Friends of Three Things—

It has been a while since we officially shut the doors on Three Things newsletter, but we still have signups as people dig through the archives.

I (Andy) also post the occasional post to ping subscribers on updates and new projects. In that vein, I have two things to announce: a new novel and a podcast.

The Ill-Starred Knight, a fantasy novel just launched!

Does anyone remember when Phillip used to talk about sophisticated things like Bach and Paul Kingsnorth and I was like “Hey… I read this fun book about a game world and you should too”? Well, that hasn’t changed.

For the last several years, I’ve been writing a fantasy novel called The Ill-Starred Knight—and it went live today on a serial publishing site called Royal Road.

Here is the link if you want to read along.

I’ll paste the blurb below so that you can get a sense of what the story is all about. If it sounds like your cup of tea, head over to RoyalRoad.com and start reading; I’ll be posting a chapter a day for the next several months.

What is this story about?

It is sort of like “Hunger Games meets Total Recall meets Severance.”

Here is the blurb:

George’s children are in danger. He wakes in a featureless white room with no memory—and a countdown to a trial he may not survive.

He’s been dropped into a deadly game world where magic, machines, and interdimensional monsters collide. He can only level up by clicking a button… a lot… and has to earn gold to buy back his memories to learn who he is, what happened to his kids, and how he got here.

Outmatched, under-leveled, and on a clock, George has only a few advantages.

A strange, telekinetic ability lets him find, shape, and weaponize whatever he can get his hands on—scrap metal, broken tools, the environment itself.

A cheat code ability that lets him slow the world at critical moments—long enough to see patterns, make impossible decisions, and turn certain death into a narrow escape.

And in his head, a talkative, sharp-tongued AI companion—a “brain spider” named Nod—offers advice, banter, and just enough of an edge to keep him alive.

If he wants to reach his children, George won’t just have to survive, he’ll have to become something far more dangerous than anyone expects.

The Darkling Psalter Podcast

I’ve continued the project to write creative renditions of the Psalms as a part of the Darkling Psalter—and now we have a podcast. (Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Instagram.)

Here are some sample episodes if you want to dip back into this project:

All the best and much love from one half of the Three Things team.

—Andy

Welcome to Three Things.

Perhaps you’ve noticed our silence over the past few months. It’s certainly not for lack of available Things for your reading, listening and engagement. It’s simply that life has proven very full, especially for our curator (Phillip) who writes 90% of the issues and whose attempts to tap out this newsletter each month while first being a present husband, father-of-three, church leader and friend were proving very difficult indeed.

And so, after much thought, we’ve decided to put Three Things to bed.

This newsletter might emerge in some new form at a later date. If you want to know about that, there is nothing you need to do. Your contact details will remain on our list. Paid subscriptions were stopped a few weeks ago.

The following Miscellany is our way of saying Au revoir. Which, as Mary Poppins would remind you, does not mean Goodbye but ‘Til we meet again.

With sincere gratitude,
Phillip Johnston (Curator) & Andy Patton (Instigator)

Phillip spent his birthday in Cambridge this weekend at a conference on postliberalism (the good kind) called Political Economy and the Good Life. The range of speakers across disciplines and the political spectrum in the same room and getting along was striking. It felt like a front row seat to a some kind of hopeful realignment. And a seat it was, for Phillip was but a spectator and understood approximately 20% of what was said. A career in politics and academia for thee, but not for me! Thank goodness for that.

Reading: As Phillip steps back from his Curator role, he looks forward to spending less time trawling the internet for worthwhile articles and more time with quality printed material curated by others. At the moment, this means Plough Quarterly, Mere Orthodoxy, and The New Atlantis. Care to join?

On another front, two children’s book discoveries delighted Phillip while he wasn’t writing Three Things this autumn. First, the extensive oeuvre of the late Tomie dePaola. Wow, this guy did everything and Phillip has only scratched the surface. Some highlights: The Quilt Story (historical), The Baby Sister (autobiographical), The Story of the Three Wise Kings (for Epiphany), and best of all, Petook (which Phillip is saving for Easter). Used copies are dirt cheap!

Second, Babar the Elephant. NOT the Canadian TV show from the 1990s but the original six French children’s books by Jean de Brunhoff from the 1930s that “forever changed the face of the illustrated book” (according to Maurice Sendak, who ought to know). There are honestly no picture books Phillip enjoys reading more. Give me Babar over princesses any day of the week. Plus, Poulenc was a fan.

Finally, Phillip will hop back into preaching Genesis in January, opening up chapter three for a slow walk around. A new-ish resource has proven especially illuminating for the kind of teaching Phillip is doing: Genesis 1-11: A New Old Translation for Readers, Scholars and Translators by Samuel Bray and John Hobbins. If Genesis seems like old news, this will help it breathe. It’s like eight interesting commentaries, each with a different focus, condensed into one standard-size book.

Listening: This year’s seasonal music discovery is Christmas Without Words from Camerata Tchaikovsky, a rich collection of carols and popular tunes for every part of the season interspersed with extracts from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The tracks have made their way onto Phillip’s December, Advent and Christmastide playlists.

Also, the music at the re-opening of Notre Dame. Talk about resurrection!

Finally, scroll down for Andy’s recommendation of the best audiobook you’re likely to encounter in the coming year…

I would like to give a digital round of applause to the Curator of this newsletter. As my title “Instigator” indicates, I’ve been the driving force behind the marketing and infrastructure of 3T, but Phillip is the reason 2,000 people have subscribed to this newsletter over these past six years. His (impossibly) wide reading, intellectual integrity, and ability to distill large, complicated ideas into the space of a few paragraphs has blessed many, this Instigator included.

If you want to keep up with what Phillip is reading, thinking, and preaching about, you can listen to the sermons he gives to his tiny, but beautiful congregation at Hope Church in Greatham, UK.

Phillip, my friend, it has been a pleasure. Thank you for taking me up on this idea.

Now, on to the rest of the Miscellany.

The past few months have been full of reading, so here is a long round-up of the latest books blowing Andy’s hair back.

Twenty-five years after the publication of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell is revisiting the question of social epidemics in Revenge of the Tipping Point. In the intervening quarter century, Gladwell has become a one-man cottage industry of unexpected ideas. Even if you haven’t read The Tipping Point, you have probably heard the often misunderstood maxim that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to perform something at a world-class level. That idea was not original to Gladwell but has become associated with him; however, it originated in the research of Anders Ericsson (Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise). Both Ericsson’s book, Peak, and Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code, shed light on what is really going on when it comes to the famed 10,000-hour rule. Hint: if you aren’t practicing in a certain, deliberate way, the 10,000 hours don’t do it for you.

Modern people do not need help staying glued to our devices, but we do need help setting them aside. If you want some help in that effort but don’t know where to begin, here are a handful of books to steep your brain in: Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation, John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and Abraham Heschel’s classic Sabbath.

Also, check out the new round-up newsletter editions that Ekstasis has been doing. This will help fill the gaping void left in your lives in the absence of Three Things.

Marsh Moyle’s excellent book Rumours of a Better Country is out on audio now (we published an excerpt when it came our last year). Andy has heard it said that Marsh’s sentences change lives. In years of friendship he has experienced that to be true time and time again. Rumours is the fruit of long pondering on the Ten Commandments, modern culture, and what the world would be like if it was filled with the foundational beauty of righteousness. After you read it, go visit the English L’Abri, sit down in Marsh’s office, and start talking.

And, of course, we’d would be remiss if there was no mention of litRPGs in the last Miscellany…

Last year, Andy wrote a post for the Rabbit Room called “The Actual Top Five LitRPGs.” The article was about a sub-sub-genre of fantasy literature that features stories set in game worlds or involving game dynamics. For some bizarre reason, it has become one of the most-viewed articles in the history of the Rabbit Room. Andy does not know why. There is nothing about litRPGs that suggests mass appeal. When people find out that Andy reads these books, their most common reaction is, “Sorry… what?” These books are as nerd-niche as it gets. What could explain the popularity of this post? Is it a case of the universal captured in the particular? Probably not. Is it some weird quirk of Google’s search algorithm? Most likely. However, on the off chance there is a teeming sleeper community of litRPG fans out there who care about what Andy’s top picks are, he now offers five more recommendations of the best stories out there. Here you go… all the leveling-up, dungeon delving, and interdimensional portaling you can shake a level 40 Abyssal Longsword at:

• Primal Hunter by Zogarth

• The Prince Has No Pants by Matthew Howry

• Quest Academy by Brian J. Nordon

• Jake’s Magical Market by J. R. Matthews

• Iron Prince by Bryce O’Connor

And with that, we’ll say goodbye for now.

Welcome to Three Things.

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

Phillip turned on Neil Diamond’s “America” first thing on Monday morning. The girls jumped up and down, dancing around the living room because this was indeed the day they were coming to America (“Today!”). Hours later, faced with the longest border security line imaginable on the other side of the Atlantic, the same children were itching to go back to their beds in the land of hope and glory. But jet lag is nearly gone now and today the Johnstons take to the highway for Michigan, Nashville and Asheville. Oh, the brutal joy of family travel.

Reading: Science and faith questions hold little interest for Phillip, but now that Genesis 2-3 is on the preaching horizon, he’s slipped down the historical Adam rabbit hole. William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam seems like the new standard evangelical work and, thankfully, he’s written a summary for mere mortals. Phillip was rather astonished and not a little uncomfortable when the quest led to a hard bite on the evolutionary pill. As a rejoinder, he’s reading Hans Madueme’s Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenges of Evolution and the Natural Sciences which is, according to one of its critics, “the most erudite and theologically sophisticated defense of ‘young earth creationism’ that I have read.” While Phillip is similarly astonished and not a little uncomfortable with biting so hard on the literalistic pill, he finds Madueme’s principle of “scientific fallibility” most needed in the discussion and worthy of emphasis.

Listening: Phillip arrived at the exodus in morning learning time recently. The children’s Bible mentioned that Miriam led the women in song on the far side of the Red Sea and the girls wanted to hear the song. Luckily, Handel captured it for posterity in 1739 and they were into it.

Also, Phillip loved this episode of Honestly called Kamala Harris and the Election of Laughter and Forgetting and thinks it should be preserved as a time capsule of this summer’s political madness. Listen, and then listen again.

Andy feels sorry for people who do not read fantasy and science fiction due to the simple fact that most non-genre stories span only one volume, whereas, a characteristic of fantasy is that its stories are often measured not in pages but in cubic feet of shelf space. Sure, you might read Brothers Karamazov and find in it an entire universe teeming with rich life, but that universe is bounded by the first and last page of a single book. Sad.

However, in the world of fantasy, if a story has only one book—with rare exceptions—it is nearly an orphan. Readers wonder why they have not been furnished with the subsequent seven volumes to which they have become accustomed. Maybe the author died…?

When one is lucky enough to stumble upon one of the great series as it is being written, one enters into a relationship that could span decades, as untold millions of fans experienced with the Harry Potter series and untold thousands are experiencing even now with the Harry Dresden series. Andy numbers these Harrys among his true friends, and, were it not for the good sense of his wife, would have named his firstborn son after them. Two Harrys, one stone.

