin.

“Whether people have had those exact experiences or not, I know that there’s a common feeling that has been growing in people that ‘Maybe I’m not so welcome. Maybe I don’t want to stay,’” Coppedge said. “I still think many people have the desire to stay, but it’s with a little bit of caution.”

After helping the student who was detained by ICE move into a new apartment, Coppedge asked if he could read a Bible passage with her.

“We just talked about how Jesus cares for the brokenhearted, he cares for women,” Coppedge said. “I just wanted to communicate to her that what has happened to her is not something that Jesus wants associated with himself.”

For that student, there is no question about what she wants to do after graduation. “I just can’t wait to go home,” she told Coppedge recently.

Clements said the crisis students are facing has given the church an opportunity to care for them like never before. International student ministries are providing recent graduates with free housing in church families’ homes, networking, community, emotional support, and biblical hope, he said.

“I’ve never had a more open door to pray over a student than I have right now,” Clements said.

For many students, knowing they are not alone makes all the difference.

Andrews noted that “in the end it all points back [to the fact] that so far God has definitely brought us this far and provided for us, like when we are not having any money at all. And he didn’t [leave] us lonely. He gave us each other to fight for those difficulties, and he gave us church and church family.”

- More from Hannah Herrera

News

How EMDR—and Drawing Close to God—Helped a School Shooting Survivor

Emily Belz

The trauma treatment is growing in popularity. It worked for Ellie Wyse, now in college and seeking to help teens hurting like she was.

Photo Courtesy of the Wyse Family / Unsplash / Edits by CT

Ellie Wyse still remembers the day: May 7, 2019. She was a high school freshman at STEM School Highlands Ranch on the outskirts of Denver, and classes were almost over when the school went into lockdown.

Wyse assumed it was a drill—but then it wasn’t ending. She heard loud noises, and to this day she’s not quite sure whether they were the gunshots from a classroom nearby. She got texts from her mom and others asking if she was okay.

Then a squad of SWAT officers swooped into the room and took her out of the building. It was the scariest moment of her life, she told CT: officers swarming in with large guns and Wyse having to walk out with her hands up.

She and other students were moved from place to place before finally going to a nearby gym to reunite with their parents, who had been waiting for hours. Wyse learned later that one of two shooters in the incident was a friend of hers.

One student was killed, and eight others were injured. During the attack, when the shooters pulled out their guns, student Kendrick Castillo rushed one of them and was killed in the process. His sacrifice enabled other students to subdue the perpetrators.

That day, Wyse’s friendship with the shooter, whose actions she considered “heinous,” also died.

In the days and weeks after, Wyse, a bubbly, laughing, extroverted 15-year-old, grew quiet. She became more scared and anxious about everything.

“I didn’t really notice it on my own—because I was like, Nope, I’m just going to keep pushing forward,” Wyse told CT. “It was my mom who noticed that I really wasn’t okay. She had seen the personality shift.”

At least 398,000 American children have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine shooting in 1999, and researchers are still assessing how this trauma affects them in the years after.

Wyse felt survivor’s guilt. And she initially struggled with how to feel about her friendship with the shooter.

“Why did I make it out of class and somebody else didn’t?” she said.

Her mom suggested she try a type of therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR. Wyse was initially resistant but gave in.

EMDR is a therapy supported by scientific research that helps individuals reprocess post-traumatic stress in a safe setting. It is growing in popularity—some families CT interviewed whose children survived the recent Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis planned to do EMDR therapy.

Unlike talk therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that focuses on the mind, EMDR is more body based.

Jessica Cobb, a Christian counselor trained in EMDR, compared the technique to sleeping, where your brain has a chance to process your day.

In a traumatic moment, “this alarm bell is going off in your brain, and it’s saying, I don’t know what to do with this. And so it holds on to it,” Cobb said. “Your memories get stuck in a raw, unprocessed form that’s full of images and emotion and physical sensations.”

Reprocessing that moment in a safe environment allows a person to gain distance from the memory and makes it less frightening.

In EMDR therapy, a counselor goes through several steps to help a patient prepare to reprocess the traumatic memory. The patient focuses on the memory while doing bilateral stimulation—eye movements, taps, or sounds.

Patients don’t have to describe the traumatic event while doing EMDR. After stimulation, they share about any sensations and negative beliefs that arose from reviewing the memory, such as “I’m not safe”or“I have no control.”

The therapist monitors the patient’s score on the subjective units of distress scale, or SUDS, as the session goes on to see how distressing the memory is. Once the distress reaches the lowest possible score, they work through positive beliefs around the memory, like “I survived” or “I am lovable.”

When Wyse finished her EMDR sessions after about six weeks, she was able to walk into her school without feeling anxious—for her, a huge step forward. After that, she also did talk-therapy sessions.

