Take the fallout from Israel’s Palm Sunday debacle. After Israeli forces temporarily blocked Catholic leaders from worshipping at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem due to safety concerns, an author by the name of E. Michael Jones wrote on X: “Cardinal Pizzaballa was turned back because the Jews are at war with the Catholic Church.” (Elsewhere, Jones has argued that “a Christian must be anti-Jewish”—not in the racial sense, mind you, since that would be antisemitic, but just in the way they “operate as a consequence of the Jewish rejection of Christ.”)

Or take the casual mudslinging that goes on.

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A quick search for “faith-based fitness” on YouTube brings up plenty of jacked men, some in clerical collars, telling you Jesus wants you to look and lift like they do. On X, there are plenty of animations of the Knights Templar among these folks, featuring armor that can barely contain their massive muscles. Another search, for the term Deus Vult, will get you videos that, at the very least, strongly imply that the Crusades to capture the Holy Land were a good idea. (They weren’t.)

We know that young men in America are turning toward God, but guys, this Holy Week, I suggest staying away from that version of the faith. Getting in shape is always a good idea. The Knights Templar probably did look quite cool as they rode along a path that’s now Israel’s Highway 1. But Catholicism is not an extension of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The savior you pray to was not a jacked warrior. Instead, Christ went to his execution without a fight. When one of his followers slashed a guardsman sent to arrest him, Christ healed him. In my humble opinion, this is a better incident to meditate on than the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099.

I’m not saying men should stay away from faith generally. In fact, I’m writing this to encourage you to go to church—not necessarily because it will get you fit, or be fun. Pretending to be a crusader is probably more exciting than just sitting in a pew. But going to church will probably make you a bit happier, and perhaps a slightly better human. Normie Catholicism is, to my mind, a lot more attractive than the “Deus Vult” version.

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It was only my fourth or fifth service as an adult, and the first one where I felt something.

I pictured my father in a synagogue, reciting these words. His father, and the ones who came before him. I remembered my sister as a kid, squeaking out phrases like “v’tzivanu” at our seder—how in awe of her I was.

I realized how close I was to losing all of this. Or rather, never really having it in the first place. I’d never had a bat mitzvah, hardly recognized the prayers, but there I was in an ankle-length skirt, crying in shul, which is not where I would’ve expected to be on a Friday night a few years ago. But a lot has changed since October 7, 2023—and October 8—when I watched my peers, including my best friend, celebrate the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a righteous victory. The crack that opened that day has only widened. So has my determination to carry forward an ancient tradition that I was on track to abandon.

The story is this: My father is Jewish and my mother, who was born into an Episcopalian family, is an in-your-face atheist. She tells me that as a child in rural Indiana, she once rode her bike past a Pentecostal church. She heard screams, saw convulsions, and said religion gave her the “creeps” after that. My father grew up in a Jewish household in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, an advertising entrepreneur named Harold, was the first of my paternal line to be born in America. Before that, as far as anyone told me, it was generations of generic Shmuels and Rochels in the mists of Eastern Europe—shtetls all the way down. This country has given us safety and, at times, prosperity—but by the time I was born, there wasn’t much left of our heritage to pass down.

We observed Passover most years, maybe Yom Kippur, and were encouraged to develop our own creeds. In fourth grade, I rebelled against Hebrew school.

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This pregame prayer has been happening for as long as anyone can remember—and will continue without a hitch next fall when football season resumes, despite the fact that on January 31, Thrall’s school board voted unanimously not to introduce time for prayer into the school day.

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I can’t blame them. I’m not the most technologically astute person, and then there’s the issue of my ironic and detached disposition. “This is the most sincere thing you’ve EVER done since I’ve known you,” Jon texted me. We’ve been friends for the better part of 20 years. He’s my son’s godfather. I think he said that because he knew it would unnerve me.

It all started this past Friday when I read AI expert Dr. Alan D. Thompson’s thoughts on Anthropic’s latest version of its artificial intelligence (AI) program, Claude. “I don’t want to alarm anyone,” Thompson wrote, but “this model feels both superhuman and complete.”

Several other viral articles since then have contained similar “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we’re all about to die” observations. I’m no expert in these matters, but like just about everyone not named Sam Altman, I’m worried about the rise of the robots and how it stands to upend all our lives.

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Today, Stuckey is one of the most prominent voices on the Christian right. And last week, Hillary Clinton took aim at her in The Atlantic, casting Stuckey as the centerpiece of the MAGA movement’s so-called “war on empathy.” It’s a forceful essay, one that exposes a deeper clash between two visions of religious morality and the role it should play in public life. That’s one of the defining debates of this moment—which is why we invited Stuckey to respond. —Jillian Lederman

I’ll be honest: If I had made a list of predictions for 2026, being the target of a piece by Hillary Clinton in The Atlantic would not have made the cut.

But that’s exactly what happened.

In her essay last week titled “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” Clinton lambasted the Trump administration for the recent killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Their deaths, she said, encapsulate “a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?”

