“Why would God give me the task of preaching about the hinge of all history without the heart to care about it?”
Ryan Cochran on divine hiddenness and friendship with God.
“What we must never say is that the teachings of Jesus are to be received and obeyed only within reasonable limits.”
“I’ve come to think of the diorama as a visible record of what commodity culture conceals to keep us focused on consumption, things like absence and extinction, or the grief of a wounded creation.”
“Our authors look for the traces that refuse to disappear, for moments when the fullness of the human breaks through our cultural despair, not by escaping suffering, but by bearing it in ways that transfigure the bruise of betrayal.”
“The church often does not know what to do with a believer who is enduring a season of doubt.”
“The person who believes the Christian message must believe and be able to articulate why the Christian faith is an invitation to a bigger, not smaller, world—and it must be a faith that is livable in the world.”
“I was attempting to lead our congregation through crisis while grasping for something to hold on to in my personal faith. When I most needed God to act and show his face, he remained hidden.”
Ryan Cochran on God's divine hiddenness.
“Claiming that something is true means claiming that it invites us to see the world more fully.”
Matt Burdette on enduring the cross of contradiction.
“No one enjoys being laughed at. But bearing ridicule may be the kind of foolishness that is consistent with the cross. If we can allow it, mockery can become a kind of small apocalypse.”
“The body was not owned, optimized, or disposed of at will. It was received, offered, and bound to others in love.”
“As agentic AI gains momentum, we need to identify and protect decisions that only a human conscience should make and prepare a new generation to take their moral responsibility seriously.”
“Our increasingly tenuous relationship to our physical, human bodies in the era of cyberspace and AI bears an unsettling and unmistakable resemblance to so-called gnostic heresies.”
“What we believe is bound up with how we relate to one another, and language is a major force linking the two in human psychology.”
“What is now called “cultural Christianity” was born with bien-pensant thought leaders who argued that confessing the creed was good for society, even if the mind could not authentically follow.”
“True mutuality cannot emerge when power differentials remain unaddressed or hidden beneath gestures of humility. No display of personal virtue can substitute for the structural courage required to redistribute authority.”
“What kind of world led to the creation of this technology—basic assumptions, desires, visions of the good life, and so on—and is that the kind of world we wish to live in?”
“We must reverse the social-sorting trends of the past several decades that have fuelled the rise of virtual escapism, especially among non-college-educated men. Doing so would be a social good in itself.”
“The advice was so good that I wanted someone to thank—and my very instinct in that direction is what exposed its idolatrous function.”
“The power of these models of nature lay in how they disclose the fracture within us: a yearning for communion with the natural world and the uncomfortable knowledge that we have fallen far from it.”
“None of us can keep what we call our own. Autonomy is fleeting, but dependence is common ground.”
“There is so much we will do to avoid being laughed at and so much we will avoid in order to be admired.”
comment.org/laugh-it-off/
“The more loudly we insist, “My body is mine,” the more clearly and paradoxically our fragility and dependence come into view.”
Jakob Kim on the modern fantasy of self-ownership.
“We would rather laugh than be laughed at. In the wisdom of the world, the one who has the last laugh wins, not the one who is the subject of it.”
Elizabeth Stice on how bearing ridicule well points to the wisdom of the cross.
“Living in an era that so often reduces things to their market value, it’s no surprise that we fail to perceive the created world as sacred.”
Incredibly grateful to stumble upon this fine piece from Matthew J. Milliner on @commentmagazine.bsky.social this morning. Pretty much sums up my feelings on AI to this moment precisely. comment.org/the-perfect-...
“To lose the heart is to lose the person.”
Nathan Beacom on the philosophical import of Pope Francis’s Dilexit nos.
“The heart, the understanding, is the human person in interior unity. It brings together all the faculties of a person—experience, passion, reason, desire—and sees reality in its wholeness.”
“The modern diorama transforms the royal menagerie’s desire to possess and display the world into a cooler form of representation. What was once a spectacle of imperial power becomes an ecological elegy, where nature appears serenely ordered.”
“Was it really God working through the machine? Who, or rather what, had brought me to this new place of peace?”