Traces of trauma remain. Her family has always conducted a big fireworks show on the Fourth of July, and before the shooting Wyse loved to be part of it. The first July after the shooting, she was holed up in her room wearing noise-canceling headphones. She felt horrible, as if she were messing up something fun for her family. As the years have gone by, she’s gotten better at handling fireworks, but she never enjoys them as she used to.

As she processed the attack, she decided to become a therapist to young people herself: “I know what it’s like to be in the classroom, waiting for it to be over, not sure how you’re getting out.”

“I’ve just noticed a gap in care—being a teenager who had experienced trauma and then compounding that with COVID,” she said. “I just saw this huge gap of need for people who really needed extra love and extra support and weren’t getting it.”

Teenagers, she noted, are also dependent on their parents to get therapy and drive to appointments.

Though she was initially hesitant about leaving Colorado and going to a Christian school, she had family friends who were Cedarville University alumni and urged her to try it out. When she visited, she felt at home and applied to study psychology there. She’s now a senior, planning to enroll in graduate school to become a licensed counselor.

Wyse knows taking care of her own mental health will help her be a good counselor. She has been in an improv comedy group the last three years—she thinks being social and trying new activities in community is good for her psychologically. She can still notice when she’s taking a “step back” in her healing process, becoming more socially withdrawn or quiet.

Cobb, the counselor, said patients need supplements to EMDR: predictable routines, emotional regulation tools like breathing and exercise, and supportive relationships from family, friends, and pastors who don’t rush the healing process or judge.

“It’s so important to have trauma-informed schools and churches,” she said.

Some research has shown that people who felt support from religious communities after mass shootings experienced fewer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

After a traumatic event like that, parents should look for signs of PTSD or acute stress, like a child being withdrawn, overly anxious, or prone to nightmares, Cobb said. EMDR practitioners are generally easy to find.

Christian counselors largely support EMDR as a trauma therapy, but some have concerns.

The Biblical Counseling Coalition in 2021 released a statement critical of EMDR, saying the framework was “fundamentally God-less, Christ-less, and Spirit-less,” but conceded it could provide “a limited, important degree of usefulness for some Christians under some circumstances.”

“Scripture is the only source for primary, authoritative beliefs and values. We should be enamored with it, and with nothing else,” the statement concluded. “Other models and methodologies will come and go as the world pays attention to the latest this or the latest that in the marketplace of psychotherapeutic ideas.”

Cobb, a biblical counselor herself, disagrees with the assessment: EMDR is focused on a neurobiological issue and doesn’t replace prayer or Scripture, she said. Christian counselors can incorporate faith-based resources in the EMDR process if they want, she said, like sharing a Scripture when a patient is in a distressing moment.

The point of EMDR is “you can’t do any healing if you aren’t feeling physical safety,” Cobb said.

Wyse thinks using psychological “tools God has given us” is useful, and then patients can go to biblical counseling to work through spiritual issues. As she healed, she said her faith grew.

During her freshman year at Cedarville, she was struggling being away from her parents and Colorado. For some reason she read the book of Ecclesiastes. One verse jumped off the page: “For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart” (Ecc. 5:20, ESV).

A calligrapher, she wrote the verse down and put it on a board above her desk. Now she has it memorized.

- More from Emily Belz

Ideas

The Math Behind Christ’s Care for Our Flourishing

Bruce Wydick

I was curious about how Jesus allotted his time on earth—and what Christians could learn from it.

$An image of Jesus helping a woman, with a glitchy computer texture and binary code.$

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash, WikiMedia Commons

What is God’s heart? What does he value? What relative importance does he place on the different facets of our flourishing? He certainly cares for our spiritual lives, but what of our physical health, our social connectedness to our communities, our mental health, our economic welfare? The answers to these questions have powerful implications for how we should love our neighbors, both locally and globally.

As a development economist and as a Christian, I find these questions particularly important. A significant part of my research studies the overall effectiveness of international development organizations like World Vision and Compassion International. But to do this, one needs to do two things: (1) Carefully estimate impacts on different human outcomes and (2) assess the relative importance of those impacted areas within a sound framework of human flourishing.

The first of these is more technical in nature, the second more philosophical. It caused me to reflect as a Christian: What constitutes a positively impacted life? Spiritual growth? Higher income? Social harmony? Better physical or mental health? And since a central mission of most Christian development organizations is to follow Christ’s example in his engagement with the poor, it led me to an objective study of how Jesus engaged with human need, a study that in turn deepened my relationship with God.

What first prompted this was an impact evaluation project with Hope Walks, a Christian organization that funds clubfoot interventions for children in low-income countries. As a congenital disability, clubfoot is only vaguely familiar to most Americans. It is so easily and fully treatable in infancy that we rarely see a person living with this untreated abnormality. Indeed, some world-class American athletes like Mia Hamm and Troy Aikman were born with clubfoot.

