“Gender is not merely a social construct but a gift, a gift that all of us—even those we might consider to be quintessentially masculine or feminine—have imperfectly received.” Matthew J. Milliner on gender.

“A mother’s love is not replaceable. It cannot be made by superior intelligences in the dark pathways of data centres.” Rachel Roth Aldhizer on what a machine can’t make.

“If work isn’t a mechanism for notoriety or title, but something much more ordinary and earthbound, couldn’t we be free from so much of the vain striving we see within and all around us?”

“Our myth is that we live in a secular age based on self-evident truths such as human rights. In fact, we live in the age of Hitler, and our religion is World War II.”

“The notion that all truth is God's truth makes Christianity inherently integrative and interdisciplinary.” Jens Zimmermann on what makes a humanism Christian.

“When you’re young, it’s easy to confuse strength with dominance; when you’re older, if you’re lucky, you realize the feat of character it takes to be meek.” James K.A. Smith on learning to live with uncertainty.

"At midlife, I had come to understand that leaving this tiny Appalachian town had been the most consequential act of my life. I still felt a strong pull back there." Steven Kurutz on the decline of his hometown.

“The magic of the written word has always been its capacity to float free and leap the gulfs of time, geography, and culture. But our alienated age has made me wonder whether those vast scales can, over time, attenuate the more intimate bonds that language also nurtures.”

“True depravity exists, but for most humans it’s surprisingly hard to sustain. Because of the soul’s yearning for goodness, most of us would find a meaningless life intolerable, filled with despair, and so we hunger for virtue.” David Brooks on human nature and the hunger for virtue.

“The alphabet became more than a practical tool. It bound together religion, language, and identity in ways that endure to this day.” Arthur Aghajanian on the Armenian alphabet and Christian identity.

“To be a human is to be made from and for the earth and simultaneously to be invited to bear witness to the transcendence of the cosmos.”

“Language itself is a technology, that it has long been the handmaiden of anti-human forces, and that it can narrow our habits of perception, blinding us to each other, reality, and God just as easily as it can connect us.”

“A formerly enslaved African once stood at the heart of an empire and spoke, with calm insistence, about what it means to be human.” Luke Bretherton on Olaudah Equiano's witness at empire's centre.

“We recognize Christian humanism whenever Christian existence is defined by the incarnation and lived out of one’s union with Christ, in whom all of reality finds its unifying centre.” Jens Zimmermann on what makes a humanism distinctly Christian.

“Cultures that attempt to overcome gender do not enter bold new terrain but soon find themselves repristinating tired and stale categories instead.” Matthew J. Milliner on goddess fantasies and Christian reality.

“Compassion extracts a human cost. It is not free.” Rachel Roth Aldhizer on why care that costs nothing isn't care at all.

“When worlds come to their endings, how do we account for and recalibrate what is regarded as strong and what is regarded as weak?” Laura Fabrycky on what the vulnerable know that the powerful forget.

“Our myth is that we live in a secular age based on self-evident truths such as human rights. In fact, we live in the age of Hitler, and our religion is World War II.” Alec Ryrie on why knowing what you hate isn't a moral philosophy.

“The gaining of self-knowledge through studying the past and the schooling of our imagination through literature, poetry, and the arts must reflect God’s own love for humanity. Education must be subservient to the common good of society.”

“It was a season of dark depression that first rattled my youthful confidence in philosophy. It descended on me in my early forties, and I have never been so tormented by perplexity. I was a stranger to myself.”

“In a world obsessed with fixing, sorting, and ranking the human, Equiano insists on something more demanding: a humanity that cannot be possessed, only lived and discovered together.”

“We recognize Christian humanism whenever Christian existence is defined by the incarnation and lived out of one’s union with Christ, in whom all of reality finds its unifying centre.” Jens Zimmerman with a brief history of Christian humanism.

“Each universalizing discourse harbours a contradiction: In naming “humanity,” it almost always smuggles in a local portrait of the human, one that includes some and excludes others.” Luke Bretherton on the witness of Olaudah Equiano.

“I confess I often experience God’s absence, but in those moments, I can look around and see his presence in the way humans are made.”

“Each year our technology extends our knowledge farther and farther into the galaxy while our daily lives are lived increasingly under the oppression of a dark sun, our lives shadowed by alienation and distrust.”