She continued: “The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right ‘Christian influencers’ who are waging a war on empathy.”

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But the revival is uneven. It’s happening online, and in many Catholic churches, and some Orthodox traditions. At the same time, across America, mainline Protestant churches—think American Baptists, Episcopalians, evangelical Lutherans—are dying. Sanctuaries once full of people worshipping side by side, without concern for political or cultural differences, now sit half empty. And political scientist and American Baptist pastor Ryan P. Burge has a theory about why.

In his brand-new book, The Vanishing Church, which is out January 13, Burge argues that the political polarization of American society has seeped into the pews, causing many to leave the kinds of churches long known for welcoming doubters and rejecting dogma. The consequences for the country, he warns in the following excerpt, could be catastrophic. —The Editors

Nine. There were nine people in the room, including myself. As I sat facing the congregation, listening to the pianist begin the service with a short prelude, I counted again. I didn’t want anyone else to know what I was doing—a pastor counting heads on a Sunday morning is never a good look—so I tried to bounce my eyes quickly around the room. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to count to nine. After I was satisfied that I hadn’t missed anyone hiding in the corners, the realization washed over me: It was the first Sunday we hadn’t broken double digits.

This was just over two years ago, at the end of 2023. By that point, I’d been the pastor at First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, for 17 years; when I began at age 24, it took two deacons to help me serve the bread and grape juice during Communion. Even a few years earlier, 30 faithful members would gather in this small room each Sunday to sing hymns, hear me muddle my way through a sermon, and recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed together. They were worshipping in the same building where many of them had seen their children baptized or said final goodbyes to spouses. The vast majority had gone through every life stage in that building on the north side of town. It was the one permanent thing in their lives.

But all these people had either died or moved away, and no one was coming in their place. Hence why, that Sunday morning, it was all too easy to find a seat. It only took about 90 seconds for me to make sure everyone was served the body and the blood.

Less than a year later, the church would hold its final worship service.

First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon wasn’t an anomaly. From 1972 to 2022, the share of Americans who belong to mainline Protestant churches—of which mine was one—declined from 31 percent to just 9 percent.

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We may erupt into an affair or splurge our life savings on a sports car. Me? I elected to stroll from my cottage into a nearby English forest at dusk for 101 days. My plan was to sit and listen, my back against a hazel tree.

I am a mythologist, a rather endangered species these days. I specialize in exploring the many layers of a myth or folktale, particularly those that are Irish and Arthurian. The tales of Beowulf, Baba Yaga, and Dionysus are rich with insight about the conditions of living and the kinds of monsters and blessings we may encounter along the way. But the problem with being an expert on anything is that you can become addicted to theory rather than direct encounter. It can get a little abstract in the lofty climbs of academia. After 25 years of touring, publishing books, and teaching at some of the great universities, I was bushed. I needed tangible contact with something that wasn’t a lecture hall or publishing deadline.

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But how can religion compel the secular? Political scientist Charles Murray knows the answer better than most—because it happened to him. For much of his life, he explains in his new book, Taking Religion Seriously, out October 14, he was one of the “well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant.”

But that’s changed. And in the following exclusive excerpt, Murray explains the very beginnings of his tiptoe toward religiosity. It all began, he says, in the early 2000s, with a series of nudges threatening to topple the secular catechisms he’d held all his life. —The Editors

I graduated from college in early June 1965 and flew to Hilo, Hawaii, for Peace Corps training the day after commencement. I left Hilo for my assignment with the Thai Ministry of Public Health’s Village Health and Sanitation Project in September. Except for a two-week visit home in 1968, I didn’t return to the U.S. until August 1970. In effect, I missed the years that Americans have in mind when they talk about “the ’60s.”

Over the course of those five years in Thailand, I got caught up in my generation’s attraction to transcendental meditation and set out to become enlightened or, failing that, reach some sort of meditative state. I tried, but it didn’t work. On those rare occasions when I came close to a meditative state, I could feel myself resisting. The idea of giving up that much of my autonomy scared me.

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Tollner, who i…

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Four people inside the church died. Ten were injured. Sanford was killed in a gunfight with police. Investigators said that Sanford, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, “hated people of the Mormon faith,” a sentiment reportedly tied to a failed relationship with a woman from the LDS church more than a decade ago.

The attack has shaken the small city of Grand Blanc, a suburb of Flint with a population of just under 8,000. Yet amid the devastation, something remarkable has emerged.

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It’s a poignant subject, made even more so by the location: Utah Valley University, the same campus where, just over two weeks earlier, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, triggering a wave of ugly celebrations and frenzied political finger-pointing.

Brooks offered a simple solution to this hostility, one deeply rooted in faith: Love your enemies. Why? It’s the only way to realize that they aren’t your enemies after all.

We’re honored to bring you an adapted version of that speech today. —The Editors

“Hatred among brothers and neighbors has now reduced sacred cities to sites of sorrow.” These are the words of the late Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, speaking in October of 2002.