But in low-income countries, clubfoot often goes untreated. Many people begging on the streets of poor countries were born with congenital abnormalities like clubfoot. Ever wonder who comprises the “least of these” on a global scale? Many of them are people born with congenital abnormalities to poor families in poor countries.

I was stunned at how devastating clubfoot is for various aspects of human flourishing. Our research team—Patrizio Piraino, Gianna Camacho, and I—found that compared to the life outcomes of their nearest-age siblings, the lives of children in Ethiopia who went untreated for clubfoot were shattered by this congenital abnormality. The statistics painted a disheartening picture of being relatively immobile, socially excluded, suffering poor mental health, and failing in school.

These children were also suffering spiritually, according to our interviews with family members and siblings, less likely to believe God cared for them and uninvolved in church and youth activities. Their physical disability bled profusely into their spiritual, social, academic, and emotional lives.

But we found that treating this congenital abnormality in infancy largely restored human flourishing in all of these areas. Because the consequences of untreated clubfoot are so grim in a low-income country like Ethiopia, and because the Ponseti treatment that Hope Walks employs (casting for one to 2 months and then bracing at night until age 5) is so ubiquitously effective, the impacts of this clubfoot intervention on human flourishing were greater than any poverty intervention I have studied.

I wanted people to understand how human flourishing changed so dramatically with clubfoot treatment, even compared to health and poverty alleviation programs offered by other excellent Christian nonprofits. And showing its overall impact on human flourishing led me to my challenge: How are we to assign relative importance to the various facets of our well-being in a way that reflects God’s priorities for his children?

A fascinating concept in economics is called “revealed preference”—the idea that we can infer a person’s values by observing how they allocate their money and time. It’s as if we can peer into a person’s soul by looking at their choices.

Might we also learn something of God’s heart by examining how Jesus devoted his time on earth across different aspects of human need? Jesus in his earthly ministry had to make choices about how to allocate his limited time, just as we do.

I decided to go through the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ interactions with people—conversations, teachings, and healings—and digitally categorize all 171 recorded interactions (as delineated by New International Version subchapter headings) based on which of the following five different facets of human need he was addressing: (1) purely spiritual, (2) physical needs, (3) social inclusion, (4) mental health, and (5) economic needs.

I allowed two categories maximum for each encounter. To ensure these categorizations reflected the consensus of a diverse group of Christian leaders, I assembled a theological team made up of a Presbyterian pastor (Al Tizon), a Catholic theologian (Mark Miller), a Protestant theologian (Kent Annan), and parachurch workers with InterVarsity (Jackie Tisthammer) and Cru (Lori Kepner), all experts in New Testament manuscript studies, to carry out the same exercise. Below are pie charts showing the team’s consensus categorizations of Jesus’ engagement with different human needs:

Published with permission, courtesy of Bruce Wydick.

In a quest for maximum objectivity, I brought in Richard Zhang, my friend with a PhD in computer science from Berkeley. Zhang works for Google DeepMind on its Gemini AI platform and leads the organization Christians for AI, a group of wonderfully nerdy believers. I asked Richard to create an optimal AI prompt for me to similarly categorize the 171 human interactions of Jesus into the five bins. He got to work and engineered a gargantuan prompt to carry out the task.

I fed the prompt into Perplexity AI, a large-language model that excels at categorization. Perplexity AI’s categorization of Jesus’ engagement across human needs showed even an even more holistic division of concern than the collective categorizations of the theologians. The result of these exercises is shown in the pie charts below:

Published with permission, courtesy of Bruce Wydick.

While Christians already know from Scripture and experience that God cares for all of the different facets of our well-being, this analysis provided some statistical insight outside of any possible denominational or ideological slant. It is simply what exists in the New Testament “data.”

It occurred to me during this exercise that, to prove he was God, all of Christ’s miracles could have simply been spiritual displays of power, miracles of the shock-and-awe variety, like calming storms or walking on water. But they weren’t. Instead, most of his miracles involve meeting various human needs: people’s physical ailments (restoring sight, mobility), their social inclusion (healing of lepers), their economic shortages (loaves and fishes), and maybe even their mental health—“Peace be with you,” (John 20:21). His miracles show how much the God of the universe cares about all these different facets of us that make us happy, healthy human beings.

From seeing Jesus’ priorities in action, we know he didn’t come to establish a strictly spiritual gospel, or a merely social gospel, or just an economic gospel, or just a psychologically comforting gospel. Want a one-dimensional religion? Well, it’s not Christianity. Jesus does prioritize more of his time in the Gospels to addressing our relationship to him and his Father than any other single facet of human flourishing. But it’s clear that he cares about all facets of our lives.

Perhaps most importantly to me as a development economist, obtaining some sense of Jesus’ relative concern across these areas of human flourishing is a helpful conceptual tool in assessing the impact of Christian organizations.