All this is simply to raise a digital glass to those hardworking, underpraised authors of his favorite ongoing genre stories: Matt Dinniman, Pierce Brown, Jim Butcher, Zogarth, and so many others. Keep the stories coming.

Listening: Andy spends most of his day facing his computer screen and thus, listens to a lot of music. Follow his recent playlist breadcrumbs here and here. Recent artists of note: Rachel Chinouriri, Young Jesus, and Kinnship.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s Psalm project):

• Psalm 18—Every naked thought crisped in the lightning light.

• Psalm 20—We will know the silent sky can speak, and holy heaven ring like struck bells.

The Wager Stone: Read along with Andy’s fantasy/sci-fi novel about a broken man whose search for his family leads him, of all places, into a game world. Once inside, he loses all of his memories, and his body is invaded by a loveable but snarky brain spider. Hilarity, antics, and deadly peril ensue.

Welcome to Three Things.

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

“It is Finished!” A Poet’s Epiphany Before a Painting

Ben Palpant interviews Li-Young Lee

Author Ben Palpant has been interviewing well-known poets of faith all year on the Rabbit Room’s poetry Substack. When he scheduled an interview with renowned poet Li-Young Lee, he didn’t know that the conversation would happen just after a significant spiritual moment in Lee’s life.

Days prior, Lee visited the Ontario Museum of Art and had an epiphany while sitting in front of a 17th-century painting called “Saint Paul the Hermit.” He said, “It unseated me… It agitated and troubled me so much that it's all I can think about right now. I'm not even sure I'm capable of conversation; I'm just so distracted.”

Lee continued:

“In [the painting], there's so much darkness descending on Paul. So much darkness, Ben. I mean, his robe is falling away from his frail body. At the top, there's a raven's head with a morsel of bread in its beak, and Paul is straining up to that bread, straining into that darkness. It's a darkness full of news."

"What kind of news?" Ben asked.

"I don't know," he says. "Ultimately, news that's profound and great, news we've forgotten, news we can barely believe. When I saw that painting, I just had to stand beneath it. I thought: it is finished. I don't know why that phrase came to me, but that's all I could think about. It is finished. I felt this ecstatic thing, this realization that it really is finished. I'm just standing in the wake…

Everything has changed for me. You catch me at a moment of crisis, Ben. I don't know that I can write the poems I've been writing all these years. In fact, I know I can't. I've been writing poems as if I was living before ‘it is finished.’ It's hard to catch up, to awaken to the reality that it is finished. I've been lagging behind. What do I write now?"

Read the rest of this remarkable conversation over at .

Confronting the President

Daniel Silliman on the pastor who called out Richard Nixon

As the fusion of Christianity with partisan politics continues to reach ludicrous new heights in the United States, here is a blast from the past.

The only United States president ever forced to resign is Richard Nixon. To gain an unfair advantage in the 1972 election, Nixon’s administration broke into the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C. to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters housed there. It didn’t go as planned.

Before and after the scandal, Nixon was surrounded by religious leaders of all stripes. Each of these leaders walked on tiptoe around Nixon, even Billy Graham. As Daniel Silliman writes,

Nixon organized worship services in the White House instead of going to a church in the nation’s capital like his predecessors. The ministers who came and preached had the opportunity to say something convicting, to speak up. Instead, again and again, they hesitated.

They would show deference, speak in abstractions, and often indulge in a bit of flattery—after all, they felt flattered themselves to be invited to preach in the White House. They would sometimes draft sermons with tough language but then tone it down.

There was one exception. From an early age, John Huffman was a Nixon fanboy. Despite his political ambitions, Huffman eventually took up Christian ministry. His first gig involved manning the high-profile “side door” at an influential American church. This is where Huffman first met Nixon.

When Huffman took up his first pastorate in Florida, Nixon began attending the church on vacation. After Watergate broke out, a banker at Huffman’s church advised the pastor to be quiet in Nixon’s presence regarding the scandal. Huffman didn’t mention Watergate in his sermon, but he did preach from Paul’s words to Agrippa in Acts 26:26: “The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner.”

To read what happened and to glimpse Huffman’s motivations, read He Told Richard Nixon to Confess over at Christianity Today. For more on Nixon’s religious struggle, check out Daniel Silliman’s new book One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon's Search for Salvation.

Naming is an Act of Love

Hadden Turner on calling things by their name

Preaching through Genesis 1 recently, I (Phillip) needed a clear description of what it means for human beings to have dominion (or rule) over creation. With the help of better thinkers, this was the result: Dominion is our human capacity to take hold of the world to form what is formless and fill what is empty, in communion with God and for the good of creation. This is the call given to God’s image bearers in Genesis 1.

In Genesis 2, we find the first example of dominion-in action as Adam forms names for the animals and fills the world with words. In this, Adam is imaging God, who named his first creature day and his second creature night.

Naming is a central human task. As Hadden Turner writes,

Parents name their children, a founder names her company, a craftsman names his product. All have the authority to name, and this authority is an expression of rule. The named doesn’t get to choose its own name. Likewise, Adam had a God-given delegated authority over the rest of creation, and with that authority came the extraordinary privilege to name what came before him – extraordinary in the sense that the Maker delegated his own right to name his creation to humankind. Only one creature was named by God – Adam himself – a mark of his own submission to his Maker.

It isn’t a matter of pure domination. God was giving Adam an opportunity to care for what he had dominion over. To name something is an act of love. Done rightly, naming bestows value, dignity, and an identity on what is named. It is attentive, recognizing the nature of the thing. This is why improper naming is so wrong. Calling a human by a string of numbers or a slur dehumanizes and causes offense. Referring to a species as a pest or a weed will mean it is always viewed as an enemy. Naming creation is therefore a task that involves skill, knowledge, and wisdom – attributes that rely on relationship and careful observation. It is no simple task. It is, instead, a great and profound responsibility.

Unlike Adam, we haven’t been given the responsibility of naming the animals. But if naming is an act of love, we cultivate our own dominion by learning to call creatures by their names. It is a godly—and God-like—task.

Read Naming Creatures over at Plough. For more from , check out his Substack named .

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

Subscribe now

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

Ah, the English summer. July days full of rain with temps in the upper 50s Fahrenheit. Phillip hasn’t even ascended the attic ladder to retrieve the fans. Positively, this means he can still wear his favourite winter flannel most mornings and evenings. Negatively, Phillip and family are now primed for a rude awakening when they return to America for three weeks in late August for a taste of sweltering Pennsylvania, Michigan and Tennessee heat.

Reading: Weather notwithstanding, it’s time for summer novels. Phillip is nearly finished with Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse and will quickly advance to The Whalebone Theatre afterward. On the nonfiction front, he and Christa just finished reading David Gibson’s The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host in the mornings before the girls wake up. A beautiful, rich, compact meditation that makes the familiar strange, new and compelling.

In his own attempt to make the familiar strange each week, Phillip recently finished a five-week preaching stretch on the image of God. A study highlight was Christopher Kou’s article God’s Statue in the Cosmic Temple—a bravura deep dive worthy of an entire book! Kou traces out the difference between image and likeness, offers a clarifying challenge to the “divine council” view of “Let us make the man in our image…” (Genesis 1:26), sketches a biblical theology of the image of God and, drawing on Irenaeus, puts forward a systematic treatment of Christ as the image of God that Phillip is only beginning to understand. So many depths to plumb!

Listening: Phillip’s home group is doing the Practicing the Way Course based on John Mark Comer’s new book of the same title. If you can abide by the West Coast coolness of the presenters and stay alert amidst the womb-y aesthetic, you’ll find a gentle, compelling, and deeply challenging framework for life with Jesus that goes beyond the 5 Mores of evangelicalism and offers immediate steps to take. Highly recommended for any and all church groups! (And, if you do the course, make sure to order copies of the companion guide and think about taking two weeks for each session. Watch the video one week, and debrief the practice the following week.)

Andy and family are beating the St. Louis heat in northern Michigan this week. Highlights have included summiting Sleeping Bear Dunes, the case of the mysterious engine coolant leak, the sleepy, quiet towns of Cherry Country, the bobcat prowling in the backyard, and those sweet, sweet 68-degree temps.

Reading: Fans of this newsletter will remember that 18-month period when Andy was reading the Realm of the Elderlings series. Robin Hobb’s 16-book masterpiece is one of the greatest works of fantasy ever written—and most people haven’t read it. It doesn’t get as much play as LOTR, but True Believers know it for the immortal diamond that it is. Well, Andy has fallen into the sprawling, heart-rending story again, much akin to a man who has fallen sick with a chronic disease for which there is no treatment. There is nothing for it now. The only way out is through. He will see you on the other side. (He solemnly swears that this is the only time he will mention the series in this newsletter for a period of at least five years.)

In other news, Andy is currently reading books in preparation for a lecture on how to be more creative for Christianity Today’s NextGen Accelerator. On his nightstand are the works of Malcolm Gladwell, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Daniel Coyle’s Culture Code, and Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull.

Games: The Werewolf in the Dark crowdfunding campaign went very well, thanks in part to the legions of Three Things readers who pledged for the game. Good on you. 3T strong.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s Psalm project):

• Why a Rendition Isn’t a Translation + an audio lecture on how we got the New Testament.

• Psalms 50, 75, 91, 100, 110, 140, 43, 27, 66, 63, 4, and 5.

Last But Not Least

Andy has started yet another Substack. This one is a serialized fantasy novel called The Wager Stone. If you’ve been around long enough to remember the “Robin Hobb days,” you may also remember the “LitRPG days” that lasted approximately from 2019 to… today and forever.

LitRPGs are a sub-sub-sub-genre in the fantasy family that features stories set in a game world with game dynamics. As with most things that appear in this newsletter, they are esoteric. If you are new to the genre, here are my top five picks and a general introduction to this very specific genre.

Here is a disclaimer before you begin. Neither this story nor the genre of which it is a part are for everybody. If you have ever enjoyed a game of Dungeons & Dragons, have enjoyed playing this game, know of the existence of RoyalRoad.com, or who could define the terms min/maxing, buff, nerf, OP, DM, OOC, PVP, murder hobo, or Leeroy Jenkins… then by all means, read the story.

All others, enter at your own risk. You have been warned.

Welcome to Three Things.

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

Imagined Countries and Our True Home

Tara Isabella Burton on Narnia and Middle Earth

Why do so many of us continue returning to Narnia and Middle Earth? Of course, there is the enchantment of entering a deftly crafted secondary world, but Tara Isabella Burton argues that it is a particular kind of enchantment that grabs us. It is an enchantment of particularity: "magic and myth that is rooted not just in a generic Jungian world story but rather in the specific meaning of this tree, of that root or leaf, of the story of this village."

The particularities of these worlds evoke the British past—and they do so in a markedly different fashion than another fairy tale that was gaining ground in Tolkien and Lewis’ day: Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, a vast saga of national greatness “that reached its apotheosis in the Third Reich’s fetishization of blood, soil, and soldiers’ glory.”

