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When Everything Is Free

Noah Hawley’s recent essay in The Atlantic , “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” is not finally about luxury. Private jets, elite guests, curated conversation, and expensive weather are part of the tableau, but they are not the burden of the piece. Hawley is after something deeper and more unsettling: what happens to the human soul when consequence begins to disappear. His most memorable line is also his thesis: for the richest men on earth, “everything is free and nothing matters.” That sentence deserves to be heard not only as cultural criticism but as theological diagnosis. The biblical tradition has older language for the condition Hawley describes. It calls it having “no fear of God.” That phrase is easily misunderstood. In modern ears, “fear of God” can sound like terror, coercion, or religious manipulation. But in Scripture the fear of the Lord is usually something more like reverence, humility, and answerability. It is the knowledge that one ...
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​When Scripture Becomes Stage Prop

On Ezekiel,  Pulp Fiction,  and the temptation to turn holy words into spectacle There is something revealing about the recent controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of “Ezekiel 25:17” language in a Pentagon worship service. The immediate issue is easy enough to name. The words he used were not, in any full sense, the words of Ezekiel. The biblical verse is short and severe: “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord.” In context, it belongs to Ezekiel’s oracle against Philistia, within a larger set of judgments against the nations. It is prophetic speech arising out of the trauma of exile, and its point is not human bravado but divine sovereignty. But biblical language has a way of wandering. In  Pulp Fiction , Ezekiel 25:17 was expanded into one of the most memorable monologues in modern film. The opening lines about “the path of the righteous man,” the “tyranny of evil men,” and being...
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The Stranger and the Moral Life of a People

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, timed to the release of her new book Once Upon a Stranger , offers a modest and welcome claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and allow a nervous inner monologue to keep us from simple acts of human contact. Sandstrom’s larger argument is that small conversations can widen a life, ease loneliness, and strengthen human flourishing.   That is sensible advice for an anxious age. But the biblical tradition has always pressed the matter further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a possible contributor to our well-being. The stranger is a test of public morality. That is a stronger claim than modern therapeutic language usually permits. We prefer to talk about social connection in terms of mood, confidence, resilience, and mental health. Those are not unimportant matters. But the Jewish and Christian traditions have long un...
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When Strangers Interrupt Us

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, occasioned by her new book Once Upon a Stranger, makes a simple claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and forget how much ordinary human contact can enlarge a day. Sandstrom’s research-based counsel is practical and humane. Most of us, she suggests, are carrying around a nervous inner narrator that warns us not to speak first, not to risk embarrassment, not to cross the little invisible boundaries of modern life. And so we pass one another by.   That is sound psychological advice for an age of loneliness. But the religious tradition goes further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a missed opportunity for self-improvement. The stranger is a theological event. That may sound like too much weight to place on a passing encounter in a waiting room, a coffee shop, or a church narthex. But the biblical imagination has always ...
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When Strangers Interrupt Us

A recent Vox interview with psychologist Gillian Sandstrom, occasioned by her new book Once Upon a Stranger , makes a simple claim: talking to strangers is usually better for us than we think. We tend to overestimate the awkwardness, underestimate the rewards, and forget how much ordinary human contact can enlarge a day. Sandstrom’s research-based counsel is practical and humane. Most of us, she suggests, are carrying around a nervous inner narrator that warns us not to speak first, not to risk embarrassment, not to cross the little invisible boundaries of modern life. And so we pass one another by.   That is sound psychological advice for an age of loneliness. But the religious tradition goes further. In Scripture, the stranger is not merely a missed opportunity for self-improvement. The stranger is a theological event. That may sound like too much weight to place on a passing encounter in a waiting room, a coffee shop, or a church narthex. But the biblical imagination has alway...
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When Work Becomes a Religion

AI may not only disrupt labor markets. It may expose how much modern people have asked work to do for the soul. A recent essay by Sam Lessin argues that AI’s deepest danger is not mainly unemployment, but meaninglessness. The real threat, he suggests, is that AI may automate enough “useful” labor to weaken one of modern society’s central moral stories: that effort leads to contribution, contribution to dignity, and dignity to a life that makes sense. Public debate, in his view, is tracking the wrong metric. Economists measure wages, productivity, and job displacement. Lessin thinks the more consequential question is what happens when people no longer feel needed. “Meaning is not some luxury layer on top of life,” he writes. “It is the critical input.”   That diagnosis is sharper than much current AI commentary. We have become accustomed to asking economic questions: How many jobs will be lost? Which sectors will grow? Will abundance increase? Those are real questions. But they are ...
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After the Argument

What Julia Minson’s research on disagreement may have to teach the church Churches often say they want honesty. We ask for feedback, invite discernment, and speak warmly about community. We tell ourselves that the church should be a place where people can speak the truth in love. Yet anyone who has sat through enough vestry meetings, parish forums, search committees, or pastoral conversations knows how fragile that aspiration can be. Julia Minson, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies what she calls the “psychology of disagreement,” has spent years examining why arguments go wrong and what helps people remain in conversation when they do not see eye to eye. Her work is timely in a polarized public culture, but it also names something painfully familiar in congregational life: the subtle ways people stop listening long before a conversation officially ends.  One of Minson’s key themes is an older psychological insight called “naive realism.” We tend to assume that we are se...
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