Take Hope Walks, for example. The negative impacts of clubfoot on a person’s life are shown in the diagram as the dark spaces between the colored segments and the outer edges of the chart, compared to data from their nearest-age sibling. The positive impact of Hope Walks’ intervention is then seen to the right in the lighter-colored areas; it reveals substantially restored flourishing to a child born with clubfoot. (The academic article detailing this research appeared in January in the journal Health Economics.)

Published with permission, courtsey of Bruce Wydick.

We compared the impacts of the Hope Walks intervention to other celebrated and more well-known development programs using our biblically based index of human flourishing, discovering that the impacts of the Hope Walks intervention were larger than any other Christian intervention for which we could find reliable impact data.

For a mere $500 intervention, its impact on these children born with clubfoot can be described as nothing short of totally transformative. Hope Walks truly packs a punch against poverty, social and spiritual exclusion, and multiple dimensions of human suffering.

Jesus loves all of us, not just every individual person, but all of us, deeply caring for every facet of our lives. He loves us and wants us to flourish completely. Supporting organizations whose work significantly and positively impacts every facet of human flourishing is a great way to show Christ’s love to others across the globe.

Bruce Wydick is professor of economics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, adjunct professor at the University of California at Davis, and distinguished research affiliate at the University of Notre Dame.

- More from Bruce Wydick

Theology

Communion, Sex, and God’s Created Order

Kyle Wells

Our bundled partisanship misses Scripture’s focus on the body.

Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: WikiMedia Commons, Unsplash

It’s disorienting to live in Christian community in the United States today. Those who agree on Jesus, read the same Scriptures, and confess the same creeds diverge sharply on the weightiest moral questions of our time, especially around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world. The issue is not just that Christians arrive at different conclusions, but that we often seem to be navigating the world by different maps.

What is particularly disconcerting is the sense that often conversations around sexuality, racial injustice, and care for the created world betray one’s political affiliation more than one’s biblical and theological reasoning. For example, the Pew Research Center shows Christian attitudes about climate change align more closely with partisan identity than with confessional commitments. Over time, partisan identity (with its bundling of priorities) increasingly shapes not only individual judgments but also our sense of which moral conclusions naturally belong together.

I want to propose a different map, one that recovers an ancient, biblical understanding of the body and its relation to the world. Scripture consistently speaks of bodies as participatory—both formed by what they share in and shaped by the powers they yield to. Bodies are how people are bound to one another, to the world they inhabit, and to whichever lord they serve. Seen this way, the body provides a unifying framework for Christian moral reasoning.

Much of our moral confusion begins with a way of understanding the body that feels obvious to us but sits uneasily with how Scripture speaks about embodied life. We tend to treat bodies as private and self-contained. Bodies are something we have, rather than something that situates us within relations we did not choose and cannot escape.

This way of imagining the body is not natural or inevitable. Modern Western life trains us to see ourselves as autonomous individuals, sealed off from one another and from the world we inhabit. Our instincts about freedom, responsibility, and harm are shaped by this inheritance, so that bodily life appears fundamentally private.

Paul assumes something very different. Repeatedly he describes human existence as participatory—lived in Christ or in Adam, within the old creation or the new (1 Cor. 15:35–50). Bodies are how people are joined to one another, embedded in the created world, and drawn under competing forms of rule.

In the ancient world, bodies scaled outward. A person could be a body, but so could a household, a city, a people, even a planet—each a living whole ordered within a larger created reality. Paul assumes that human bodies are caught up in these larger networks of relationships—these “bodies.” Human bodies are porous and connected, shaped by shared practices, social bonds, and spiritual powers. To belong to a body is not a metaphor for association; it is an acceptance of how combinatorial life is and a description of how life actually functions.

So Paul speaks about ordinary practices—like eating, worshiping, and gathering—in ways that reject modern assumptions. When he writes, “We, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf,” he assumes that bodies gathered around a table become one body through what they share (1 Cor. 10:17). Christians cannot “have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons,” because to give oneself bodily to a practice is to be bound to and shaped by the power that stands behind it (v. 21). Bodies, then, are not only sites of connection but also the places where loyalty is formed and enacted.

Given these ancient assumptions, Paul’s frequent talk of “bodies” no longer sounds like loose metaphor but like a coherent way of seeing the world. He can speak of a “body of Christ,” a “body of sin,” or a “body of death” because bodies are where lives are bound together under a shared rule—Christ, or sin and death (Rom. 6:6, 7:24 ESV).

This is the world presupposed by Paul’s stark declaration that “you are not your own” (1 Cor. 6:19). The phrase is often heard as a moral restriction. In fact, it names a prior Scriptural reality: Bodies always already belong somewhere and to someone. The only question is not whether our bodies are claimed, but by whom. Neutral bodies do not exist.