That’s not Narnia. As Burton writes, 

Nobody, in Narnia, fights for glory, or for grandeur, or for Greatness. They fight for Narnia—and they fight for each other. They fight so that they can go home and sleep in warm beds and eat food far more wholesome than any boarding school will ever serve. …

Lewis knows, as I think we all know, that although our love of country, of our own places, helps us understand something vital, it also illuminates what we’re missing. We are all, for Lewis, wayfaring strangers, whose country is not the place where we were born or whose passport we hold, but God’s own land, the Narnia beyond Narnia. And our love of home is also always a homesickness for that place beyond the place we remember. To love Narnia is to love real-life England, but it is also no less important to love the country Narnia points to and at the end of the Last Battle collapses into Aslan’s own country.

Read on Narnia at The Line of Beauty. For more from Tara Isabella Burton, check out her important book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. It was our summer book club choice last year.

Choosing Not to Choose

Matthew Franck on the 2024 election

We don’t want to tell you who to vote for. But we do want to reassure you, with all the resources we can muster, that you do not have to choose from the two options you’re likely to find on the 2024 US election ballot.

To the choir, we’ll add the voice of Matthew Franck. He’s a lifelong conservative who writes over at The Dispatch. Back in 2016, Franck wrote about not voting for either Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton. He’s now back with more of the same:

Trump’s signature qualities were incompetence and recklessness, constrained to positive effect only by Congress, the courts, and many of his own appointees. Then he did his utmost, up until the evening of January 6, to steal the election from Joe Biden. A second term for Trump would be a four-year master class in indecency and mendacity, strongly inflected by an urge to authoritarianism that may sorely test our civic institutions. 

Biden, as all can see, is showing many of the weaknesses of his advanced years (though here, Trump appears in better shape only by comparison). Never a strongly principled man even in his prime, Biden has long enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a “moderate” Democrat because he is a trimmer. Now his sails are trimmed to capture the wind that blows from his party’s hard left.

But why not vote for “the lesser of two evils”, whoever you deem that to be? Franck expresses it well:

For at the end of the day, that is what voting is: a kind of investment. Not of our money, but of ourselves—our will, our intention, our passion, and our conscience. Of course, our investment can be a light matter to us, if we cast our vote in a throwaway mood, thinking “better this guy than the other guy.” Then we might cut our emotional losses when he disappoints us. “Live and learn.” Yet paradoxically, if it took a great effort to “screw your courage to the sticking place,” as Lady Macbeth put it—if, that is, you had to swallow hard to vote for a candidate, and he won—you may find your investment in him very heavy, and your felt need to defend him equally so.

Read Choosing Not to Choose over at The Dispatch.

Redemptive AI?

Andy Crouch on repairing and redeeming artificial intelligence

We’ve pointed you toward some hot takes on artificial intelligence over the past few years and I (Phillip) stand by them. But AI isn’t going anywhere. It is as consequential a development as agriculture, electricity, or the Internet. 

Can AI, like those developments, be harnessed for good? The question requires a few deep breaths to keep fools from rushing in. But with ample caution in place, and from the foundation of a Christian understanding of human beings as image-bearers of God captive to deception and living in a very good and very distorted world, Andy Crouch jumps in:

Like the Internet, electricity, and agriculture, AI is a general-purpose technology that can be harnessed to many ends. Redemptive entrepreneurs can lead the way in demonstrating that AI can be deployed—in fact, is best deployed—in ways that dethrone pride, magic, and Mammon and that elevate the dignity of human beings and their capacity to flourish as image bearers in the world.

What might this look like? Crouch provides six “redemptive directions” for the technology, with examples for each:

1. Redemptive AI will inform but not replace human agency. 

2. Redemptive AI will develop rather than diminish human cognitive capacity and extend rather than replace education. 

3. Redemptive AI will respect and advance human embodiment. 

4. Redemptive AI will serve personal relationships rather than replace them. 

5. Redemptive AI will restore trust in human institutions by protecting privacy and advancing transparency.

6. Redemptive AI will benefit the global majority rather than enrich and entrench a narrow minority.

Read A Redemptive Thesis for Artificial Intelligence over at Praxis. For more from Andy Crouch, check out his brilliant book The Life We’re Looking For.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

Subscribe now

Welcome to Three Things.

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

The Johnstons are excited about going on holiday to the Lake District with friends soon. But ask N (age 5) and L (age 2) what their favourite place is and they will simply say The Hall. And by that they mean the musty old church building rented by the church Phillip works for. On rainy afternoons (there are many) when the hall is unoccupied, Philip takes them to the Hall for an hour to run riot through the empty building, playing monster and hide and seek. Now, whenever Phillip goes to The Hall simply to get some work done, the girls, assuming daddy plays hide and seek all day, ask to come along.

Reading: Phillip has been camped out in the earlier chapters of Genesis. It’s been useful to take things slow and to focus on a single idea or concept each week in preaching. For instance, rather than flying through the creation of humankind in the image of God in 1:26-28, he’s focusing on three aspects of the image. The first is dignity, so he’s picked up Charles Camosy’s book Losing Our Dignity: How Secularised Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality. Through multiple case studies, Camosy shows how the status of personhood in the modern world is increasingly reserved for individuals who are autonomous, self-aware, productive, and rational (podcast interview here). This rejection of equal dignity, rooted in Genesis, returns us to the pre-Christian ethic of the strong deciding the moral and legal status of the weak. Genesis really is revolutionary stuff.

Listening: Though he’s never prommed in any sense, Phillip would love to join to the queue to hear The Aurora Orchestra play Beethoven’s Ninth from memory in August. What a feat! Hearing the piece by surprise on the radio the other day reminded him of that summer in the early noughties where Solti’s Ninth was the only thing he listened to on the minivan CD player. Also, the oboist Albrecht Mayer recently released an album titled Bach Generations where he plays the work of not one but four members of the Bach family. It’s not just for nerds, however. Mayer’s playing reminds Phillip of why he wanted to play the oboe as a kid. If this is what you could eventually get out of it, who wouldn’t?!

Before Andy was the lowly Instigator of Three Things Newsletter, he was a game designer. In the winter of 2019, Andy sold a game called Werewolf in the Dark to a game company. He tends to make games that involve lying, alliance-breaking, and being socially sneaky (but all in good, mutually edifying fun) and most of Andy’s games require a lot of people to play. That was all well and good in the winter of 2019, however, you may recall that spring 2020 had a little thing called COVID-19 in store. To say the least, it was not the best time to release a new game that involved a bunch of people bumping into each other in the dark.

But now the time has come and the crowdfunding campaign for Werewolf in the Dark is upon us. If you’re new to this whole “social-deduction, party game” business, here is a review of the game.

Reading: Andy’s children have brought some new gems into his reading life: Investigators (They’re alligators. They are investigators. They wear vests. Hilarity ensues) and the Lightfall series (fans of Narnia will enjoy these action-packed graphic novels).

Andy was recently asked by two friends to list resources for people who are just getting into poetry and want to read more. His answer was:

• The Rabbit Room poetry Substack (new and beloved poems emailed to you almost every day)

• This must-read book on an introduction to poetic forms.

• The Poetry For All podcast by Abram van Engen and Joanne Diaz

• The Poetry Unbound podcast by Pádraig Ó Tuama.

Listening: Andy recently heard a sermon on how Solomon’s wisdom was also evident in his knowledge of the natural world. People came to Solomon from all over the world to hear about “animals and birds, reptiles and fish.” (1 Kings 4: 29-34) And it reminded him of a wonderful book called The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea. Phillip Hoare isn’t Solomon, but reading this book sure felt like soaking up someone who had studied the Lord’s world […and I dedicate this pun to Phillip Johnston] in depth.

New from Pattern Bible (studies on the biblical theme of water):

• Baptism and the Waters of Transformation.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project):

• Psalms of Ascents—Complete

• Psalm 54—He will not leave me alone, stranded, strangled, and caught.

• Psalm 114—The sea saw them and fled. The Jordan held itself still.

• And this song based on Psalm 73 from Becca Jordan. Beautiful song, Becca!

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

Transgender Meds for Kids?

Rebecca McLaughlin and others on the Cass Review

Four years ago, the National Health Service of the United Kingdom commissioned Dr Hilary Cass, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, to conduct “the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken.” Last month, in a 388-page report, the Cass Review was released to the public. 

The result is, in the words The Economist, a “damning of practices that were commonplace in England until recently and remain widespread in other countries, notably America.” The articles linked above from secular news sources offer lucid summaries. You can also listen to Dr. Cass discuss her findings in this recent interview for NPR’s On Point.

Over at The Keller Center, Rebecca McLaughlin shows how the Cass Review uses reason and evidence to discredit four widely believed claims. Here they are, each followed by a quotation from the final report:

1. Adolescent gender dysphoria does not predict adult identification. Gender dysphoria in childhood “is not reliably predictive of whether that young person will have longstanding gender incongruence in the future, or whether medical intervention will be the best option for them” (29).

2. Puberty blockers don’t merely ‘buy time to think.’ On the contrary, the review found that “bone density is compromised during puberty suppression” and that there was “insufficient/inconsistent evidence about the effects of puberty suppression on psychological or psychosocial wellbeing, cognitive development, cardio-metabolic risk or fertility” (32). 

3. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are not ‘life-saving’ medicines. The review draws from multiple studies to show that even though “the suicide rate in the gender-referred youth was higher than in the general population, this difference leveled out when specialist-level mental health treatment was taken into account” (96).

4. The exponential rise in trans identity is not explained by greater societal acceptance. Echoing many of Jonathan Haidt’s findings in The Anxious Generation, the Cass Review says, “The increase in presentations to gender clinics has to some degree paralleled this deterioration in child and adolescent mental health” that began between 2009-2014 (111).

Read Transgender Meds for Kids? 4 Findings from New Report over at The Keller Center.

Not All Sins Are Equal

Myles Werntz on how particular wrongs require particular remedies

Christianity is full of paradoxes. One of the more difficult tensions to hold, writes ethicist Myles Werntz, is this one: “All sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally.” Here’s an on-the-ground example:

There is a great deal of energy currently devoted to the matter of sexism in American churches. We should not hide the fact that the sin of sexism has done real damage within the church, but how we name that damage makes a great deal of difference.

As the accounting for these wrongs has begun, many discussions have bundled very different sins, lumping together anything from sexually abusive ministers to interpersonal biases. Every sin causes damage and requires repair, but common sense alone tells us these sins are meaningfully different.

If we’re able to hold the tension—that all sins ruin us, and yet not all sins ruin us equally—we will be in a better place to understand the truth that “God knows each of us by name, knows our particular sins, and knows the particular virtues we need to recover from those sins.”

Read Particular Wrongs Need Particular Remedies over at Christianity Today. It’s the fruit of much reflection by Myles Werntz on how Christians should conceptualise and categorise harm. See the longer treatment here (part 1), here (part 2), and here (part 3) at Christian Ethics in the Wild.

Why America Can’t Come Together

James Davison Hunter on democracy and solidarity

There are countless explanations on offer for how the United States came to a place where it is known primarily for its political polarisation, outrage, anger, and authoritarian power grabs. But when the sociologist who coined the term “culture war” in 1991 offers his own explanation, it’s time to listen in.

