There’s a particular species of ingratitude that isn’t really ingratitude at all — or at least, it doesn’t feel that way to the person doing it. It feels like discernment. Like wisdom. Like finally having enough of a foothold to have standards.

I’ve been watching it up close lately, and I want to write about it because I think it’s one of the more quietly devastating things that happens between people who love each other.

Here’s how it works.

A recent headline reported a striking statement from Pete Hegseth about the escalating conflict with Iran.

“More casualties are expected… casualties stiffen our spine and our resolve to finish the fight.”

Read that sentence slowly.

One of the most repeated lines in modern political rhetoric goes like this: “The trouble with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.” The phrase is attributed to Margaret Thatcher, and it gets repeated whenever someone wants to dismiss public spending as naïve or irresponsible.

The line works because it sounds like common sense. It conjures a picture of the economy as a collection of separate piles of wealth — a productive pile and a dependent pile — and warns that the dependent pile will eventually drain the productive one dry.

But that picture of the economy is wrong. And understanding why it’s wrong turns out to matter quite a lot right now.

There’s a headline making the rounds from Christianity Today: “In Our Anger Era: Too Many Americans Stay Enraged Rather than Seeking Help.” The article, published in August 2024, opens with this framing:

“More Americans than ever are seeking help for mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But they seem to be avoiding help for another emotion, even though it comes up across life stages and can be destructive: anger.”

One counselor quoted in the piece offers an analogy for good and bad anger: “It’s okay for a kid to be angry, but it’s not okay for them to harm another child in their anger. It’s okay to feel it, but how they express it matters.”

There is a man in the New Testament named Eutychus. He appears in Acts 20, sitting in a third-floor window while the Apostle Paul preaches. Paul, we are told, “talked on and on.” And Eutychus, overcome with sleep, falls out of the window to his death.

Paul goes down, raises him from the dead, then goes back upstairs and keeps talking until dawn.

This story is in the Bible. It is not presented as a cautionary tale about the dangers of long sermons. But it is hard to read it without noticing that the early church had the same problem we have: someone in the back, tuning out, in danger of falling.

Here is a question worth sitting with.

When the United States launched strikes against Iran’s leadership, much of the Christian Nationalist movement cited Romans 13 in support. Governing authority is God’s instrument. The state bears the sword for good reason. Support your government.

When the international community — representing the governing authorities of most of the nations on earth — condemned those same strikes as unlawful and destabilizing, that condemnation was dismissed. Globalism. Anti-Americanism. Irrelevant.

There are two verses in Scripture that sit uneasily beside each other.

“As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why will you die, O house of Israel?” — Ezekiel 33:11

“When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices; and when the wicked perish, there is jubilation.” — Proverbs 11:10

The word Anglosphere has been everywhere this week. It appears in foreign-policy commentary, in arguments about alliances, and — most recently — in angry recriminations about who did and didn’t show up for Operation Epic Fury.

The implication is usually clear: there is supposed to be a natural unity among certain countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — because they share language, institutions, and history. And when that unity fails to materialize, the conclusion drawn is not that the war lacked justification, or that the process was flawed, but that the allies were pathetic. That they betrayed the family.

That framing deserves scrutiny. So does the war that produced it.

I’ve heard this argument before. Not a version of it — this exact one. The names change, the decade changes, the country changes. But the argument is always the same: we have unfinished business. Someone humiliated us. Now we’re finally strong enough to settle it.

Here we go again.

I was standing in a high school hallway around 2010 watching an Army recruiter work a small group of teenagers. He was good at it — confident, friendly, knew how to read a room. And then he invoked 9/11. Leaned into it, actually. The weight of it, the wound of it, the obligation of it.

A recent post from Christianity Today made the rounds with a well-meaning message for spiritual leaders: addressing women’s health issues might feel uncomfortable, especially if you’re not a woman yourself — but every time you avoid it, you miss a chance to show God’s love. It was framed as an encouragement. A gentle nudge toward growth.

But there’s a problem with that framing. A serious one.

Treating discomfort around women’s health as a relatable quirk to work through doesn’t encourage growth. It normalizes a failure of professionalism that, in any other context, we would recognize as a red flag.