Today, his words are eerily prophetic. Two weeks ago, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University, the very campus where I now stand. The tragedy has provoked a number of impossible questions. Among them: Why here?

Here’s a hypothesis: You have been chosen for a great and vital journey. You have been called to respond to this murder by following the most countercultural teaching in the history of humanity: to love our enemies.

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On June 13 in Yelwata, Nigeria, an Islamist militia murdered over 200 Christians in a brutal rampage before setting their homes on fire—leaving many bodies burned beyond recognition. Just before Easter, militants slaughtered 170 in the counties of Ukum and Logo.

Since 2009, Islamist extremists in northern Nigeria have destroyed more than 18,000 churches and killed over 50,000 Christians nationwide, according to a 2023 report by the Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law. And another 5 million Christians have been displaced within the country. In 2025 so far, over 7,000 Nigerian Christians have been killed.

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“That man, that young man, I forgive him. I forgive him because it’s what Christ did and it’s what Charlie would do.”

Erika Kirk spoke for 30 minutes—longer than anyone who took the stage, including President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. The focus of her eulogy was singular: America needs a revival. And that is what her husband would have wanted more than anything else.

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I was involved in student government, ran recruitment for the Interfraternity Council, and once liked Mitt Romney’s Facebook page. At Oregon, that was enough to make me a recruit.

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But at what cost? That’s the subject of Paul Kingsnorth’s forthcoming book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, out September 23. We’re delighted to be publishing an exclusive excerpt today.

Every culture, Kingsnorth writes, is built around a sacred order. For 1,500 years, the West’s sacred order has been its founding biblical story, which shaped the working week, our understanding of the universe, and the very notion of individuals with God-given rights.

But over the past several decades, we’ve abandoned that sacred order in favor of the breakneck pursuit of wealth, innovation, and power. In the process, we’ve become spiritually bankrupt, grasping for meaning and roots even as we build skyscrapers to the heavens.

Today, we leave you with a question at the heart of his work: When the West’s sacred order falls, what takes its place? —The Editors

Let me tell you a story.

This story begins in a garden, at the very beginning of all things. All life can be found in this garden: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen and heard and spoken to. Everything walks in the garden together. Everything is in communion.

At the center of this garden grows a tree, the fruit of which imparts hidden knowledge. The humans—the last creatures to be formed by the creator—will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain its knowledge and be able to use that knowledge wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation they are only partially formed.

Do not eat that fruit, the creator tells them. Eat anything else you like, but not that.

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The child was born at what is now King’s Sutton, in Northamptonshire, to noble parents. Only three days were given to St. Rumwold, and in them he touched eternity. In a rose-filled field surrounded by servants’ tents, his high, unchildlike voice demanded baptism from a priest (or perhaps a bishop) named Widerin, asked to hear Mass, and preached a sermon in which he urged his listeners not to participate in ambushes or to mock the persons we now call “intellectually disabled.”

Finally realizing that he would soon find himself entering heaven rather early, Rumwold made arrangements for his own funeral, even predicting that the place where his bones would lie would one day be known as Buckingham. “In that same meadow where St. Rumwold was baptized,” his hagiographer tells us, “there never ceases to be the loveliest fragrance, and the grasses neither fade nor wither but remain always green and are redolent of sweet nectar.”

I found myself thinking of St. Rumwold’s legend as I read about the Church’s recent canonization of St. Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old Italian boy who died in 2006. The first saints whose feasts are recorded in the liturgical calendar were children. The Holy Innocents, whose slaughter is recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel, were the spiritual ancestors of hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of children said to have been burned, beheaded, deprived of their ears and noses, or flung down staircases in late antiquity. It is only during the Middle Ages that we see the emergence of a now more familiar type: child saints who, like Rumwold, were not martyred.

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I grew up in Egypt’s Coptic Christian community; once a year my church would pile us into a bus for our annual pilgrimage to the monastery. But the standing of this holy place is now at grave risk.

In May, an Egyptian court ruled that the monastery’s monks are mere “occupants,” allowing the state to essentially take control of what is—and is not—allowed at St. Catherine’s, and stripping the monks of all legal authority. With enough pressure, they may be forced to abandon the monastery altogether.

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“We’re here to pray,” says Cyriaque, 25, who came to the capital from the country’s southwest. “It will be fun.”

Cyriaque is one of about 20,000 limber young Catholics—and a few stiffer older ones—about to embark on a pilgrimage to the cathedral of Chartres, 62 miles southwest of Paris. The annual Pentecost trek—the 43rd such march in modern times—is a moving youth festival of old-fashioned Catholicism, featuring hymns, devotions, and the Latin Mass. It’s Woodstock for Catholic traditionalists, if Jimi Hendrix had been a Benedictine monk singing Gregorian chant.

“People just want to find something outside of their day-to-day life,” explains Cyriaque. “They’re looking for transcendence.”

Hence the Latin Mass: It’s the “most beautiful,” he says.

In the past decade, the Latin-language rite—which was made the standard liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church in 1570—has been at the center of an apparent Catholic awakening among young people, from France to America. 

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