James Davison Hunter recently published Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. From his longstanding perch at the University of Virginia, Hunter suggests that the deepest problems for America are cultural, not political. Crisis will not be averted through “political will and smart public policy.” What we need is solidarity. 

Solidarity isn’t about the willingness to come together, Hunter says. It’s about the possibility of coming together. America simply does not have the cultural resources right now to make coming together possible. Hunter explains it like this:

The United States has experienced periods of deep antagonism. From the beginning, there was a fierce debate between Federalists and Republican Democrats, and then during the Jacksonian era, the 1850s and the Civil War. But the protagonists shared an agreement on the implicit order of things. … After the great recession of 2008-2009, this is no longer the case. On both the left and the right, it is now heard that the Enlightenment philosophy, which served as the basis for dealing democratically with differences, must be rejected. It is replaced by an alternative cultural logic, fundamentally Nietzschean, which is at the heart of identity politics: it is rooted in the narratives of wounds that feed it, and which invariably lead to a kind of revenge ethic. This leads to a competing will to power that makes it impossible to talk to one’s opponent. The other side becomes the representative of another disgusting culture: its members are not even American.

What does this mean for the future of America? Hunter’s prediction is grim but realistic:

Formal democracy will endure, but it will mask a confrontation punctuated by acts of violence. If we can no longer talk to each other, and if solidarity cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed undemocratically, because no social order can function without some notion of a shared understanding of what binds people together. The potential for violence is present on all sides. Because the progressives have the advantage in the long run, we will see it more on the side of the conservatives, who are the losers, but the will is there on both sides.

Read more in this interview. For a brief summary of Democracy and Solidarity from a Christian point of view, check out this review. The book is published by Yale University Press, which is running a 50% off with free shipping sale until May 17 if you use the code Y24SAVE50.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

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Welcome to Three Things.

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

Walking through town a few months ago, Phillip overheard an older woman complain about the size of hardback novels these days. Eager to read the new doorstop by her favourite mystery writer, the woman exclaimed to her friend, “But I have to wait for the paperback because it just hurts me’ wrists!” Since then, Phillip’s appreciation for small, hand-sized hardbacks has increased. Sadly, they don’t make them as they once did.

Reading: And yet, Phillip recently found a little 1946 printing of the Collected Papers of Evelyn Underhill, a twentieth-century spiritual writer whom he has never read before. Easy on the wrists and expansive for the spirit. Consider this bit from a 1931 address called “The Inside of Life”:

The real modern dilemma is how we are going to reconcile the sort of truth declared in The Mysterious Universe with the sort of truth declared in “Hark! the herald angels sing.” One series of truths belongs to life's outside—the other series belongs to life's inside. And to be a complete human being means to be in touch with both those worlds. The vast world of nature, stern and entrancing, where we are learning to spell out more and more of the poetry of God's creative thought: and the more vast, more stern, more entrancing world of spiritual experience, which alone gives meaning to that marvellous outer scene.

Harder on the wrists is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, but his case that the tidal wave of mental illness visited upon Gen Z is rooted in a “Great Rewiring of Childhood” via safetyism, smartphones, and social media (rather than in racism, economic hardship, or the 2008 crash) seems watertight.

Watching: Phillip and Christa caught The Taste of Things at the cinema with a friend a few weeks ago. Food films are always a gamble, but the story of Dodin and Eugenie’s twenty-year relationship in the kitchen is a new favourite. Reviewers certainly have reasons for describing the film with silly phrases like “food porn”, but they miss what the movie evokes about the perpetual human longing for beauty. Beauty that is still worth pursuing even when the longing is never satisfied. It’s a mini “philosophy of pleasure” that is a pleasure in its own right. What a treat.

Reading: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg is required reading for those who want to communicate better. Duhigg studies people who seem to have a way of listening that makes others feel at ease and a way of communicating paves the way for understanding. Read it along with The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle and How To Know A Person by David Brooks.

The kids and I have had a great time reading Usborne’s 100 Things to Know About the Unknown. I’ve never read a book that makes me say, “No way… really?” as often. For instance, do you know about Graham’s Number? It is a number so big that if you wrote every digit no larger than a grain of rice, the universe still would not be big enough to write it. They don’t know much about it, but they do know it ends in 7. It is a crazy world out there, folks.

I’m a sucker for a good post-apocalyptic tale. Here are a few I’ve been reading lately: Seveneves, The Last Policeman, 2034, The Last, and the (that’s right) Shopocalpyse saga.

Teaching: Deconversion Part 2 at English L’Abri.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project):

• Psalm 119—The Complete Rendition

• Psalm 120—Give the wicked gifts as sharp as arrows

• Psalm 122—May all brothers and friends live at peace

• Psalm 124—They would have swallowed us alive

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

Goodness is More Interesting Than Patriarchy

Kirsten Sanders on The Women Are Up To Something

Four women born between the First and Second World Wars dared to look at the horrors of the twentieth century and think relentlessly about goodness. They did this in the philosophy departments of Oxford University. Challenging their male colleagues at nearly every turn, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgely reinvigorated a field called virtue ethics. The key question for these women was, What sort of persons should we be and how should we live?

In reviewing a recent book about them, theologian Kirsten Sanders highlights what they were not interested in: 

It is quite interesting that the women of Oxford find patriarchy so uninteresting. These women were able to focus their lives on truth telling without speaking much at all about their experience of being women, and with nearly no reflection on any systems that inhibited their truthtelling.

They were seldom interested in power. Of course they stewarded the power that they had as they filled the chairs to which they were assigned, but “power” as an abstract concept seemed uninteresting to them. What was more interesting was agency, which each of them did indeed have.

Sanders’ reflection on “the women of Oxford” is filled with details about their particular lives, choices and answers to the question of goodness. As a theologian, however, Sanders returns to what this quartet of philosophers might be able to teach us about the life of the church today.

What recent focus on “patriarchy” attempts to demonstrate are the ways that the "tradition" or "church practice" is stacked against women's involvement in the maintenance and repair of the local church or local institutions. But such accounts of patriarchy demonstrate little curiosity about a) the way individual women navigate these things and b) whether patriarchy is an adequate definition (and what it precisely means).

This view to the prevalence and all-encompassing effects of patriarchy does indeed seem to be the conclusion of many recent books on the topic. Whether or not such an evaluation is descriptively adequate, what such a definition lacks is any interest in virtue and the irreducibly particular forms it takes in the individual lives of women. Where virtue and the impressionistic creativity that it demands brings to the table is a consideration of real life, and only real lives can be good or holy ones.

Read The Women Were Up to Something over at In Particular. The book about the women of Oxford is The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics.

Stop Talking About “Christian Nationalism”

Michael Wear on what it really is

We need to stop talking about “Christian Nationalism”. It has become a meaningless, pejorative term that obscures more than clarifies. “The problem with what is being referred to as Christian Nationalism is not that it’s too Christian or that it is too pro-America,” writes Michael Wear, “but that it is neither.”

What we do need to start talking about, Wear suggests, is Political Therapeutic Deism:

Political Therapeutic Deism is a system of beliefs which invoke religious terms for the purposes of affirming one’s politics. It includes beliefs like:

1. God is on my political party’s side.

2. My views on political issues are a leading indicator that I am a true Christian.

3. My actions in politics are justified in light of God’s general approval of my politics.

4. I do not understand how other “Christians” could vote for my candidate’s opponent.

5. It is clear and obvious which political issues are most important to God.

Political Therapeutic Deism makes sense of why we’re seeing sorting in churches by politics, over and above theology or other factors. It makes sense of why we’ve seen steep declines of religious affiliation among Democrats over the last several decades, and why growing numbers of Trump supporters identify as evangelical, even if they don’t share evangelicals’ theological beliefs. It makes sense of political scientist Michele Margolis’s contention that politics shapes our social identities and that partisan forces are responsible for shaping religious divides along partisan lines. 

Read Political Therapeutic Deism at Mere Orthodoxy for further help in questioning an unhelpful concept. For more from Michael Wear, check out his book The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.

Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet

Ted Goia and Michael Sacasas on “Dopamine Culture”

“The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction.”

So wrote cultural historian Ted Goia in a February post that nearly broke Substack. He went on:

Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.

This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity.

We sometimes call it doomscrolling; Goia calls is TikTok depression, Silicon Valley zombification and, most notably, Dopamine Culture. It makes tech companies rich, but users pay the price. As Goia writes, “Some companies get people hooked with pills and needles. Others with apps and algorithms. But either way, it’s just churning out junkies.”

Or, in visual form:

Goia’s post resonated with over 5,000 users who liked it and is still generating discussion. But tech writer suggests that the dopamine and addiction framing might be inadequate and counterproductive. It potentially paints us as “hapless individuals at the mercy of large tech companies” when what really might be going on is much deeper. For instance:

• We can’t envision life beyond our devices. Our “addictions” might actually be compulsions borne of a “poverty of concepts.” What might happen, for example, if we took regular walks without them?

• The problem isn’t just with tech companies. The problem is the perennial human tendency to resist solitude and turn away from “duties, responsibilities, and obligations we ought to be more vigorously pursuing.”

• Even deeper, when we scroll we are not simply machines searching for pleasurable inputs. We are human creatures enacting an inbuilt longing to know and to be known. But our devices “discourage the labor that would transform information into knowledge and connection into relationship.”

• All of this combined with the reality that we live in a cultural situation where it is increasingly taboo to say No to anything.

Read Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet over at for a fuller exploration of these themes. For an accessible Christian treatment, see Andy Crouch’s brilliant book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

Subscribe now

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

Women apparently do not think about food amidst the travails of labour. Husbands, however, do. Midway through the process just a little under a month ago, in a moment of quiet desperation, Phillip walked very fast to the hospital cafe for a sneaky steak slice. There and back again in fifteen minutes and sustained by mediocre filled pastry, he returned in time to welcome a third Johnston daughter into the world.

Reading: It is always a delight to discover a writer who makes you laugh. For Phillip, that’s been Jess Pan, author of Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come: One Introvert's Year of Saying Yes. He’s been listening to the audiobook, but the true delight is It’ll Be Fun, They Said, her Substack about working in a small London bookshop. Sorry I'm Late - my friend has a hot husband had Phillip and Christa in stitches a few nights ago.

On a more serious note, Phillip picked up Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis. It is filled with gems like this:

The very remarkable belief of these ancient Hebrews that God loved the world and valued humankind persisted among them through every difficulty. It gave them the conception of time as open-ended from a mortal point of view but utterly purposive, shaped by a divine intention for which a thousand years are like a day when it is past. Time is implicated in the idea of covenant or promise. Destiny will be fulfilled, loyalty will be maintained, into a future unlike all the misery and happiness that must intervene between now and then. Within this great certainty little can be assumed.

Listening: Phillip recently felt indicted by musicologist John Ahern’s Alienated Man’s Guide to Modern Music, especially his indictment of classical music lovers as people “swung up and down, up and down, pitilessly, between the kick of disappointing reality and the snare of an evaporated past. Though he cannot hear it in the dulcet strains of Beethoven or Bach, he is in the vise grip of the Beat.” Perhaps it’s true, but he’s still looking forward to hearing The Hanover Band play Bach’s St. John Passion in Arundel on Good Friday. He also receives great comfort from videos like the one below, which have inspired him to play the piano a bit more. Vice grip? Maybe, maybe not.