“If materialists are the party of the head and the Romantics are the party of the heart, the religious worldview celebrates both those parts of our nature but also acknowledges the yearnings of the soul.” David Brooks on Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism.

“As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manicheans and Pelagians with iron-clad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers.” James K.A. Smith on the liberation of unknowing.

Evangelicals, historically, have largely supported the state of Israel. Providence Editor-at-large Robert Nicholson joins @commentmagazine.bsky.social podcast to discuss why have evangelicals taken this stance, and what has changed.

“The magic of the written word has always been its capacity to float free and leap the gulfs of time, geography, and culture. But our alienated age has made me wonder whether those vast scales can, over time, attenuate the more intimate bonds that language also nurtures.”

“Art in our time is desperate to be necessary, and it is necessary, but not for the reasons it imagines. Many people now see art as the visualization of an idea that could have been conveyed by more direct means.”

“Loving language in this era of chatbots, digital scams, and AI hallucinations has, for me, meant coming to terms with language’s limits and its deadening, anti-human capacities, but also hewing close to its inexhaustible communicatory flames.”

“I’ve been seeing a spiritual director, a wise man with an earring and a grey ponytail, twenty years my senior, charming enough he could start his own cult, and wise enough never to do so.”

“The invention of the alphabet inaugurated Armenia’s golden age as centres of learning revived and scholars from Alexandria to Rome journeyed to renowned schools, bringing home a wealth of translated and original works that deepened both intellect and faith.”

“This is precisely where non-violent resistance begins: choosing to open oneself to another person’s narrative and creating space for that narrative to exist alongside your own.”

“The question is whether the understory can withstand the invasive growth long enough to recognize itself, find its story, and muster the nerve to grow into the light.”

What does it mean to support Israel? Robert Nicholson joins Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk to explore the shifting relationship between American evangelicals and the state of Israel.

“To see a person rightly is to have a sense of the sacred in ordinary life. So, too, the homes we inhabit, the tap water we use for cooking and cleaning, the day-to-day dishes on which we share meals with friends and family.”

“Something is dying, and something is being born, and they may just be the same story. Welcome to the Understory.”

“Dying to one’s own ideas opens up a space. I think perception is wider when the ego dies.” Anne Snyder talks with Manuel Dürr, painter of the new Stations of the Cross in St. Peter’s Basilica.

“The question is whether the understory can withstand the invasive growth long enough to recognize itself, find its story, and muster the nerve to grow into the light.” Anne Snyder on what this moment asks of us.

The world is having fewer children, and it's reshaping everything from elections to religious life. Shadi Hamid and Matthew Kaemingk sit down with Lyman Stone to find out why, and what comes next.

“Work is a primary way we give expression to our status as imago Dei, but it is not a portal to transcend it.” Adam Gustine on learning to love sacred and unholy labour.

“The dominant metaphors of calling, fulfillment, and cultural engagement assume a degree of choice and agency.” Case Thorp on Simone Weil and the blue-collar failure of the faith and work movement.

“The sacred character of Armenian letters extends beyond stone and wood into ink and parchment, appearing in the illuminated manuscripts that helped sustain Armenian devotion and identity.”

“My own tendency toward melancholy turned abysmal that summer I turned nineteen; the mental health troubles have been rumbling along ever since, sometimes as a background hum, sometimes as a debilitating cacophony.”

“AI pantomimes the real, caricatures the soul, and offers a poor replacement for the care that women stake off as their own, claim as our birthright.” Rachel Roth Aldhizer on the care and presence of women in a world of artificial intelligence.

“Our primary concern was parenting, not policy, but I felt like I was having to block my daughter from running down a very dark road the government was trying to clear for her.” W.R. Thomsen on fish oil, MAiD, and why the personal is political.

Is organized religion vital to the health of democratic life? And how is it different from “spiritual but not religious”? Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid take up a central argument from their new book.

“The alphabet became more than a practical tool. It bound together religion, language, and identity in ways that endure to this day.” Arthur Aghajanian on Armenian letters as a threshold for participating in the sacred.

What does it look like for American Muslim communities to engage in political life? Omar Suleiman joins Zealots at the Gate to talk political participation, assimilation, and what it means to be Muslim and American.