The resurrection of Jesus gives Paul’s vision of the body its full ethical weight. God has raised Jesus bodily from the dead and united believers’ bodies to his glorified body, establishing a new lordship that reaches into embodied life now (Rom. 6:1–14). What happens in and through the body now bears witness to which power truly rules, and where the world itself is headed.

This vision gives Christian ethics its map. The question is no longer simply “What should I do?” Instead, it is “What am I being joined to? What kind of life is shaping me? And what story is my body being trained to tell?”

If the biblical vision of the body can feel abstract, sexual practice makes it concrete. Paul applies the same participatory logic to sex that he applies to eating, worship, and communal life. Addressing the practice of visiting temple prostitutes, he reminds believers that their “bodies are members of Christ himself” (1 Cor. 6:15). To join one’s body to another is to become “one flesh” (v. 16), binding what belongs to Christ to a rival allegiance. Similarly, the only reason a believing spouse may remain sexually united to an unbelieving spouse is that the unbelieving spouse has been sanctified through the marriage (7:14). Sexual union is never merely physical or private.

Contemporary Christian debates about sexual behavior often miss this starting point. In some settings—especially those shaped by abstinence movements—sexual practice becomes a visible marker of personal holiness. In others, it is treated as a private matter of identity or desire, best addressed through affirmation and personal discretion. Despite their differences, both approaches tend to assume that sex is about the individual—how desire is ordered, expressed, or affirmed.

Paul begins elsewhere. When he addresses sexual behavior, he does not start with desire, identity, or social boundaries. He begins with what bodies are and whose they are. Sexual acts are not self-contained choices but forms of participation that shape the life of the community.

This is why Paul responds so sharply to the man sleeping with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5). What concerns him is not scandal management but communal formation: “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (v. 6, ESV). What one body participates in does not remain private; it works its way through the whole.

The question, then, is not whether an act feels right, but whether it yields the church more fully to Christ or leaves it exposed to powers that traffic in sin and death. In Paul’s vision, sexual ethics are not about managing desire or signaling virtue. They concern how bodies participate in shared life—and which powers that participation serves.

Once bodies are understood as participatory realities, the implications cannot be confined to sexual ethics alone. They extend outward to the world that bodies inhabit and depend upon. To speak of embodied life is to speak of creation.

Paul’s language makes this connection unavoidable. The bodies that now belong to Christ—our mortal bodies—are still formed from the dust of the earth (1 Cor. 15:47), subject to decay and sustained by the same material conditions. This is why Paul can speak of creation itself as groaning alongside human bodies, awaiting liberation together (Rom. 8:22–23). The fate of embodied human life and the fate of the world are bound together because, for now, they share the same condition of corruption and hope.

If bodies are participatory realities embedded within God’s creation, then care for the created world is not an abstract cause. It is a question of how embodied life is sustained and shared. What happens to the land, the air, and the water inevitably shapes the bodies that depend upon them—especially the bodies of the poor, the vulnerable, and those with the least power to shield themselves from environmental harm.

Seen this way, disregard for the created world is not merely a failure of stewardship. It is a contradiction of Christian confession. To affirm the resurrection of the body while treating the material world as expendable is to live as though decay, not Christ, has the final claim on embodied life.

Creation care, then, is not a matter of moral signaling or political alignment. It is a matter of allegiance and witness. It asks whether our embodied practices yield the world we inhabit to the life-giving rule of Christ or leave it captive to patterns of extraction and neglect that belong to the old creation. The question is not whether Christians should “care about the environment” but whether our bodily life bears witness to the lordship of the risen Christ over the world that sustains us all.

The implications for race are immediate. Racism is not first an idea but is a practice that manipulates, controls, and violates bodies. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes this plain when he frames life as a Black man in America as a struggle over how one should live within a Black body. He returns to the body as the site of vulnerability and threat in his writing. Racism, he insists, is not merely social or symbolic. It is visceral. It “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones.” However we name it—justice, privilege, relations—the reality lands, with force, on the body.

Coates exposes something that resonates deeply with how Paul speaks about sin and salvation. Paul does not treat captivity as an abstraction. He locates it in embodied life. Sin reigns in bodies. Death works through members. And redemption, when it comes, takes root in the same place bondage was endured.

This is why Paul speaks so urgently about division within the church. When communities fracture along lines of status, ethnicity, or power, the problem is not merely social or political. In Christ, Jew and Gentile have been made one body, their hostility put to death through the cross (Eph. 2:14–16). This unity is a public affront to the powers that thrive on domination and exclusion. To tolerate embodied division is not simply to fail at justice; it is to deny the lordship of Christ over his body.

Paul’s claim does not stop at the church’s boundary. Christ’s reign extends to every human body. How bodies are treated—protected or exposed, welcomed or constrained—bears witness to who truly rules. To dishonor a body is, in practice, to deny Christ’s claim upon it.