Andy turned 40 this year. Along with a new number in the tens place, there have been a few other signs that time is passing. This morning, Andy Googled "Why do young people wear one earbud in their ears even when they're talking to me?" Also, he has learned that the words slap, drip, pop off, and cap have sprouted other meanings meant to be opaque to the uninitiated... like the rules of Tennis. A young friend recently asked, “What songs did you like when you were young?” Trying to be hip, Andy said, “Oh, I don’t know. Sufjan Stevens…?” Andy’s friend said, “Who?”

Sigh.

Reading: Phillip likes classical music. Andy likes litRPGs. With our powers combined we make…. a very esoteric newsletter. That is why you should always keep that unsubscribe button handy if you want off this ride.

For those of you who remain, Andy has been reading the Nova Roma series by J. R. Matthews, Heaven’s River in the Bobiverse Series by Dennis Taylor, the Ashtown Burials series by N. D. Wilson, and the All the Skills series by Honour Rae.

For more sophisticated fare, Ben Palpant has continued to interview important modern Christian poets for the Rabbit Room poetry Substack. The interviews are as inspiring as they are challenging. Here are the interviews with Scott Cairns, Luci Shaw, Mischa Willett, and Jeremiah Webster.

Listening: Gen Z, listen to some Sufjan Stevens. Begin with Carrie and Lowell. Denis Haack will be your guide.

Video Saturday: Each week the Patton kids get their fill of screen time in a 45-minute educational YouTube session lovingly known as “Video Saturday.” The children’s questions are collected on the chalkboard during the week and then the answers are sought in video form. This week’s Video Saturday picks are two guys building weird houses out of mud in the jungle, this person explaining the 13 levels of drumming, and John Williams conducting the Imperial March for his own 90th birthday.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project):

• Psalm 119 (Part Two)—Revive me with your word. You know my story.

• Psalm 119 (Part Three)—Lord, you have made me well. Now teach me what is good.

• Psalm 119 (Part Four)—I am still held in the palm of your love. Now comfort me.

• Psalm 119 (Part Five)—Some split their hearts in half to follow one master each.

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

Are You a Tree, or a Potted Plant?

Joy Clarkson on Psalm 1 and our longing for roots

Joy Clarkson's family moved sixteen times as she grew up, six times internationally. When she left home for college and graduate studies, the pattern continued with a yearly move seven years in a row. Longing for rootedness, she eventually began to liken herself to a potted plant:

Perhaps after all these years of life with portable roots, I was no longer capable of natural rootedness. Perhaps if you tried to plant me in a particular place, I would shrivel up and die, not ready for the exposure of pure obligation to a place. I longed for a place to belong, to be entangled with, but felt in my bones incapable of such a thing.

Around this time, she encountered Augustine's Confessions and his metaphor of the Christian life as a pilgrimage toward a homeland. The metaphors began to mix: “I am a potted plant; I am a pilgrim.” This, she soon discovered, is the mixed metaphor at the heart of the first psalm:

The blessed person walks, like a pilgrim (v. 1), but the blessed person is also like a tree (v. 3). At first the psalm begins as a simile, but it unfolds the likeness in metaphor; the righteous are not only like the tree, they are planted, yielding, prospering. At the heart of these two images is not only the (not) nature of metaphor but also some of the central tensions of what it is to be a human. We flourish in rootedness and fruitfulness, but that rootedness is always temporary, interrupted by death. And even in life we are driven by longings this world never seems capable of satisfying. By reflecting on the properties of trees and journeys, and carrying them over to the human condition, we might discover new ways of understanding ourselves.

Read Are You A Tree? over at Plough. It’s an excerpt from Joy’s recent book, You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer.

A Better Political Compass

Evan Riggs on our four new political camps

The USA is set for a rematch. (FYI, you don’t need to choose.) As a tumultuous political season unfolds, Evan Riggs is convinced that we need a better political compass to reduce the chances of friendly fire.

The old compass, inherited from previous decades, had an X-Axis for the political Left and the Right where the key difference was one of economics. The Y-Axis, on the other hand, was social, with authoritarian arrangements at the top and libertarian freedom at the bottom.

Bring this compass into our current political debates and you’ll only be confused, writes Riggs. The new compass looks like this:

The Left-Right X-Axis is no longer about economics and the Y-Axis is no longer about social arrangements. On the new compass, writes Riggs,

The X-Axis is a Moral Scale based on different moral foundations. The easiest way to understand it is by acceptance of hierarchy, with the far left striving for total equity while the far right strives for a perfect caste. The Y-Axis is an Innovation Scale, with Progressives generating new ideas for the future while Conservatives try to preserve the past. Anyone below the X-Axis supports liberalism, anyone above it does not.

Roughly generalized, this is what the four camps look like:

1. Right-Wing Conservative: “Right-Wing Conservatives are conservatives as you know and love/despise them, the ones who can’t help but go one about how things just ain’t like they used to be.”

2. Left-Wing Conservative: “These are your standard issue liberals. If you consider yourself “politically homeless,” a “centrist,” have ever thought, “I didn’t leave the left, the left left me,” … you also probably belong here.”

3. Left-Wing Progressive: “These are the Woke. They are also often called “leftists” or "progressives” by our left-wing conservatives (aka Liberals) to differentiate themselves from them.”

4. Right-Wing Progressive: “This is the “New Right,” the hardest-to-define quadrant of the four, due to its relatively new prominence.”

The political battles of recent years have been between (2) and (3). We’re ramping up for some tussling between (3) and (4).

Read A Better Political Compass over at The Burn.

Mammon or Marriage?

Bradford Wilcox on what’s missing from our “Midas mindset”

The mythical King Midas once wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. Most modern people are in a similar position. Everywhere we look, says University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox, a "Midas mindset" is caught and taught. We are inclined to believe that the only things worth touching are those that yield affluence: education, career, personal brand management. Wilcox writes,

The message is clear: leaning into work, rather than family life, is the path to prosperity. But this seductive message in our individualistic age is completely at odds with the facts.

Those facts provide the foundation for Wilcox’s recent book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. The title cheekily points out a glaring inconsistency at work in modern discussions of marriage. As Wilcox puts it in an excerpt from the book at The Atlantic,

many elites today—professors, journalists, educators, and other culture shapers—publicly discount or deny the importance of marriage, the two-parent family, and the value of doing all that you can to “stay together for the sake of the children,” even as they privately value every one of these things. On family matters, they “talk left” but “walk right”—an unusual form of hypocrisy that, however well intended, contributes to American inequality, increases misery, and borders on the immoral.

In public and in private, for the sake of our own flourishing and that of our communities, we would do well to exchange the Midas mindset for a marriage mindset. Successful marriages in the modern world are buttressed by five pillars. Wilcox unpacks them with data in the talk above, but here’s a preview:

• Communion — a sense of “we before me” in a marriage

• Children — recognizing that children depend upon the stability of their parents’ marriage

• Commitment — ensuring fidelity and loyalty

• Cash — being intentional about money (statistically, no separate bank accounts)

• Community — being surrounded by people who support the marriage

Watch (or listen to) the talk, check out the book, or read some excerpts at The Atlantic (The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage) or The Free Press (Why You Should Get Married).

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

Subscribe now

Welcome to Three Things.

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

After years of prejudice, Phillip has finally come round to his local Wetherspoons. Perhaps it was this Chris Arnade article that did it. More likely, it’s the opportunity of dining out with the family for under £25 in a warm and welcoming environment. With baby on the way, Wednesday’s final lunch as a family of four was a hit. “‘Spoons is a nice place,” said the four-year old. Indeed. Just don’t sit by the slot machines.

Reading: A new children’s Bible just bumped its way to the top of the Johnston family list: N.T. Wright’s God's Big Picture Bible Storybook (known in the UK as My Big Story Bible). Here’s what each of the 140 stories look like:

See that short-but-not-too-short retelling pitched at just the right level? The colorful, imaginative, full-page picture by Helena Perez Garcia (of Sophie and the Heidelberg Cat fame)? The “link” at the bottom to Isaiah’s “Promise of a New World” (most stories have a few links)? All in all, it’s a Bible Phillip’s girls want to read, which is a new thing.

Speaking of creation, Phillip was swimming in Revelation commentaries last year for a Bible study (recently summarised in a talk called The Apocalypse in an Hour), but now he’s thinking of spending the rest of the year in Genesis 1-4. Because familiarity can lead to blindness, he’s picked up Peter Leithart’s new Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1 — and my goodness, it’s a shot in the arm. It’s easy to speak on a surface level about how philosophical concepts alien to Scripture got smuggled into the Christian understanding of God, but Leithart goes straight to the sources to show how. This tees up an astonishing trinitarian exposition of Genesis 1 where we meet the Speaking God, the Spoken God and the Spirit, graciously extending the love he is in creation. Daunting, but thrilling.

Listening: This Ash Wednesday recording from The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge makes for some beautiful Lenten listening, especially the William Byrd motet near the end taken from Isaiah 64: 9-10: "Ne irascaris, Domine" ("Be not angry, O Lord"). Phillip has also been trying to understand an album called Passion for Bach and Coltrane by the Imani Winds that won a Grammy for Best Classical Compendium a few weeks ago. Phillip doesn’t quite get it (yet), but he could listen to their take on the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations ad infinitum. Plug in, close your eyes, and take 3.5 minutes.

During Andy’s day job at the Rabbit Room recently, he was asked by several well-intentioned, childless Gen-Z colleagues what fun things he had planned for Valentine’s Day. He exchanged a knowing, world-weary look with the other person over 40 at the table (herself a mother of five children) and said the first thing that came to his mind: “Surviving.” Still, he thought to himself: “They’re right. Why should I let the soul-deep exhaustion of raising three young children stand in the way of a fun night out?”

So, babysitting was secured. A popular wine bar was selected. The fateful night came and Andy and his bride of fifteen years had just put in their order for wine and charcuterie when he received a text saying: “Ivy is throwing up everywhere. Please come home.” Sigh. At that moment, Andy was reminded of the wise saying of a friend that has stayed with him for years: “No one flourishes with small children.'“

The tab was paid. The parents rushed home. On the way, Andy had time to reflect on his initial answer to his colleague’s question with a sense of ennobling but afflicted sagacity, which - along with the wine in the take-home cup - was his only consolation of the night. (That and the cuteness of the children, which is generally an effervescent and self-renewing source of joy, vomit notwithstanding.)

The next morning, Ivy didn’t remember throwing up, being cleaned, or being transferred to Mom and Dad’s bed and swore the whole episode never happened. God bless her.

Reading: Ben Palpant has done lovely interviews with contemporary poets for the Rabbit Room poetry Substack (coming out in March). One was with Andy’s new favorite poet, Mischa Willett. Andy has been thoroughly enjoying Willet’s two books this month: The Elegy Beta and Phases.

Also, Jake’s Magical Market book one or the even trippier book two. (Warning: this is an alpha-nerd-only recommendation. If you are not the sort of person who knows what a tardis is, what it means to roll for initiative, what cultivation is, or who has strong opinions about why everyone is suddenly crazy about Brandon Sanderson—you may find the experience of reading Jake’s Magical Market somewhat bewildering.)

