Hello, fellow wayfarers … In time for the countdown to Halloween, why people crave horror movies and scary stories … What those who differ on Mormon doctrine should say—and not say—after an act of violence on a Latter-day Saints congregation … How one writer thinks our machines are putting us in touch with more-than-just-artificial intelligences … A Desert Island Playlist from the Pacific Northwest … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
What Horror Stories Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About the World
When you were a child, did you ever go to the place where your mom or dad worked and get a little glimpse into what their day-to-day life was like when they were away from you? I’ve been trying to imagine today what it would be like to see that my father spent all day not selling Ford cars (as mine did) but making up ways a homicidal clown could lure a child into a sewer grate.
That thought crossed my mind as I read an essay in The New York Times by Joe Hill—son of the world’s most-well-known horror novelist, Stephen King—on the anniversary of the release of King’s famous vampire novel, ’Salem’s Lot. Hill, now also a writer in the same genre, describes what it was like as a seven-year-old to be terrified by the television adaptation of what he then mistakenly called “Salem’s Yacht.” Along the way, he offers his thoughts on why people continue to crave stories that terrify them—whether in books or films or video games or podcasts. He writes,
People believe—want to believe—in a moral universe, a universe that confirms the existence of the human soul, a thing of incalculable worth that can be won or lost. If that heightened moral universe doesn’t exist in reality (I think it does, Richard Dawkins thinks it doesn’t, and you can form your own conclusions) then we will search for it in fiction. We don’t want to flee “’Salem’s Lot.” We want to live there.
Hill goes on to say that the reason we want such stories is because we recognize that there is evil out there and we don’t know what to do with it:
To be human is to find oneself confronted with vast, terrible forces that lack form, that can’t be fought in any literal sense, hand-to-hand, stake to heart. That doesn’t satisfy us. It’s fine if there’s evil, wickedness, cruelty. We just want it to have a point. If we’re in this fight, we want to know there’s an enemy out there—not just bad luck and grinding, impersonal historical forces. More than that, though: Once you give evil a face and fangs, once you give it agency, it becomes possible to imagine a force opposed against it, a light that can drive out shadow.
What Hill points to here is not unique to our cultural moment, a fact seen in his father’s latest project, Hansel and Gretel, which retells the old German fairy tale. Using illustrations completed decades ago by the late children’s author Maurice Sendak (author of Where the Wild Things Are), King attempts to restore the horror of the original story, tamed as it has been by our familiarity with it.
The new version reminds us of what’s most important about the original: Childhood is not merely the idyllic days of play and innocence but also something that sits on the precipice of the terrifying. The tropes in “Hansel and Gretel”—parental abandonment; starvation; being lost in the wilderness; cannibalism; the occult; and perhaps scariest of all, predatory adults masking as kind—are all there.
Sendak is the perfect choice to illustrate this story, because he recognized the root of the problem. Responding to those who thought Where the Wild Things Are was too frightening with its fanged monsters in the dark woods, Sendak argued that children know there are scary things afoot. The way for adults to calm such fears is not lying that such things don’t exist but talking about them. Honest discussions enable children to do what Sendak’s character Max did to tame the wild things: look them straight in the face.
Most seven-year-olds don’t want to see ’Salem’s Lot. That’s where the wild Kings are. But they do like “Hansel and Gretel” or some other iteration of the monster story. And most adults do too—for all the reasons Hill outlined. That ought to say something to us.
C. S. Lewis famously noted that hunger indicates there is such a thing as food. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world,” he wrote. “If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”
Maybe we want meaning and resolution—and the kind of horror we can get back into the coffin with a stake in its heart—because we do indeed live in a universe that’s a haunted house. But it’s been claimed by one whose voice causes the spirits to ask, “Have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1:24). We want the answer to be yes. And it is.
Horror stories tell us half the truth. They tell us the world is both more terrifying and more meaningful than our everyday lives allow us to see. The gospel, though, assumes the horror story and then overcomes it. That’s the difference between the two. One leaves you running from the monster. The other shows you that the monster is around you—and within you—and then gives you everything you need to overcome it. Namely, mercy that is stronger than death.
After a Church Shooting Is Not the Time to Debate with Latter-day Saints
While I was in church Sunday, I started getting text messages—including from some friends who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (some call them “Mormons,” although I think they officially reject that moniker now)—about a church shooting at a Latter-day Saints (LDS) congregation. By the time I walked out of church, several had died, and the building itself was aflame. Like most Americans, I had yet another sick feeling about this twisted time in American life. I also grieved for my LDS friends who were wondering whether their fellow church members would be targeted further for such violence.