Christians are not simply caught between political left and right or struggling to locate a sensible middle. More often, we are navigating by the wrong map altogether. Paul does not ask us to refine our positions within the present order. He announces that a new world has already been revealed in Christ and that our bodies are being claimed by it now.

When that vision comes back into view, questions of sexuality, race, and creation no longer appear as disconnected debates. They come into focus as intertwined expressions of a single, embodied life. What we do with our bodies—how we join them, protect them, and situate them within the world—bears witness to who we believe truly reigns.

The work of Christian ethics, then, is about learning to live, together, as bodies gathered under the lordship of the risen Christ—bearing witness, in the most ordinary and physical ways, to the life of the world that is already breaking in.

Kyle Wells is lead pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara, California. He writes on biblical theology and Christian ethics for both the church and the academy.

- More from Kyle Wells

Books

Review

The Forgotten Founding Father

Thomas S. Kidd

Three history books to read this month.

Illustration by Christianity Today

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

**Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)**

Many excellent books on the American Revolution will help us mark this 250th year of the country’s birth. Founders such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson will get the most coverage this anniversary year. But our understanding of America’s independence is incomplete without considering Thomas Paine, a then-recent immigrant from England and the author of Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet arguing for American independence.

Jack Kelly’s Tom Paine’s War is a lively introduction to Paine’s critical role in the Revolution. Kelly, a novelist and history writer, doesn’t break much new ground regarding Paine, but he crafts a dramatic narrative that makes Tom Paine’s War a good introductory read.

Kelly notes that Paine is a somewhat forgotten Founding Father, though most American History courses mention Paine’s Common Sense and The American Crisis, best known for its stirring line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine’s lesser status among the Founders is partly explained by his unorthodox religious beliefs. Paine had a family background in Anglicanism and Quakerism and may even have served briefly as a Methodist preacher in England. (Kelly unequivocally says he did, but the fact is not confirmed.)

During Paine’s tenure in France during the French Revolution, however, he embraced radical anti-Christian and anti-clerical ideas. This resulted in his inflammatory The Age of Reason (1794), in which he denounced the Bible and Christianity and declared that “my own mind is my own church.” Traditional Founders saw Paine as a dangerous incendiary and did not wish to associate him with America’s Revolution.

**Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)**

A highly illuminating treatment of the Revolution’s international implications is Richard Bell’s The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. The global dimensions of the Revolution were everywhere, from the East India Company’s Chinese tea that rioters dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773 to the treaty signing in Paris that ended the war in 1783. But Americans have understandably downplayed these dimensions because of the symbolic importance the nation attaches to American “exceptionalism.”

Bell’s impressive and readable book won’t let us be satisfied, however, with the Revolution’s usual battle scenes from Bunker Hill, Massachusetts, and Yorktown, Virginia. With each chapter connected to a global-facing vignette, Bell reminds us that in the world perspective, the Revolution was really a series of interlocking gears that turned events in lands as distant as India and Australia.

Bell posits there were at least four simultaneous wars happening during the 1770s and ’80s. These began with many American colonists fighting against British imperial rule. But there was also a French gambit to weaken Britain and reconfigure the European balance of power, a similar Spanish effort to regain and protect imperial domains in the Western Hemisphere, and the undeclared but urgent efforts by Native Americans and Africans in America and the Caribbean to secure their autonomy and freedom.

**Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)**

A deeper examination of Paine’s role in the “Age of Revolutions” is Yuval Levin’s brilliant The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. Levin focuses on Burke and Paine’s clashing perspectives on the French Revolution. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Burke attacked the French upheaval as precipitous and foolish. Burke’s book arguably marked the beginning of the modern conservative tradition. Paine’s response to Burke, The Rights of Man (1791), expressed great confidence in man’s ability to re-create society based on the ideals of liberty and equality.

Paine argued that progressive societies should continually pursue a return to man’s (supposed) natural state, in a society composed of individuals free from arbitrary rules and hierarchy. Virtually all churches and nations, to Paine, erect traditions designed to benefit the few and oppress the many. The people must constantly press against state and church for their natural rights. When necessary, the people should “begin the world over again” (as stated in Common Sense) by initiating revolution.

Paine was sure that when people applied reason to politics and religion, they would jettison traditional structures such as monarchy, established churches, and the historic fallacies propping up these institutions. Like Thomas Jefferson, Paine was certain that reason would eventually demolish Christian doctrinal claims such as the Trinity or the divinity of Christ.

Burke, of course, placed greater confidence in the stabilizing force of political institutions and Christian tradition. Although Burke was a British monarchist, his worries about idealistic and revolutionary social change matched those of conservative American founders, including George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.

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

- More from Thomas S. Kidd

History

Considering Both Sides of Church Divisions

Daniel Silliman

CT hosted debates about the charismatic movement and women’s ordination.

