There’s a Fox News piece making the rounds today about truckers being pulled off Florida highways for failing English proficiency tests. Embedded cameras, a federal ride-along, dramatic exchanges where truckers respond “No” to questions about road signs. The framing is immigration crisis. The subtext is danger on the roads.

But if you slow down and read it carefully, the article dismantles its own premise three times before you even reach the case studies.

The most revealing moment in the piece isn’t what’s reported. It’s what’s missing.

At the 2026 Oscars, actor Ethan Hawke was asked on the red carpet for advice about unrequited love — a fitting question, since he was nominated for playing Lorenz Hart, a man who loved deeply and was never quite loved back. His answer went viral almost immediately.

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken; you’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays, right? It just keeps on shining. That’s you.”

Almost immediately, the internet split. Half the comments were “this changed my life.” The other half were: easy for a man to say who allegedly cheated on Uma Thurman.

There’s a mythology at work in American energy policy right now, and it goes something like this: fossil fuels are power. The more we produce, the more we burn, the more pipelines we build — the more dominant we become. It sounds like empire. It isn’t.

The British didn’t conquer half the world because they loved pepper — they did it by controlling trade routes, monopoly charters, and the chokepoints between producers and consumers. They ate roughly the same amount of pepper before and after the East India Company. What changed was who paid whom to move it. They sat between supply and demand and charged a toll in wealth, labor, and sovereignty. The spice wasn’t the point. The dependency was.

If you want to use a resource to dominate other nations, you don’t consume it. You hoard it, control it, ration it, and make others come to you. You make yourself the chokepoint. That’s how resource imperialism actually works.

It started, as many arguments do, on the internet. A science page posted the classic bait question: which is more painful, childbirth or getting kicked in the groin? Predictably, a chorus of men arrived in the comments armed with a curious argument: nobody asks to be kicked, therefore it must hurt more.

The logic collapses on contact — nobody asks for kidney stones either, or bone fractures, or the kind of grief that makes it hard to breathe. Voluntariness has nothing to do with the intensity of pain. But embedded in the comment thread, almost as an aside, was the point that actually matters: women were historically denied pain medication because doctors assumed they could handle it better. That throwaway line contains an entire archive of atrocity.

This is not ancient history. It is one of the foundations on which American medicine was built.

There is something deeply satisfying about saying it out loud. He’s going to hell. After years of watching cruelty get baptized as righteousness, after watching children separated from their parents get shrugged off by people who claim to follow Jesus, after watching powerful men mock the deaths of people who simply did their jobs — the words feel like justice. They feel like prophecy. They feel like finally telling the truth in a room full of people pretending not to see it.

A recent video making the rounds declares, with theological framing, that Donald Trump is going to hell. I understand the impulse completely. Some days I share it.

But I want to sit with why it’s still the wrong move — not because it’s impolite, and not because we should sand down our witness to avoid offending the comfortable. It’s wrong because it claims knowledge we don’t have, and because Scripture is actually quite clear about who gets to make that call.

Pick up almost any evangelical sermon on 1 Timothy 1:8–11 and you will hear the same argument: the Law is not for the righteous. It is for murderers, fornicators, kidnappers, liars, sodomites. The implication is clear. Decent, church-going people are not the problem. The problem is out there, in the culture, among people who have not yet submitted to sound doctrine.

That reading is comfortable. It is also radically incomplete. And the proof is not in progressive theology or modern scholarship. It is in the Old Testament itself, in the prophets, and in the words of Jesus.

The passage includes “sodomites” in its list of lawbreakers. In modern usage, that word has come to mean one specific thing: male homosexual conduct. But that meaning is largely a product of later interpretation, not what the Biblical texts themselves specify.

There is a persistent idea in Christian circles that justice means punishment, and that mercy is what you extend instead of punishment when you’re feeling generous. By this logic, a society that goes easy on criminals is a society that has been seduced by sentimentality. What we need, the argument goes, is consequences. Law and order. The firm hand.

It sounds rigorous. It sounds biblical. But it has a significant problem: it only ever seems to notice crime flowing in one direction.