One friend noted she had seen arguments all over social media from evangelical Christians who rightly condemned the murders but at the same time took the opportunity to post all the reasons they believe Mormonism is wrong. I tried to explain why, in the most charitable reading, those evangelicals did it that way.
Probably many wanted to show those who share their convictions why they ought to care about their LDS neighbors as neighbors even if evangelicals do not accept them as brothers and sisters in Christ. Others wanted to make sure people knew that, by expressing solidarity with their LDS neighbors as Americans, they were not intending to compromise the gospel.
I get that. But in most cases that kind of confusion doesn’t exist anyway. I have many, many Latter-day Saints friends, many of them close enough that we can have honest and very long theological debates about where we differ. One told me one time that he was offended that I wouldn’t refer to him as a Christian. I said I defined the boundaries of Christianity creedally, and the Trinity and the eternal deity of Christ are nonnegotiable for that. I pointed out to my friend that he would not say I am part of “the church.” That doesn’t offend me, because I know we are defining the church in two completely different ways.
Our friendship became stronger, not weaker, after that.
It is not rude for evangelicals to want to share the gospel with their Latter-day Saints friends or for LDS missionaries to seek to convert evangelicals to what they believe is the restored gospel. Indeed, not to have those conversations, if we really believe what we say about the stakes, would be to tell our friends we are apathetic about them spiritually. We should take every opportunity, then, to bear witness to what we believe is true.
That said, we only hinder that kind of evangelism when we choose, at a moment of murderous violence against our neighbors, to qualify everything we say about it with where we disagree with the victims. When a synagogue or a mosque is burned in my city, that ought to grieve me as an American, as a human being, and as a Christian who believes the gospel comes through faith in Christ, not coercion and threats and murder. The same is true of our Latter-day Saints neighbors.
Jesus was never bashful about his call for people to repent and believe the gospel. And yet in his wisdom he also responded to times and seasons in different ways. When he saw that the religious leaders around him wanted to argue to make political points with their audience, he refused to do it (Matt. 21:23–27).
It’s perfectly appropriate to say, “I’m not a Latter-day Saint, and I disagree with them on some really important stuff. But I love them as my neighbors, and we need to care for them right now.” That’s especially true if you think there’s some confusion about whether your statement is an endorsement of everything Joseph Smith and Brigham Young taught. That is almost never the point of confusion though.
Debate your Latter-day Saints friends and neighbors about the matters we all think are of eternal importance. But in the immediate aftermath of an act of violence against them, what they need to know is “We love you. We stand with you. This is wrong.” Full stop.
Are We Summoning Demons Through Our Machines?
On this week’s podcast, I felt like I needed to add a trigger warning. That was not because the episode talks about anything inappropriately graphic but because it gets really weird and wild. You will think, What on earth is happening here?
For years, I’ve read Paul Kingsnorth’s literary science fiction, horror novels, and collections of essays. We have always shared a common love of Wendell Berry. Kingsnorth used to be a Neopagan, though—a practitioner of Wicca. I could tell in his essays, however, that he was circling around something. He talked about feeling as though he was being called—he just didn’t know by what or whom. Sure enough, he became a Christian and joined a Romanian Orthodox Church near him in Ireland.
Having read Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, I wanted to talk to him to make sure I was reading him right. Here’s the question: What if the world’s most brilliant engineers are not just building smarter tools but opening a door to something older, darker, and more sinister?
More explicitly, what if the artificial intelligence systems ubiquitous in our devices are, in fact, a giant, interconnected Ouija board? What if artificial intelligence isn’t artificial at all? What if AI is not an invention but an invocation?
It sounds insane—until you realize the people creating these systems admit they don’t fully understand them either.
In this conversation, Kingsnorth tells me how he journeyed from witchcraft to Christian baptism; why he believes our cultural obsession with screens, sex, and selfhood is a trap; and why Christians in particular must stop treating digital technology as just another set of tools. What if it’s more than that? What if, in chasing progress, we’ve been summoning something we cannot control?
This isn’t your average hand wringing about iPhones or social media. It’s a bracing, unsettling, and oddly hopeful dialogue about how to remain human in an age increasingly hostile to humanity.
Listen in if you’ve ever wondered why AI feels less like a tool and more like a presence, how paganism and environmentalism can point toward but never satisfy our longing for God, what the “four pillars of the machine” are (and how they shape us without our consent), whether resistance to the machine is possible, and how communities of faith might embody such defiance.
Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Mark Ward from Mount Vernon, Washington, who writes that his compilation is a “Dessert Island Playlist,” which he says is no misspelling:
“Due to a clerical error, I was sent to a dessert island, a place where all the greatest delights of human culture were available,” Mark writes. “Nonetheless, I found myself listening to a dozen songs more than all others.”
Here they are:
- John Tavener, “Song for Athene” (Tenebrae): The most powerful choral piece I’ve ever heard; it rewards decades of listening.
- Arvo Pärt, “Bogoróditse Djévo” (Pro Arte Singers): A perfect little gem of a composition: joyful, moving.
- Henry Purcell, “Hear My Prayer, O Lord” (Voces8): Throws the listener immediately into the doleful and supplicant spirit of Psalm 102.
- William Harris, “Bring Us, O Lord God,” (Voces8): Even on the dessert island, pleasures are not forevermore, and we need to set our eyes on the one equal light.
- Sergei Rachmaninoff, “Glory to God in the Highest” (Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir): One moment in this piece causes dessert island residents to levitate, to fly as close to heaven as a mortal can.
- Maurice Duruflé, “Requiem” (Choir of Trinity College Cambridge): Powerful singing in a beautiful space of a masterful composition.
- Eric Whitacre, “Sleep” (Ensemble Altera): A modern composer’s most popular work, originally composed for a poem that proved to be copyrighted and therefore unavailable.
- Joseph Jennings, arr., “Glory to the Newborn King” (Chanticleer): When the Western classical tradition takes up the spiritual as interpreted and sung by a man who grew up in the black church.
- Charlie Chaplin and David Raksin, “Smile” (Ringmasters): Half the fun of this piece is the evident joy taken by the live audience. The poor quality of the recording only adds to feeling like you were there.
- Paul Caldwell and Sean Ivory, arr., “Ain’t No Grave” (Wartburg Choir): Sung with aplomb by a young and energetic choir. The silent portion is just as stirring.
- Nolan Williams Jr, “Take It to the Lord in Prayer” (The Oakwood University Aeolians): A tradition developed to perfection.
- Philip Glass, “The Grid” (Koyaanisqatsi motion picture soundtrack): Distilling Western music to its constituent elements and repeating them with minor variation to build incredible intensity.
Thank you, Mark!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“We come to throw ourselves on grace, but it is by grace that we throw ourselves on grace. Before we touch the cross, Christ has shouldered it; before we shape a prayer, Christ has prayed it. Let the prayer of Christ, let the sacrifice of Christ, placed in my baptism under the root of my heart, break upwards and displace the sunny rubbish of self-will, to become my prayer and my resolution.”
—Austin Farrer
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Catherine Conybeare, Augustine the African (Liveright)
- Stephen King and Maurice Sendak, Hansel and Gretel (HarperCollins)
- Ian McEwan, What We Can Know: A Novel (Knopf)
- Jeremy Naydler, In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness (Temple Lodge)
Join Us at Christianity Today
Founded by Billy Graham, Christianity Today is on a mission to lift up the sages and storytellers of the global church for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Subscribe now to get exclusive print and digital content, along with seasonal devotionals, special issues, and access to the full archives. Plus, you’ll be supporting this weekly conversation we have together. Or, you could give a membership to a friend, a pastor, a church member, someone you mentor, or a curious non-Christian neighbor. You can also make a tax-deductible gift that expands CT’s important voice and influence in the world.
Ask a Question or Say Hello
The Russell Moore Show podcast includes a section where we grapple with the questions you might have about life, the gospel, relationships, work, the church, spirituality, the future, a moral dilemma you’re facing, or whatever. You can send your questions to questions@russellmoore.com. I’ll never use your name—unless you tell me to—and will come up with a groan-inducing pun of a pseudonym for you.
And, of course, I would love to hear from you about anything. Send me an email at questions@russellmoore.com if you have any questions or comments about this newsletter, if there are other things you would like to see discussed here, or if you would just like to say hello.
If you have a friend who might like this, please forward it, and if you’ve gotten this from a friend, please subscribe!
Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
P.S. You can support the continued work of Christianity Today and the Public Theology Project by subscribing to CT magazine.
Moore to the Point
Join Russell Moore in thinking through the important questions of the day, along with book and music recommendations he has found formative.
Delivered free via email to subscribers weekly. Sign up for this newsletter.
You are currently subscribed as no email found. Sign up to more newsletters like this. Manage your email preferences or unsubscribe.
Christianity Today is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
“Christianity Today” and “CT” are the registered trademarks of Christianity Today International.
Copyright ©2025 Christianity Today, PO Box 788, Wheaton, IL 60187-0788
All rights reserved.