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, CT Archives

In 1975, CT tried to understand the charismatic movement. Was it evangelical? Was it biblical? Was it good for the church? The magazine published a charismatic theologian making the case for the movement in February.

As one involved in the movement for the past decade, I should like to set forth a brief profile of it. … Persons in the charismatic movement ordinarily stress first the recovery of a liveliness and freshness in their Christian faith. This may be expressed in a number of ways. For example, the reality of God has broken in with fresh meaning and power. God, who may have seemed little more than a token figure before, has now become vividly real and personal to them. Jesus Christ, largely a figure of the past before, has now become the living Lord. The Holy Spirit, who previously had meant almost nothing to them, has become an immanent, pervasive presence.

The Bible, which may have been thought of before as mostly an external norm of Christian faith, or largely as a historical witness to God’s mighty deeds, has become also a testimony to God’s contemporary activity. It is as if a door had been opened, and walking through the door they found spread out before them the extraordinary biblical world, with dimensions of angelic heights and demonic depths, of Holy Spirit and unclean spirits, of miracles and wonders—a world in which now they sense their own participation. …

All of Christian faith has been enhanced by the sense of inward conviction. Formerly there was a kind of hoping against hope; this has been transformed into a buoyant “full assurance of hope” (Heb. 6:11).

Even evangelicals who were sympathetic to ecstatic charismatic practices, like speaking in tongues, often found themselves clashing with the charismatic Christians, though. One pastor wrote of the hard conclusions he had reached.

I have tried my best to make a climate of Christian fellowship and worship that will accommodate both those who speak in tongues and those who do not. My intention was to open the doors of Christian sharing to everyone who loves the Lord Jesus as Saviour.

Having had about a dozen persons in the congregation who speak in tongues, I have come to some hard conclusions after a year of effort. These conclusions have been heart-breaking to me. …

They carried their Bibles and became a part of the congregation’s program and fellowship. However, after some months it was obvious that they had a spiritual superiority complex, and it became obnoxious. Professing to be filled with the Spirit of humility and holiness, these persons expressed the opposite. The subtle but real spiritual conceit became more and more apparent until the words “Spirit-filled” came to have a regrettable taint. …

These persons are insensitive to the concept of Christian discipline.

The magazine also looked at two sides of another debate dividing Christians of the time: the role of women in church. CT reported on a landmark meeting of evangelical feminists and the growing numbers of women going to seminary. Should they be preparing for ministry? Elisabeth Elliot, then a regular CT columnist, presented a case against women’s ordination.

Changes made by the Church merely to accommodate changes taking place in the world have resulted in a loss of power. This week’s “relevance” is next week’s irrelevance.

The question of the ordination of women has been raised inevitably because of the women’s liberation movement. The confusion wrought by this question in the Church is one of many symptoms of a general malaise. As Christians we ought always to be testing our assumptions and priorities against the Word of God, for we are daily subjected to undermining by the secular presuppositions of our age. …

The exclusion of women from ordination is based on the order established in creation. The first chapter of Genesis gives an account of the creation of the world and its creatures. The creation of man and woman in the image of God himself was the culminating act. This act is more specifically described in the second chapter, in which it becomes clear that the man Adam was created first. When God brought to Adam all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air he named them, but among all the creatures “there was not found a helper fit for him.” It was then that God made the woman, fashioning her from Adam’s own flesh and bone. …

The principles of obedience, submission, and authority are clearly set forth in both the Old and New Testaments. Every creature of God has his appointed place, from cherubim, seraphim, archangels, and angels down to the lowliest beast. Man himself is “made a little lower than the angels,” and was commanded to have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves.

A Fuller Theological Seminary professor made the case in favor of ordaining women.

The creation account … need not be thought to subordinate one sex to the other. Rather, mankind in the divine image is created a partnership of male and female. By the same token the new mankind “foreordained to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:29, ASV) is likewise a partnership of the sexes. Translated into the language of ecclesiology, this is to say: The Church is a universal priesthood of all believers in Christ, female as well as male. …

I conclude that women have full title to the order of Christian ministry as God shall call them. Let those who scruple consider what it has cost the Church not to use the talents of the woman. Let anyone consult the hymnbook and see what women poets—Fanny Crosby, Charlotte Elliott, Frances Havergal, Christina Rossetti, Anne Steel—have taught the people of God to sing and then ask what it would mean if such women were allowed to move beyond the relative anonymity of the hymnal to full visibility in the Church as evangelists, preachers, and teachers.

And let all who would help them attain such visibility remember that sharing the ministry with women does not mean requiring them to think, speak, and act like men. This would be to misunderstand the meaning of our sexual complementarity. Because God made Man male and female, in the natural realm men are fathers and brothers, while women are mothers and sisters. So it must be in the spiritual realm. And when it is, then, and only then, will the Church be truly the family of God.

