That was what John Porras, a 39-year-old former Marine, told me on my first day at 252 The Weekend, a Christian men’s retreat.

I arrived last Friday morning at 9 a.m.—just in time for the morning worship session, which kicked off not with a prayer, but with a cup-stacking contest. Under a large tent, 580 men sat rapt, watching six guys on a stage competing to build the highest red Solo cup tower. Other challenges scheduled for the weekend would include a bench press competition and an obstacle course—the winner of which, I was told, would have his name engraved on a sword.

Run by a New Jersey-based megachurch called Transform Church, 252 The Weekend is named for Luke 2:52. It’s the only Bible verse that references what Jesus, who began his pastoral work when he was about 30, got up to as a teenager and a twentysomething: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” The verse is the weekend’s blueprint, in the words of Transform Church founder and senior pastor Anthony Fleming, who created and runs the retreat, which is now in its fifth year; the aim is “for boys to become young men, and for young men to become great men.”

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I am curious about Christianity myself, and have noticed changes lately, conversations with young people who were raised as atheists and almost wish they hadn’t been, who wonder what it would have been like to grow up with more guidance and guardrails. That does seem new, different from even when I was a teenager. But part of me is still skeptical. For a while, I thought my generation might be finding God. Now I worry we are just finding content about God.

There is a lot of Christian content online. Learning about the faith feels easier than ever: Follow Christian influencers, listen to Christian podcasts, scroll through Christian hashtags; the Bible is bite-size now! Of course, this has been happening for a long time, Christianity being made easier and more convenient. Neil Postman warned in the 1980s that TV was turning faith into a form of entertainment. But now it feels as if all of Christianity can be done on a screen. To stay connected with God, all we need to do is subscribe, download, press play.

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From outside San Francisco, the joke is sometimes heard as a reflection of spiritual lacking—that the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a stand-in for a God-shaped hole, that clever technologists who reasoned their way out of the old faith are now building an idol to fill the vacancy. I do not think that is quite what is happening. People need meaning, and intense, world-shaping work is one of the oldest ways to find it; that part is not new and often not sinister. What is different here is that this particular work sits so close to the old questions—what are we, where did this come from, what comes after—that you cannot do it long without staring into them. They are not building God because they miss Him. They are building something that has brought them, unexpectedly, to the edge of where He would be.

AI workers tend to be less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. They are mostly lapsed in their faith, or were never religious to begin with. Perhaps they were circumcised or baptized; now they may occasionally meditate. This is, for the most part, a materialist lot—by which I mean people for whom the world is atoms and physical laws with nothing supernatural left over, and for whom morality is something worked out from intuition or from philosophy, rather than received from outside the world.

Their work is fascinating and all-consuming. Some are exhausted, and some do fear what they are making—loss of control, misuse, the economic disruption it may bring—but largely, their days are good and full. By any ordinary measure, there is little here to search for.

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Im ye’hareg b’mikdash adonai, cohen ve’navi. Shall a priest and prophet be murdered in the sacred space of G-d?! (Lam. 2:20)

Sacrilege. Desecration. Abomination. These are the words beneath the tears and disbelief that I felt. The news from San Diego is, unfortunately, very familiar. I serve as the founder and senior rabbi of Romemu, a pluralistic post-denominational Jewish congregation in New York City. In the course of my rabbinate, there have been countless moments like this one, mourning lives lost to violent bigotry and hate.

The Jewish tradition is in awe of human life; no earthly phenomenon is more precious or more reflective of divine majesty. Every life is a universe. Every human being is B’tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God. The great Rabbi Yitz Greenberg understands this to mean that all people are endowed with three inalienable dignities: infinite value, equality, and uniqueness. Human life is infinitely worthy, and thus the violence that occurred on Monday morning is a desecration that defies description. Language is insufficient. The actions of these two young men, rooted in ideologies of hate, can never be excused or justified. Full stop.

And our willingness to say so cannot falter or fail based on our politics or our differences with the victims.

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Earlier this week, President Trump paid homage to this heritage when he included in his Jewish American Heritage Month proclamation a call for American Jews to “observe a national Sabbath” from May 15 to 16 to coincide with religious celebrations around the nation’s 250th birthday. This is an invitation worth taking seriously.

For much of the 20th century, a powerful school of thought treated the Founders as though they intended religion and state to be hermetically sealed spheres set apart by Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation.” That view captured part of the American story, but not the whole of it. The Founders prohibited religious tests and the federal establishment of religion, but also opened public proceedings with prayer, appointed chaplains, and came from states with laws that protected the Christian Sabbath. Their aim was not to rid public life of religion, but to prevent the state from coercing conscience.

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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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