To be clear: harm matters at every level of society. When someone wrongs another person — regardless of their circumstances — that wrong is real and deserves to be named. The question is not whether justice matters. The question is whether our theology of justice is actually as biblical as we think it is, or whether we’ve selectively applied it in ways the prophets would not recognize.

There is a small cultural script that plays out over and over again.

A controversy breaks out around who is “allowed” to tell a particular story. The conversation quickly narrows to identity: who is on stage, who is not, who is permitted, who is not. Before long, the substance of the work itself — the accuracy, the tone, the care — has disappeared entirely. The controversy has replaced the content.

The recent dispute over Annette Hubbell’s one-woman historical show is a clean example of this script in action — and also, if you look carefully, a case study in where it breaks down.

There is a version of the prosperity gospel that never gets called that.

It doesn’t involve private jets or seed faith offerings. It wears thoughtful literary prose and gets published in respected evangelical magazines. It quotes C.S. Lewis. It is written by serious scholars with genuine pastoral intentions.

But it does the same thing the prosperity gospel always does: it takes human suffering, runs it through a theological framework, and hands it back to you as a lesson about contentment.

Last week, Dave Ramsey told Fox Business that Corporate America has screwed young people out of the housing market. He cited record-high car loans, student debt, and credit card balances as the forces draining the disposable income young Americans need to buy a home.

He’s not entirely wrong about the debt. But he’s framing it in a way that obscures a more uncomfortable truth: you could follow every piece of Dave Ramsey’s advice — no credit cards, no car payments, no student loans, emergency fund fully stocked — and still not be able to afford a house. Not because of your choices. Because of math.

Take a worker earning $20 an hour. That’s not poverty. In most of the country, that’s a decent wage. Annualized, it comes to roughly $41,600. After taxes, take-home is around $34,000.

Christianity Today is keeping an eye on this summer’s denominational conventions. The SBC. The LCMS. The ACNA. The CREC. The Global Methodist Church. Millions of churchgoers represented. Dozens of decisions to be made. Abuse investigations on the agenda.

Here is what they will not tell you: the abuse survivors are women. And the women will be ignored.

This is not a prediction. It is a pattern so well-established that predicting it is barely different from reading last year’s minutes.

Russell Moore recently wrote that “a church severed from empathy is a church lacking the compassion of Jesus, but it is also a church unable to call people to repentance of sin.” It’s a good line. Theologically coherent, pastorally honest, and — given the tradition Moore is addressing — genuinely courageous to say out loud.

But it contains an assumption worth examining.

It assumes the problem is a deficit of empathy. That somewhere along the way, white evangelical Christianity lost its capacity to feel. That the corrective is to restore something that went missing.

If you’ve spent any time in gamer culture, you know the legend of Leroy Jenkins. His teammates are mid-strategy session, calculating risks, assigning roles, coordinating the plan — and Leroy just charges in screaming his own name. Everyone dies. Leroy shrugs.

On March 19, 2026, a Japanese reporter asked President Trump why the United States hadn’t informed its allies before striking Iran.

Trump’s response, delivered in front of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi:

There is a long tradition in Christian and Jewish education of treating the patriarchal narratives as stories of heroes — men of faith whose missteps are either minimized or spiritualized into object lessons about grace. Jacob wrestles with God and is celebrated. Joseph is sold into slavery and becomes a type of Christ. The moral texture of what actually happened tends to fade behind the theological payoff.

But the Torah does not ask us to ignore what happened. It records these stories in unflinching detail, and it gives us a legal framework — the Mosaic covenant — that names what these actions were. Yes, the law came after the patriarchs. The anachronism is intentional. The Torah is not simply reporting history; it is interpreting it. When Moses receives the commandment against kidnapping and selling a fellow Israelite, the reader is meant to remember Joseph’s brothers. When the law condemns wage theft and contract fraud, Laban’s face is in the background.

This piece catalogs the specific violations in two episodes: Jacob’s years of labor under Laban, and the brothers’ trafficking of Joseph. In each case we will name the act, identify the applicable law, and let the text speak.