Listening: Each night before bed, the Patton family gathers in the kids’ room to listen to an episode of We Wonder. We Wonder is a meditative, liturgical scripture podcast. The bedtime routine can be crazy. We Wonder is very sane and centering and is a great way for scattered parents to get some Bible into the day.

Video Saturday: Andy is field testing a new mini-series for his part of the Miscellany taken from the annals of the Patton Family Rhythms. We Pattons aren’t exactly screen-free, but we’re low-screen. Screen time is consolidated into one 45-minute session each weekend known as “Video Saturday.” The catch is that the videos have to be selected based on the kid’s questions during the week. If the children ask questions like “How is candy made?” or “Where do doors come from?”, we write the questions down on the blackboard in the kitchen and find the answers on Video Saturday. It has been a surprisingly good family rhythm, and allows us to (1) say to other non-Saturday screen time requests and (2) have a hand in channeling our children’s interests.

This week’s Video Saturday picks are:

• Making candy by hand

• Building a bushcraft sawmill by a stream

• Mark Rober makes a puzzle maze that his octopus can solve

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project): Psalm 23, Psalm 139, Psalm 62, Psalm 117, Psalm 119 (1), and Psalm 148.

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): The Living Water Isn't Water: Jesus and the Woman at the Well (Part Two) and Caught Between the Red Sea and the Sea Monster.

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture.

Smartphones vs. Smart Kids

Jonathan Haidt on the great rewiring of childhood

Perhaps you, like me (Phillip), watched with glee last week as five social media CEOs appeared before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee for a bipartisan grilling about child safety on their platforms. It was deeply satisfying to watch such powerful figures called to account so directly and relentlessly.

Despite the seriousness of social media damage, the concerns raised by last week’s hearing are just one aspect of what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the great rewiring of childhood.” It happened somewhere between 2010-2015 with a decisive shift from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood, not simply in America but across the world.

Take forty minutes to watch Jonathan’s Haidt’s talk from last year’s National Summit on Education (see video above). Speaking to educators, Haidt marshals the data to show that the great rewiring has unintentionally resulted in a mental health epidemic, spikes of social and sleep deprivation, behavioural addictions, and a litany of distinct harms for girls (perfectionism, emotional contagion) and boys (retreat from reality, porn addiction).

But it’s not all bad news, thankfully. There is a way out via collective action and the creation of new foundational norms. Haidt suggests four:

1. No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school)

2. No Social Media Before 16

3. Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches)

4. Far more free play and independence (e.g., more and better recess, and giving students the “Let Grow Experience”)

Watch Smart Phones vs. Smart Kids. It’s a summary of the work Haidt has been doing over at After Babel and in a forthcoming book called The Anxious Generation.

How We Lost the Ability to Listen

Ted Gioia on the rise of print and the eclipse of song

We live in a world of text and images, but what if ours were a world of song? This was the world before the printing press, writes music historian Ted Gioia — a time where even laws were put to music, a place where accumulated wisdom was received not primarily through the eyes but through the ears.

After the printing press, however, bards and singers have been replaced by scribes and scholars. In this world (which is our world),

When you sought enlightenment, you no longer went on a vision quest and brought back songs of magic and wisdom. Instead you found a book store or library, where every branch of learning had its assigned place on the shelf.

Even in a world of text and image, a world where we have lost the ability to listen and sing, there is still a yearning for a heroic quest that goes beyond a bookshop or Google search — and brings back a song. That is why every screen-based hero has a song or theme.

And yet these songs and themes are not ours. They do not result from our quest but from the quest of a fictional other whose creators are after our money:

Heroes once sought wisdom and transcendence, and their music was a pathway to another world. Brand franchise heroes are instead obsessed with fights, chase scenes, and special effects.

This situation has created an unresolved cultural tension. The profit-driven heroes can bring in billions at the box office, but still not fill the huge gap in the modern psyche created by the erasure of the vision quest and the marginalization of the transcendent music that once empowered it.

Read How We Lost the Ability to Listen over at — and keep reading as Gioia seeks to resolve that tension in future posts.

Power Plays in Church and State

Hannah Anderson on what happens when those with authority refuse to exercise it

“Despite an assumption of separation, church and state politics often run in tandem,” writes Hannah Anderson of the United States. On her mind are two events in recent months: Donald Trump’s victory at the caucuses and the Southern Baptist Convention’s settlement of the case against Paul Pressler. Both men rose to great heights within their constituencies, despite their alleged sexual predation.

Why does this happen? A too-simple answer is to blame the individuals in the voting booth and convention floor. In both church and state, the locus of complicity lies elsewhere:

Too often, our calculus assumes a great deal of individual agency. This, in turn, leads us to flatten moral responsibility, to democratize guilt and redistribute it widely. In fact, this leveling is part of what fuels online call-out culture wherein anyone with the slightest link to a given situation can be made responsible for the whole of it.

When it comes to elections, this guilt by association also means that we often deem individual voters directly responsible for the actions of the candidate they vote for. But this understanding misses the fact that complicity correlates to power and privilege. Because our systems were not designed to distribute power equally among the citizenry, responsibility is not equal either. The individual voter may be the last chance to stop a predator, but she should never be asked to do this in the first place. 

The people most responsible for the crises in our churches and in our nation are leaders who have the ability to resist evil yet choose not to.

Read Parallel Power Plays in Church and State. For more from Hannah Anderson, keep an eye out for her column over at The Dispatch.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

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Welcome to Three Things.

We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

With the imminent arrival of Baby 3, two major preparatory changes are in order for the Johnston household: a third car seat and a dishwasher. Between Christa and Phillip, the latter will free up approximately two hours a day. Their four-year quipped at dinner last week, “When we get a dishwasher, it will be a new life for us.” To which the two-year old exclaimed, “Then the baby will jump for joy and sing!” Not just the baby.

Reading: The most mystifying passage of the Bible for Phillip has long been the latter half of 1 Timothy 2 (“She will be saved through childbearing”, etc.). No explanation has ever made sense other than that Paul is addressing a local problem in Ephesus related to the temple of Artemis, a renowned goddess of midwifery, from whom new Christians would struggle to turn away. It’s always seemed a stretch, but now the argument has been laid out in near watertight fashion by Sandra Glahn in Nobody's Mother: Artemis of the Ephesians in Antiquity and the New Testament. What a book — and with a powerful concluding interpretation of the text. He’s also discovered a picture book called Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep that has been a joy to read the girls. Skipping rope, fairies, the nearby Sussex countryside and the fight against enclosure in the early twentieth century; what’s not to love?

Watching: In the rarest of occurrences, Phillip has been to the cinema not once but twice in recent days to see some 2023 Cannes Film Festival winners: Anatomy of a Fall and Fallen Leaves. The first is a French courtroom drama with a zinger of a plot: a woman is suspected of her husband's murder, and their blind son faces a moral dilemma as the main witness. The setup in the opening sequence is a thing of beauty and, as one critic puts it, “one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.” The other film is a Finnish romantic comedy, which Phillip didn’t even know was a thing. After watching it, he’s still not quite sure.

St. Louis seems to be the land of book clubs, in my limited experience. When the Patton family moved here in the summer, we were quickly invited into various book clubs. Some places bake brownies for new neighbors; St. Louis bakes book clubs. Andy is currently reading the Lord of the Rings series with “The Sensitive Boys Book Club.” The name is as apt as it is hilarious. Things get personal. Tears are shed. Toasts are raised to great books late into the night. It’s the best.

Reading: A grab bag of genres: Bandersnatch by Diana Glyer, Primal Hunter Book 8 by Zogarth, The Coddling of the American Mind by Haidt and Lukianoff, The Hell Divers series, and Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Listening: Andy has been developing a Songs of a Secular Age playlist inspired by the work of Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. Taylor wrote a whopper of a book called A Secular Age that chronicles the movements toward secularism in the last 500 years. Jamie Smith wrote a (much shorter but very worthy) companion to the ideas of the book called How (Not) To Be Secular.

Also—through the aforementioned book club—Andy came across The Tolkien Professor. If you ever wished for over 500 episodes of deep dives into Tolkienien lore, be glad. Your wish is granted. Start with “On Wingless Balrogs and Tom Bombadil” or the introduction to the Silmarillion series.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project): The full series of seven poems on faith, hope, love, grace, loss, time, and memory and a new rendition of Psalm 3.

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): An Impossible Conversation: Jesus and the Woman at the Well (Part One).

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbour and culture.

Simple Acts of Sanity (or, How to be Weird in Public, and in Private)

Peco and Ruth Gaskovski on sowing seeds of anachronism

Almost ten years ago, this newsletter’s Instigator (Andy) and Curator (Phillip) met at a Christian residential study centre, called L’Abri, where we were both working. L’Abri was a shelter where the pace of modern life slowed down by degrees. Visitors often described it as a place where they began to feel more fully human, before lamenting their inevitable return to “the real world.” We encouraged people not to idealise L’Abri, but to take some of what they saw there and implement it in their own lives — to rehumanize a dehumanizing world, if only a little bit.

Over at , Peco and Ruth Gaskovski are doing something similar. They’ve gone beyond complaining about the world moving too fast and simply started opting out of some of the standardised experiences of modern life by peppering their lives with anachronistic actions.

They call this “sowing seeds of anachronism” — and the point is not to be twee or attention-getting. As they write:

When we opt out of the standardized experience boxes of modern life, when we choose an anachronistic action instead, we are choosing to make an effort of the mind and body. Doing hard things builds the musculature of our humanity. Real things exercise what we are. Unreal things atrophy us.

Anachronistic action does something else, too. It connects the past to the present and our visions of the future. The stability of a society isn’t just lateral, reaching across the physical space of lands and cities, but vertical, reaching through time for its rich resources of wisdom. We can’t take all of the past with us, and we shouldn’t—not all of it was good. But the ideas of the past, at least, were tested slowly, and refined carefully, across generations and peoples. History winnows its wheat with many hands.

The Gaskovski’s then offer a crowd-sourced catalogue of “Simple Acts of Sanity” for readers to try out. Here are the categories, with a sampling of acts:

1. Technology use (reducing, altering, removing, replacing) — Use message apps on computer instead of smart phone to set boundaries, keep a whiteboard calendar, send letters to family and friends to share news and say hello instead of Facebook etc.

2. Self-sufficient, Minimalist Practices — Bake bread, carpool or take transit when possible, mend or alter clothes by hand, walk to appointments if possible.

3. Embodied & Mental Practices — Always carry a journal with you, print out recipes and put them in a binder, read physical books, sing long songs from memory.

4. Children and Family — Allow your children ample free time to pursue their own interests, have a birthday party at home with a simple cake and friends to play with, leave children to find ways to amuse themselves without adult direction and without screens, take a long walk to talk things out.

5. Spiritual and Relational Practices — Learn to sing Gregorian chant, light a candle each morning and at meal times, fast, greet the day outside every morning when waking without looking at clocks, thermostats, phone, etc.

