The Weekend 1/31/26

January 30, 2026
January 30, 2026
CT Weekly

weekend reads

A pair of essays in Christianity Today this week resisted modern culture’s obsession with productivity and work, reminding readers that the church is called to be set apart. (Timely essays, perhaps, because so many of us in the United States were stuck at home with the world encased in ice and couldn’t quite work our regular hours this week!)

First, O. Alan Noble writes about how his wife suddenly found herself being ignored in social settings after she left the workforce to care for their children. “If people asked her questions, they were about our children,” he writes. “Her value and interest to other people was defined by her labor, even within the church.”

Instead of approaching our neighbors and new acquaintances with partiality based on work or worldly acclaim, he writes, the church should be utterly different, “propelled by the Spirit and emboldened by Jesus’s mission.” 

Also this week, Hannah Miller King described her realization that she’d been constantly obsessing over productivity, and her strategy to fight back by embracing boredom.

“I am challenging myself to welcome my own encounters with boredom as a spiritual discipline of sorts,” she writes. “In the spare moments of the day when I would typically turn to my phone for either a quick task or mindless clickbait—waiting in line at the store, sitting at a red light, even walking from the bedroom to the kitchen—I am seeking instead to be present.”

She sees how boredom is good for her own children, who naturally use lulls in the day to reconnect with God’s good creation: “They inspect icicles outside or play in a bubble bath. Sometimes they fall asleep. Their ability to receive the present moment, with all the limitations and pleasures of embodiment, convicts me. It exposes my disinterest with the world beyond my computer screen or to-do list.”

www.christianitytoday.com

Human Worth in the Attention Economy

During our children’s early years, my wife stayed at home with them, caring for them, nursing them, raising them, and homeschooling them for a year. Our children benefited immensely even…

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www.christianitytoday.com

This Winter, Be Bored

Parenting literature these days is full of encouragement to let kids be bored. In an over-scheduled world, kids need downtime. Their brains benefit from white space, which ultimately results in…

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weekend listen

On this week’s episode of The Just Life, Benjamin Watson interviews Ruth Malhotra, who advocates for “those whose voices are not being heard” in public policy. She also talks about her harrowing experience as a whistleblower after working for Ravi Zacharias International Ministries: 

“I was told to stay in my lane,” she says of raising questions internally about the apologist spending time with young women in foreign countries. She describes a saying within that old workplace: “At RZIM you’re allowed to question Jesus, but you’re not allowed to question Ravi. … It really had a chilling effect on the staff.”

Ruth Malhotra: The Woman Who Told The Truth About Ravi Zacharias

editors’ picks

Mia Staub, senior editorial project manager: My favorite coffee beans are the Mocha Java beans from Equator coffee. My whole family gets them.

Ashley Hales, editorial director, features: I got my box of Blackwing pencils in my stocking this year. Though I tend to edit onscreen, these pencils make note-taking in margins or on legal pads feel beautiful. (I once showed up to a meeting with the Design team at CT, and we each were using a different Blackwing!)

Angela Lu Fulton, international editor: We love this instant pot mojo pork taco recipe. Super simple and tasty. I’ve decided it’s my new go-to recipe for when we sign up for meal trains for church members.

PAID CONTENT FOR GLOO

Values-Aligned AI

Technology has revolutionized our world time and time again. Electricity transformed daily life, increased industrial productivity, and provided safer and more stable power for lighting, heating and cooking alike. Television…

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prayers of the people

more from CT

I Trained to Monitor ICE but Found Myself Feeding the Hungry

I sit at a friend’s kitchen table at her home in our South Minneapolis neighborhood. A vinyl tablecloth wrinkles under my notebook as we work together to make a grocery…

Young Christians Can Stay in the Black Church

If you go to a Sunday service at many Black churches, you won’t find a lot of young people there. Pew Research Center confirmed this generational gap, which has also…

Christian Devotion Does Not Undermine Christian Charity

It was a “social experiment” playing out on TikTok: A young Kentucky woman called churches asking if they’d buy formula to feed her (fictional) hungry baby. Only a handful agreed on the…

First Year of Trump 2.0 Leaves Pro-lifers with Misgivings

At the March for Life event Friday in Washington, DC, the largest annual gathering of pro-lifers, it may have seemed that all was well in the pro-life movement. Despite the…

IN THE MAGAZINE

Cover of the January / February 2026 of Christianity Today.

When Jesus taught, he used parables. The kingdom of God is like yeast, a net, a pearl. Then and today, to grasp wisdom and spiritual insight, we need the concrete. We need stories. In this issue of Christianity Today, we focus on testimony—the stories we tell, hear, and proclaim about God’s redemptive work in the world. Testimony is a personal application of the Good News. You’ll read Marvin Olasky’s testimony from Communism to Christ, Jen Wilkin’s call to biblical literacy, and a profile on the friendship between theologian Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman. In an essay on pickleball, David Zahl reminds us that play is also a testament to God’s grace. As you read, we hope you’ll apply the truths of the gospel in your own life, church, and neighborhood. May your life be a testimony to the reality of God’s kingdom.

THE WEEKEND FROM CHRISTIANITY TODAY

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