Here is the uncomfortable thing someone needs to say out loud: organized crime ran a better town.

Not a safer town. Not a cleaner town. Not a town where the books were honest or the violence stayed theoretical. The mob controlled Las Vegas from the 1940s through the early 1980s with guns, skims, Teamsters pension funds, and the occasional car bomb in a casino parking lot. Nobody is disputing that. The workers who crossed them, the rivals who encroached, the debts that went unpaid — those people were not protected by the hospitality philosophy. The system had victims, and it had coercion running beneath every surface that looked generous.

But here is what they also did for everyone else: they comped your room. They charged five dollars for a steak. They put Frank Sinatra in the showroom and covered the ticket. They knew your name at the front desk. They built a hospital with a Teamsters loan. They bought uniforms for local kids’ sports teams. They paid hospital bills for employees with sick children — not as policy, but as relationship.

There is a reason most Americans only know Eva Perón through a Madonna film and a Broadway ballad. The musical is gorgeous. The woman was not.

This is not an accident. History has a well-documented habit of softening its female wielders of power. Male authoritarians get clinical analysis — thick biographies, documentary series, university syllabi dedicated to understanding how they built what they built. Female ones get musicals. Cleopatra gets Elizabeth Taylor. Mary Queen of Scots gets Cate Blanchett. And Eva Perón — a central architect of a political machine that helped shape decades of Argentine instability — gets Andrew Lloyd Webber, Rachel Zegler singing from a London balcony, and a generation of people whose entire frame of reference is “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.”

That song is a lie. Argentina should cry. It has been crying for seventy years.

Economic systems that rely on artificially cheap human labor tend to underinvest in tools and infrastructure. The pattern is consistent across history: when labor is treated as the default solution, capital investment slows.

The American South before the Civil War is one example. Slavery reduced the economic pressure to mechanize agriculture — why engineer a solution to a problem you’ve already solved with people? The region fell behind the industrial North not just morally but technologically, and spent generations recovering from that deficit.

Russia is perhaps the cleaner case. Serfdom kept Russian agriculture and industry in a kind of suspended development for centuries. It was not until the emancipation of 1861 — and more pointedly, the labor pressures and revolts that followed — that Russian industrialization began in earnest. Workers gaining rights didn’t destroy the economy. It forced investment in the infrastructure and tools that a coerced labor system had made unnecessary. The industrialization came because the cheap human substitute was no longer available.

The easiest way to dismiss sexism in politics is to call it fringe. A bad speech. A loud voice. An exception.

That explanation no longer holds.

It’s not on the margins anymore. It’s in the room where policy is being written.

On March 19, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a Pentagon podium — having just returned from Dover Air Force Base, where he watched flag-draped caskets come off a plane — and closed his remarks with this: “May Almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight. To the American people, please pray for them every day on bended knee with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”

It was not the first time. In a CBS News interview days earlier, Hegseth had declared that “the providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops.” At another Pentagon briefing he recited Psalm 144: “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” The man has tattoos of the Jerusalem Cross and the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” — “God wills it” — on his body. He has hosted monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon. He invited his pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who believes the United States should become a Christian theocracy, to address the U.S. military.

This is not incidental rhetoric. It is a theological claim: that Operation Epic Fury — the surprise U.S.-Israeli assault launched on February 28 CNN without congressional authorization, over the objections of European allies and while indirect nuclear negotiations were showing substantial progress House of Commons Library — carries divine sanction. That God himself is blessing this fight. In the name of Jesus Christ.

There’s a sentence you learn to say in certain church circles. You learn it the way you learn not to slam doors — not because anyone sits you down and explains it, but because you watch what happens to people who don’t say it.

The sentence is: “Good people can disagree on this.”

Said about women in ministry. Said about whether a seminary should ordain her, whether a pulpit should hold her, whether a title should name her. Said with a kind of weary reasonableness, as though the person saying it has personally wrestled long and hard and arrived at magnanimity.