When India’s Allahabad High Court ruled in January 2026 that no government permission is required to conduct prayer meetings on private premises, it delivered a judgment that was constitutionally sound, theologically appropriate — and quietly devastating to a certain kind of persecution narrative.

The court was clear: private worship is fully protected under Article 25 of India’s Constitution. What is not automatically guaranteed is the right to extend that worship onto public roads and public property without prior notice to authorities. The ruling drew a simple, reasonable line — and in doing so, exposed a more uncomfortable one: the line between genuine religious persecution and the grievance of losing public dominance.

That distinction matters enormously, not just in India but in the United States, where Christianity has become increasingly weaponized as a political identity — and where the loudest voices claiming persecution are often the least engaged with what Christianity actually demands of its followers.

There was no address to the nation. No prime-time speech. No solemn walk to the podium. Instead, on a February evening, the President of the United States announced that American forces had struck Iran — in coordination with Israel — with an eight-minute post on Truth Social. Bombs had already fallen. People were already dead.

This is what it looks like when a businessman goes to war: fast, transactional, and with little apparent concern for the constitutional architecture designed to make such decisions slow by intention.

What followed — the legal justifications, the congressional responses, the international condemnation — tells us something important not just about this moment, but about where American democracy and global order may be heading.

I grew up hearing the playground rhyme:

Girls go to college To get more knowledge Boys go to Jupiter To get more stupider.

It was harmless nonsense. A sing-song jab. Nobody cried about educational collapse because of it.

Verse 1

If Deborah speaks, the sky will crack,
The stars will fall and not come back,
The moon will blush, the sun will flee,
This ain’t how it was meant to be
If Priscilla explains the Word,
Heaven trembles, so I’ve heard,
The throne of God might shift an inch—
We simply can’t take that risk.

Pre-Chorus

There’s a difference between using technology to expand your mission and using technology to protect your margins.

And readers can tell the difference.

When a struggling local newsroom experiments with AI to survive, most people understand the pressure. Journalism’s business model has been collapsing for twenty years. Ad revenue evaporated. Classifieds moved online. Facebook swallowed distribution. The pie shrank.

Someone you loved has died.

Maybe they went to church their whole life and drifted in the last decade. Maybe they never went at all. Maybe they said things in their final years that made you wonder. Maybe they were angry at God, or angry at the church, or just — quiet. Unreachable on the subject.

And now they’re gone, and you are standing in the middle of your grief carrying a question you didn’t ask for:

Two women can grow tired of each other without it becoming a moral indictment.

This used to be common knowledge.

You move.
You have children.
Your schedules stop aligning.
You realize the group dynamic feels competitive.
You notice you don’t leave gatherings feeling better.

On Saturday morning, as Iranian schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve sat in their classrooms at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, a missile reduced their building to rubble. Iranian state media reported a death toll approaching 165 children. The U.S. and Israel said they were checking into the reports. The school, it emerged, was near an IRGC naval base — as if proximity to a military target might eventually explain away the screaming in the footage that human rights organizations have already verified.

On the same day, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — the man who had ruled Iran for 36 years, overseeing executions of gay men, the brutal suppression of the 2022 women’s uprising, and the imprisonment of journalists, artists, and reformers — was killed in the joint U.S.-Israeli strike. His daughter, grandchild, and son-in-law died alongside him. Iran declared 40 days of mourning. Across social media, Iranians who had suffered under his rule wept with relief.

Both of these things are true at once. That is the nature of this moment, and the reason it demands more honesty than most public commentary is currently offering.

A woman recently shared that she had read five books in ten years.

Not because she was busy. Not because she had children. Not because she lacked interest.

Because her husband felt it was rude.

Every year, around this time, the internet rediscovers that Ash Wednesday “isn’t in the Bible.” Someone makes a graphic. Red X marks appear. Matthew gets misquoted. And a thousand Christians who just came from a Wednesday morning service wipe the smudge off their foreheads and scroll past it.

They’re not wrong, exactly — the critics. Ash Wednesday isn’t commanded in the New Testament. Neither is the word “Trinity.” Neither is the practice of singing hymns in four-part harmony, or having a church building with pews, or calling the person who leads your congregation a “pastor.” Many of the forms through which Christians practice their faith are not found in explicit biblical legislation. That’s kind of the point.