Read Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private and Simple Acts of Sanity: A Seed Catalogue over at . For more from Peco Gaskovski, check out his science-fiction novel Exogenesis.

America’s Authority Problem

Bradford Littlejohn on a crisis that afflicts all sides

The United States of America has always had an authority problem, but 2020 was the year authority well and truly died. We saw it on both sides of the political spectrum, writes Brad Littlejohn:

When it came to Covid-19, Americans on the right typically saw pandemic restrictions as draconian lockdowns — forms of lawless oppression and fundamental injustices against the American way of life. Americans on the left, meanwhile, were more likely to fume against what they saw as either government weakness in the face of the crisis or a lack of political will — especially in the Trump White House and among red-state governors — to take the difficult steps necessary to protect the public in a time of grave danger.

When Black Lives Matter protests rocked American cities over the summer of 2020, the roles reversed. The left reacted with rage and indignation at any attempt by the guardians of public order to show their teeth in the face of violence; the agents of law enforcement were seen, like the agents of public health, as perpetrators of lawless oppression. At the same time, the right fulminated against the weakness and lack of will the authorities displayed. "Why aren't they doing more?" they demanded as vandals ransacked stores and burned buildings to the ground — just as the left had fumed about the response to Covid-19. Today, a large majority of Americans cannot recognize an act of political authority as such; they perceive it as either brazen oppression or craven abdication.

We got here, writes Littlejohn, by conflating the authority wielded by experts with the authority granted to politicians. Experts know their stuff and it’s good to listen, but their judgments are always revisable. Our political leaders, on the other hand, must make binding decisions amidst uncertainty. When political authority bows to expert authority, decisions are constantly revised and public trust is lost.

Restoring America’s trust in political authority will not happen quickly. The best place to start, suggests Littlejohn, is on the small scale:

If we struggle to discern true political authority within the sphere of politics, then let us call on religious leaders, school principals, coaches, and businessmen to model it in their own local contexts — and let us cut them some slack when they inevitably fail.

Read In Search of Authority over at National Affairs.

Give Up on Purity. Try Chastity.

Rachel Joy Welcher on the deep and broad virtue of chastity

For an entire generation of evangelical Christians, the phrase sexual purity is enough to send chills down the spine. Not primarily because the youth group talks were unbearably awkward (which they were), but because the message of sexual purity as an endlessly rewarding “sprint of self-control” until marriage were frequently so overstated as to be deceptive.

Virginity, writes Rachel Joy Welcher, was the hallmark of purity:

It was a temporary state, like holding in a sneeze. If you could just get through your young adult years a virgin, then you could get married and proceed to have all-the-sex. There was never an acknowledgement that some of us might end up single for the rest of our lives, or that we might never find ourselves attracted to the opposite gender, or to anyone at all. What did chastity mean for those who were sexually abused as children? For those still unmarried at twenty-three? And what did it mean for those of us divorced by twenty-nine?

The Christian tradition holds out a different, broader virtue for our formation: not purity, but chastity. And chastity is about far more than virginity. As Welcher writes,

It turns out that chastity isn’t a sprint of self-control; it’s a marathon of spiritual endurance. And the commitment we make is not to our future selves as some kind of insurance guaranteeing relational health, wealth, and happiness, but a lifelong vow to God himself; that we will love him with “all our heart, soul, mind, and strength,” (Mark 12:30) including our sexuality.  

Unlike purity, which is an impossible state to achieve outside of Christ’s work on our behalf, chastity is the human pursuit of love and self-denial. According to Thomas Aquinas, it is the act of “curbing” ungodly desires and practicing “moderation,” and it is not something we ever fully achieve on this side of heaven. Therefore it is something the Christian must pursue until their dying breath.

Read Chastity as Worship over at Mere Orthodoxy. For more from Rachel Joy Welcher, check out her book Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality or a podcast interview here.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

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We’re a monthly digest of three things to help you engage with God, neighbor, and culture. But this is our monthly Miscellany where we (Andy and Phillip) tell you what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

‘Tis the season of children’s nativity plays in the United Kingdom. For the church nativity, Phillip’s girls were cast as Elizabeth and a shepherd respectively. Elizabeth went on strike when the time came, leaving her pregnant mother to stand in, and the shepherd loudly dropped her metal crook during the Song of Simeon, quite enjoying the sound. This year’s best story, however, comes from another nativity where the Christ child was hailed as “a light to lighten the genitals.”

Reading: The author Katherine Rundell is taking UK bookshops by storm. Phillip picked up a copy of her recent novel Impossible Creatures from a stack in Waterstones only to be rushed by two eager booksellers telling him that it is indeed as good as Michael Morpurgo says: “There was Tolkien, there is Pullman and now there is Katherine Rundell.” It’s the first in a trilogy and he’ll be reading it aloud with Christa over the holiday season. David Brooks’ How to Know A Person is also on the nightstand.

Listening: Since it’s almost time, the Christmastide playlist from ArtandTheology.org is all queued up and, like their Advent playlist, offers a great base for culling a playlist of your own (as Phillip has done). He’s also enjoyed listening to the first part of Noiser’s new podcast on the original Christmas villain, Herod the Great.

The Johnstons are off on a babymoon next week to see Ronnie Scott's Jazz Orchestra at Christmas, but Phillip is seeking a generous donor to extend the babymoon with a New Year’s Eve journey to Long Beach, CA aboard The Queen Mary to ring in 2024 with Alex Mendham and His Orchestra. He just discovered them singing wintry tunes on Radio 3’s In Tune Christmas Special and, oh my, what a night it would be!

Then again, early bedtimes are really nice these days.

As the year closes, Andy is coming to the end of his second five-year journal. Each day, he writes a few sentences about what happened yesterday. Around this time of year, he reads through the previous year’s entries. For a decade now, it has been a discipline that helps him remember what has happened and feel the passage of time. Whether you are a journaler or not, consider this your recommendation to pick up the practice. There is no time to start like a new year…

Reading: Two factors have recently contributed to an increase in Andy’s book consumption: (1) ten hours of commute each week and (2) Andy has pushed his audiobook listening speed up to 3.5x. (He is still working up to the promised land of 8x, his audiobook app’s top speed. At that rarefied velocity, the file turns into sonorous dophin-like tones and clicks as the story imprints itself deep in your unconscious mind.)

Anyway… some gems lately include:

• The Imperfect Pastor by Zack Eswine (Sorry for listening to your book so fast, Zack. The irony is not lost on me.)

• This Homeward Ache by Amy Baik Lee. Insightful and poetic theological ruminations/memoir.

• Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. Unexpected rules about how to be good at things.

• The Ascendant Series by Craig Alanson. Classic epic fantasy. Alanson’s series wins the award for most uses of the word “fireball” in a fantasy trilogy.

• Creating Character Arcs by Kim Weiland. If you’re stuck on a fiction story, listen to this and let your mind wander. Works every time.

Listening: Andy has been working on this important, transformational playlist that has provided a great boost to his personal writing over the past few weeks. He shares it with you in hopes that it might provide a similar boost to your own creative efforts this holiday season. (Warning: It is mostly AC/DC… make sure you’ve got your rocking pants on before pressing play.)

And for something more Christmas-y (and because I feel bad for traumatizing our British readers with the phrase “rocking pants”), here is a little jazz piano from Charlie Brown himself.

Watching: Patriot is funny, dark, bizarre, and strangely touching. It is the anti-Mission:Impossible.

New from The Darkling Psalter (Andy’s poetry and Psalm project): Psalm 65—Love the Curve in the Waterfall (thanks for that lovely turn of phrase, Marsh) and Psalm 39—Memory the Coinage of Unquiet Thought

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): Why Do Men in the Bible Find Their Wives at Wells? and The Flood and the Reversal of Creation.

This is our main monthly issue of three items to help you engage with God, neighbour and culture.

In two weeks, subscribers will get the monthly miscellany with updates on what we’ve been reading, thinking about and working on.

Why is He Ebenezer Scrooge? And Why Do Kevin’s Booby Traps Never Really Work?

Mark Roberts and LuElla D’Amico on some favourite Christmas stories

Just as most of us can sing Christmas carols without ever thinking about the words, the below-the-surface profundity of our favourite seasonal stories can easily pass us by. Let’s consider A Christmas Carol and Home Alone.

First, the Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge is the main character, but why Ebenezer? Bible readers will be familiar with the word as a stone of remembrance, set up by Joshua and the Israelites after crossing the Jordan River into the promised land. Dickens knew this. As Mark Roberts explains:

The final use of “Ebenezer” in A Christmas Carol comes on a literal ebenezer, Scrooge’s gravestone. This stone completes the transformation of Scrooge, showing him of how his life might end if he does not become a new man. … Ebenezer Scrooge was not only a man with a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping” character. He was also to serve as a monument for readers of A Christmas Carol. Dickens intended Ebenezer Scrooge to remind us of things we ought not forget, lest we end up like Jacob Marley and the other spirits who walked the earth in sorrow, dragging the heavy chains they forged in life.

Second, Home Alone. I (Phillip) assumed that this Catholic take on the 1990 John Hughes classic would be a stretch, but no. LuElla D’Amico, an English professor and mother of two, sees in Kevin McCallister a young man moving from spiritual desolation to consolation. He finds this not in becoming “a mastermind orchestrating the consequences for those who have wronged him”, but in being rescued by a member of his church family, the fearful old man called Marley.

This moment of grace is the precursor to Kevin’s reconciliation with his family, which mirrors the teaching of Jesus. As D’Amico writes,

When I visualize the scene from this parable, as I have many times as a Christian child and adult, I can easily superimpose Kevin’s joyous running toward his mother at the end of the movie to that of the Prodigal Son running toward his father. I invite you to use your imagination in this way now, to see the spiritual where perhaps before, like me, you may have been lost in the material.

Read Kevin's Suburban Panopticon?: Home Alone and the Christmas Spirit at Church Life Journal and Recalling Our Ebenezers over at ’s Substack.

You Don’t Want to Live in a World Without Babies

Martin Gurri on the consequences of an unpeopled world

Advent anticipates the arrival of a baby, a child whose birth will bring hope to the world. “Hope is a child,” writes Peter Leithart. “Each child born is a sign that God hasn’t given up on the human race, that there are further generations to come.”

This is an increasingly unpopular idea. Widespread fear about climate change and population density are causing many young people to choose childlessness. This is framed as a noble ethical decision, but former CIA analyst Martin Gurri speculates about the unforeseen consequences:

For instance, the welfare state requires an endless supply of young people to produce more, consume more, and generate ever more taxes for bureaucrats to distribute. A prolonged shortage of young bodies will stress the social safety net to the breaking point. Expensive retirement and health insurance schemes are likely to collapse. The marginal will slip into poverty — the poor will grow desperate — but government will lack the funds to do much about it. The political consequences are unfathomable. My guess is that crime and turbulence will be a constant background noise but not revolution, since the minimum levels of testosterone needed for that kind of venture will be lacking.