Carl F. H. Henry, the emeritus editor in chief, weighed in as well in several columns over several issues on the “battle of the sexes.”

The Bible nowhere teaches male superiority and supremacy and female inferiority and servility. What the Bible pattern establishes instead is the indispensability under God of man and woman to each other in the context not only of society but also of the home as its basic unit. God’s superiority is the fundamental emphasis (cf. 1 Cor. 11:11, 12, “God is the source of all”). Paul expounds this divinely intended order in a Corinthian milieu where, contrary to the practice in Christian churches, a strong effort was under way to introduce a confused equality.

Equality in Christ, Paul insists, destroys neither apostolic authority in the Christian community as a determination of the crucified and risen Lord, nor the order that God intends.

Not every change in church life was contentious in 1975. CT looked at the explosion in sermon cassette tapes.

Tape recorders and players have been around for a long time, but the bulkiness of the equipment and the vulnerability of the tapes limit their creative use by most pastors. …

Cassette-makers are sprouting up everywhere. Christians with gnostic tendencies who gather in “underground” cells glory in circulating cassettes. They have about them the aura of the clandestine samizdat without the risk of discovery. Cassettes can be made by anyone who has a little imagination and relatively simple and inexpensive equipment. They are a boon to every ism in the land. …

Christian schools are involved in producing and distributing cassettes: Bethany Fellowship, Columbia Bible College, Luther Theological Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and Regent College. Christian Bookseller Magazine periodically reviews the latest offerings of the major religion-market companies.

There are a growing number of cassette clubs, operating in the familiar pattern of book clubs. The Episcopalians have the Catacomb Cassette Club, and, from another part of the spectrum, Pillsbury Baptist Bible College in Minnesota will enroll you in its fiery evangelist-of-the-month.

The most pressing political question was America’s responsibilities in Southeast Asia, after the military’s withdrawal from the war in Vietnam. CT reported on the dire situation missionaries faced.

Seven missionaries and a child, however, were presumed to be in the hands of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese invaders. They are:

Mr. and Mrs. Norman Johnson, both 39, of Hamilton, Ontario (Christian and Missionary Alliance); Richard and Lillian Phillips, 45 and 43, of Bloomington, Minnesota (CMA); Mrs. Archie Mitchell, 54, of Bly, Oregon (CMA); and John and Carolyn Miller and their five-year-old daughter, of Allentown, Pennsylvania (Wycliffe Bible Translators).

All were at Ban Me Thuot in the central highlands, where the CMA operates a leprosarium and hospital. The Johnsons fled into the jungle at the outset of the attack on the town early last month and still had not been heard from as of March 26. The others, along with one or two other foreign civilians, had reportedly sought shelter in the compound of the International Commission for Control and Supervision as fierce fighting raged through the area. Radio contact with the group was lost on March 14.

President Gerald Ford urged Congress to send aid to Cambodia, another Southeast Asian country wracked by civil war. CT reported that, “politics aside,” the support would help Christians in need.

The crisis comes at a time of responsiveness to the Gospel on a scale unprecedented in the Buddhist country’s history. Last year the Khmer Evangelical Church, associated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) and embracing nearly all the Protestant congregations in the land, experienced a 300 per cent increase in growth, according to CMA spokesmen. In the event of a Communist takeover, growth will be curtailed and Christian activities severely restricted, if the Communists follow their pattern elsewhere.

“I fully expect to be behind bars one day because of my love for Jesus Christ,” commented one young Cambodian believer.

The US government decided to accept refugees from Southeast Asia—the “biggest all-at-once influx of refugees” in American history—and asked church groups to help. CT explained the resettlement program and urged evangelicals to volunteer.

When Christ saw the crowds, “he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless” (Matt. 9:36). But many of his followers never quite see things that way. …

The refugees must have official sponsors before they can leave the rustic conditions of the camps and make their debut in North American society. Life in these temporary quarters is by no means luxurious: the refugees are cramped into tents and old barracks. Food is adequate, however, and recreation opportunities are provided, so that conditions are bearable. But the sooner sponsors are found the better. … All they need is some help in the transitional period. …

Even if refugees eventually cause some problems, the compassionate Christian should not turn away from helping. These people are God’s creation as much as native North Americans are, and he will do the rewarding. The Samaritan spirit calls for making room not only in our homes but in our hearts. Whatever one thinks about the Viet Nam war, the refugees should be extended a genuine welcome as fellow human beings.

Americans ultimately helped resettle approximately 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Evangelical groups including the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, Food for the Hungry, and World Vision played an active role.

- More from Daniel Silliman

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Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)

Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)

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**Jack Kelly, Tom Paine’s War: The Words That Rallied a Nation and the Founder for Our Time (St. Martin’s Press, 2026)**

**Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (Riverhead Books, 2025)**

**Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books, 2014)**