Economically, a world dominated by the old will be less innovative, less dynamic, and more risk averse. The only way to compensate for a shriveled workforce will be through technology — but that’s just what you won’t get from the geezers in charge. …

But the most wrenching aspect of the transition will be social and psychological. Absent the binding power of children, the extended family will disappear, and the nuclear family will disintegrate. There will be few mothers and fathers, no siblings, no cousins, no aunts or uncles; whole lineages will flicker out. If family is the audience to the drama of life, each individual will perform in the chill of an empty theater. Isolation will leave the young, as a class, powerless and dependent. Loneliness will fill them with psychotic dread. There can be no exit, no escape to a better future. Repopulating the world will be a tough mathematical proposition. For generations, the old will smother the young the way one does with a precious possession, like a rare breed of dog.

Might it really be true that the birth of any child, as with the birth of Christ, is good news of great joy?

Read On Having Children over at . For more on the topic, read Louise Perry’s article Fear of a Human Planet at Plough.

What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls

Freya India on internet addiction and low self-esteem

A friend recently told me about a contract she and her husband drew up with their twin teenage girls after reading parts of this article to them. The terms? Your parents will give you $1,000 if you stay off social media until age eighteen. With their girls now at sixteen, it seems to be working. Is it overkill, though? Are they offering too much for something so small? Or, are they asking too much for so little a reward?

Gen Z journalist would likely answer No to all of those questions. In a recent article at , she traces the affects of algorithmically generated content on her generation of teenage girls when it comes to personal appearance and mental health. She uses this metaphor:

Algorithms act like conveyor belts. Show even the slightest interest, fear, or insecurity about anything—hover over it for half a second—and you will be drawn in deeper. Little by little, the algorithm learns what keeps you watching. And since the most negative and extreme posts get the most engagement, very often your feed will become an endless stream of content that makes you feel worse about yourself. You’ll find yourself on a continuous conveyor belt of apps, products, services, pills, and procedures to fix you.

As Generation Alpha comes online in this decade, India offers some stark advice to parents and kids: delay social media use until at least sixteen and get off screens as much as possible. Because the dangers are not the ones we normally expect:

I speak to many parents about social media; they worry that their kids will talk to predators or be exposed to explicit self-harm and suicidal content—which are, of course, real risks. But there is also something more pernicious and more destabilizing happening. Something we have to get ahead of. Because maybe it seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it. 

Read What the Algorithm Does to Young Girls at . For more, listen to Russell Moore’s recent interview with Jonathan Haidt about how the move from play-based to screen-based childhood has created the anxious generation.

See you in two weeks for this month’s Miscellany.

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Welcome to Three Things.

It’s been a busy time for us, so we weren’t able to get your normal issue of 3T out earlier this month. Our apologies!

As a gift for the season, we’ll be pausing paid subscriptions for the month of December.

If you’re a paid subscriber, that means you won’t be charged your normal fee in December. Get coffee with a friend with that money instead.

If you’re not a paid subscriber, that means you could subscribe now, get a free month, as well as get a free book from us.

Think about it.

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The first Sunday of Advent is December 2 this year.

We frequently get to our December issue, then realise we’re probably too late to recommend things in time for the start of the season. So, here are three things for Advent, a full two weeks before it begins.

1. Advent playlist with ArtandTheology.org

A proper Advent playlist, which means there are no Christmas tunes. These are all songs of waiting, expectation, longing and hope. There is a lot on this playlist—almost 20 hours of music—so you might want to use it as a base for culling a personal playlist, as Phillip has done.

2. Heaven and Nature Sing: 25 Advent Reflections to Bring Joy to the World by Hannah Anderson

Twenty-five short reflections for the season, each one focused on something from the natural world that is bound up in the biblical story — mountains and valleys, birds and trees, serpents and sheep — to show how the whole earth sings the praise of Jesus, the coming king. Remarkably rich.

3. Sacred Seasons: A Family Guide to Center Your Year Around Jesus by Danielle Hitchen

This is a book many of us have been waiting for: an approachable guide celebrating the church’s liturgical year at home. You’ll get theology, history, devotional guides, craft ideas, recipes and beautiful art by the talented Stephen Crotts. Even though Advent usually arrives in November, it is the beginning of the church’s year. Sacred Seasons begins with Advent, then leads you through the whole journey.

Despite being scorned at a French bakery at 6:15 am for poor French grammar whilst ordering croissants, Phillip and his family enjoyed their European holiday immensely. Highlights? A clear sunset ferry crossing across the English Channel; De Hoge Veluwe National Park, where free bikes took them to the world’s second-largest van Gogh collection at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the middle of the park; beautiful medieval Dutch villages and a final day in Ghent, Belgium where the sun even deigned to come out.

Reading: While finishing up a lecture on what it means to be a man, Phillip discovered the work of Prudence Allen, a Catholic nun who has written three massive volumes on ‘the concept of woman’ in history, theology and philosophy. He will likely never read Allen’s ginormous 1,768-page project, but this handy 21-page summary will do. Allen offers two math equations to describe two opposing views of how men and women complement each other: 1⁄2 + 1⁄2 = 1 and 1 + 1 ➔ 3. In the former, men and women are incomplete persons without the other. In the latter, they are whole persons whose relationship produces a profound synergy, bringing more into the world than they could on their own. Very helpful. Phillip has also been preaching through Acts and finding Craig Keener’s commentary quite illuminating.

Watching: On a whim, Phillip went to see Killers of the Flower Moon on Monday night. He hasn’t been a strict Scorsese devotee over the years, but this one seemed like a landmark. You could argue that 3h 26m is too long, but seeing the drip, drip, drip deformation of DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart as he is gradually enfolded into a plot to kill even his own beloved wife in order to steal her ancestral land is riveting and convicting.

Nevertheless, a few listens to this Danish string quartet was necessary to recover:

As the first tentative strains of Christmas music begin to appear in the Patton household, Andy has been enjoying idyllic autumn days. Being back in range of the landscape he grew up in has reminded him of one of the beautiful things the Midwest has going for it: four distinct seasons. October released the last heat of summer and the leaves changed and began to fall in time to be bundling up and shuffling through them while the family trick-or-treated, or rather joke-or-treated as they do in St. Louis.

Speaking of something the Midwest has going for it, here is another: The City Museum. If you are within 500 miles of St. Louis, make a pilgrimage to the City Museum, as Andy did for his son’s birthday this month. It is like Salvador Dali and Willy Wonka teamed up to make a playground inside an old factory. It exceeds expectations.

Reading: Andy is pretty much always tearing through some tiny corner of the world of speculative fiction. Here is a true fact: ten out of ten of the top-selling authors in history wrote genre fiction. (Ok… a bit of a stretch there with Shakespeare, but I’m allowing it.)

What is it about visiting other worlds - be they by Orient Express, wardrobe, or wormhole - that we find so compelling? Why is it that when Waterstones asked England what their favorite books were, they chose The Lord of the Rings by a wide margin? The literary elite of Britain were flummoxed and demanded the poll be retaken. They retook the poll and it returned the same result.

There is perhaps no better source to turn to for an answer to these questions than Tolkien himself. If you love genre fiction but haven’t read Tolkien’s “On Faerie Stories,” amend that gap in your reading as soon as possible.

Oddly enough, the good people of England failed to mention Andy’s favorite genre, LitRPGs. If that acronym means nothing to you, skip this paragraph. But for Andy’s litRPG brothers and sisters out there, Zogarth’s Primal Hunter has been fun lately. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but, you know… many are called but few are chosen.

For those who prefer to take their imaginative journeys via spaceship, Columbus Day by Craig Alanson is good (especially when the sassy AI shaped like a beer can shows up in the narrative). It is the kind of series you can measure by the cubic foot (i. e. lots of books). If you liked The Expanse series or John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, you’ll like Alanson’s Expeditionary Force series. It also smacks of Ender’s Game at times, though the true successors to that immortal classic are Pierce Brown’s Red Rising books. 

Making: Andy is putting together a list of great children’s books for the Rabbit Room. Here is a sneak peek. It is almost at 100 books but if you have any favorites, he has left off, email andy@rabbitroom.com. This is the list Andy wishes he had when he became a father six years ago. (Note that the book Phillip gave to Andy on that fateful day did not make the list. Honestly, Phillip… Not Now Bernard?) [EDIT: Phillip has since emailed the address above with a recommendation.]

Teaching: This month Andy was able to give a lecture at L’Abri on the question of what to do when someone you love is deconstructing their faith. The audio of the lecture isn’t up yet, but you can see a version of the lecture in this lecture and this lecture on the Covenant Seminary site.

Watching: Only Murders In the Building. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez team up to solve murders in their old Manhattan apartment building. Witty banter, colorful characters, and murders abound. What could go wrong?

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): Why Did Eden Have Four Rivers?

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And they’re off! This Sunday, the Johnston clan will drive to the Dover ferry port for their first European holiday. Nothing too daunting — just wending their way through France and Belgium up to the Netherlands — but they are looking forward to baguettes across the Channel, driving on the right/correct side of the road (but with the wheel on the right/wrong side of the car…) and some family cycling in the Dutch flatlands. Wish them luck!

Reading: For preaching on the Jerusalem Council recently (Acts 15), Phillip picked up Peter Leithart’s Delivered From the Elements of the World again to re-read the most sensible understanding of biblical circumcision he’s come across. He read the book upon its release in 2016, but my goodness. It is a bold, ground-shifting work. He wasn’t ready for it seven years ago, and might not be now, but he’s glad it exists. Leithart also has the best take on the war in Israel that you’re likely to read. Also, a new novel by Francis Spufford is always an event for Phillip, so he’s enjoying listening to Cahokia Jazz, a noir murder mystery set in an alternative 1920s America that even has an accompanying playlist. The novel is out in the UK, but doesn’t hit American shelves until February. Look out for it!

Listening: Have you seen that Spotify Premium now has audiobooks? (Also available in the U.S. later this year; sorry.) Phillip is torn. So many titles we’ve recently recommended here on Three Things are available for your listening pleasure: Remaking the World, Digital Liturgies, Self Made, Dominion and more. But will it be “even more damaging than music streaming because books are typically only read once, while music is often streamed many times”? Is it less rapacious than Audible? Is that the wrong question? Maybe Mozart can help.

Last week, Andy enjoyed the Rabbit Room’s annual conference, Hutchmoot, a feast of art and faith and conversations. (If you missed it, fear not. The lectures from the conference will eventually appear on the Hutchmoot podcast.)

Reading: Anna Friedrich’s new poetry Substack, Monafolkspeak. Start with Holy Saturday. Then read her five poems on the Rabbit Room Poetry Substack.

Listening: Andy’s son’s Charlotte Mason-style kindergarten is listening to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons together and it has reignited Andy’s love for this hauntingly beautiful recomposition of Vivaldi’s masterpiece by Max Richter. Andy has also been treating himself to the Lord of the Rings audiobook read by Andy Serkis, Gollum himself. Obviously, he nails the part of Gollum. Also, if you are a LOTR fan and want to read a beautiful book by another True Denizen of Middle Earth, read Mark Eddy Smith’s Tolkien's Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of The Lord of the Rings. Most auxiliary books explaining the redemptive themes in beloved stories are cheap-thrill money grabs - this one isn’t. It enlarges the soul.

New from Pattern Bible: (Andy’s Bible + theology Substack): The Mist in the Wasteland: Introducing the River of Life