There is a particular kind of American who believes deeply in self-reliance. He distrusts government handouts. He thinks welfare creates dependency. He has strong opinions about people who take public money for private choices. He voted for every candidate who promised to cut food stamps, reform Medicaid, and make people earn their benefits.

He also just applied for his child’s Empowerment Scholarship Account.

Arizona’s ESA program — a universal, no-income-limit transfer of state tax dollars to families who choose private or home education — is now approaching $1 billion per year in spending. It is, by any straightforward definition, a welfare program. It is a cash transfer from taxpayers to private individuals for a personal consumption choice. It has no means test. It is available to millionaires. And it is overwhelmingly used by people who were already making the choice it subsidizes.

There’s a meme going around. You’ve probably seen it. A man, looking haggard and noble, captioned with something like: I work 60 hours a week, pay for dinner, fix things around the house... The implication being that he is doing his part. That somewhere in a cosmic ledger, the scales are balanced.

There’s a counter-meme too. A new mom listing everything her body has been through — pregnancy, labor, postpartum recovery, breastfeeding at 3am, navigating a hormonal landscape that would level most people — and concluding that she shouldn’t have to pay for dinner.

Both memes have the same disease.

Cynicism has no imagination.

It can diagnose. It can indict. It can predict, with remarkable accuracy, exactly how people will fail you again. What it cannot do — what it is structurally incapable of doing — is picture repentance. And a Christianity that cannot picture repentance has lost something absolutely essential to its identity.

Russell Moore wrote recently that cynicism “filters out not only the genuine danger and fakeness we rightly want to avoid — it filters out everything and everyone.” That’s true as far as it goes. But the deeper problem is what gets filtered out first: the vision of what people could become. Once that’s gone, we stop being prophets and start being prosecutors. We stop calling people toward something and start simply cataloguing their failures.

There’s a conversation happening in Christian circles about ethnicity, cultural identity, and the new creation. It’s an important conversation. But it keeps running into a problem: nobody can answer the most basic question it raises.

What does “culture-transcending worship” actually look like in practice?

Not in theory. Not as a theological abstraction. In practice. On a Sunday morning. With real people who have names and ancestors and foods they grew up eating. What are some specific examples?

On live television Tuesday, JD Vance flatly denied that the Trump administration has removed Black history from public spaces. The documented record — including a federal court ruling issued four days earlier — tells a different story.

When Vice President JD Vance appeared on The View on June 16, 2026, he came prepared with a book to promote and a posture of calm reassurance. But when co-host Whoopi Goldberg pressed him about the Trump administration’s removal of Black history from federal spaces, Vance denied it.

“Black history is not erased from public spaces,” he said.

When UFC heavyweight Josh Hokit finished his post-fight interview on the White House lawn Sunday night, he didn’t reach for something new. He reached for something ancient.

“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

The crowd at UFC Freedom 250 — an event billed as a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary — responded with a mixture of cheers, laughter, and some boos. Joe Rogan, standing feet away, said nothing. Donald Trump, seated cageside, was seen smiling. And just like that, one of the oldest racist lies in American history was laundered through a sporting event, broadcast on Paramount+, and gifted a national audience.

This week, Sweden’s parliament passed two sweeping pieces of immigration legislation. The first — quickly dubbed the “good behavior law” — allows authorities to revoke residency permits retroactively for things like unpaid debts, undeclared work, or vague associations with “extremist organizations.” The second, the so-called “snitch law,” passed by the razor-thin margin of 174 votes to 172, and will require employees of tax authorities, employment agencies, and social insurance offices to report anyone they suspect is undocumented to the police.

Rights groups have called them arbitrary, cruel, and a threat to the rule of law. The Swedish government calls them necessary. Both things can contain some truth. But the debate around these laws has obscured a much older, much less comfortable question: how did Sweden — once the world’s model welfare state, a self-declared “humanitarian superpower” — arrive at a place where its parliament is legislating informants into the public sector?

Across the developed world right now, a remarkably consistent story is playing out. Deindustrialization hollows out working-class communities. Wages stagnate. Public services deteriorate through decades of underfunding. Housing becomes unaffordable. Then immigrants arrive into that already-stressed environment — and become the explanation for problems that preceded them, sometimes by decades.

The Authors Guild recently updated its AI best practices for writers. It is a careful, well-intentioned document, and it is built on a contradiction it never quite faces directly.

The document wants to create a spectrum. At one end, copying AI output directly into your manuscript is bad. At the other end, using AI for grammar checks is fine. In the middle lies a vast gray territory where the Guild encourages writers to reflect, disclose, fact-check, and exercise judgment.

The problem is that the spectrum is drawn around the wrong question. The Guild keeps asking: how much did AI contribute? The more useful question is: what did the reader come for?

There’s a lot going on in a single NASCAR recap. Denny Hamlin won at Pocono on Sunday — his third straight victory, a genuinely remarkable streak for a 45-year-old who keeps insisting he’s almost done. That’s a real story. A good one, even.

But the OutKick piece that covered it this week wasn’t really about Denny Hamlin. It was about something older and uglier: a deliberate, sustained effort to define who NASCAR is for — and to make certain people feel like they don’t belong.

Let’s go through it carefully.

A Facebook post from a page called “DeKalb Illinois Issues” has been circulating around LaSalle County, and if you’ve seen it, you might be worried. The post claims that a group of investors is planning to turn the former Fox River Resort in Sheridan, Illinois into a gated, “Sharia law”-governed compound open only to Muslims.

It’s a vivid, alarming story. It’s also not true.

The post quotes LaSalle County Board member James Reid describing the proposed development as “a gated fenced community operated under strict Sharia law.” It asks whether the county board should approve an “alleged ‘Sharia compliant’ 165 acre locked and gated community.” It darkly notes that videos from the investor group have gone private and that a public open house was canceled, then asks: Why?

Last week, Marco Rubio made the rounds with a comparison that’s been bouncing around conservative media ever since. The gist: long-term Cuban-American retirees collecting $800–$1,000 a month in Social Security are getting less than newly arrived Cuban refugees who receive roughly $1,500 a month in combined government benefits. Unfair, right?

It’s a compelling piece of resentment bait. It’s also a deeply misleading comparison — and it raises an important question about how Social Security is being discussed politically.

Let’s start with the numbers. Here’s what Rubio actually said: “And in the meantime, we’re giving you Medicaid, food stamps, health care for your children, cash payments from the refugee fund.” The $1,500 figure he cites is his own bundling of those separate programs — Medicaid, food stamps, cash assistance — added together and presented as if they represent a single recurring payment equivalent to a Social Security deposit. Refugee cash assistance alone varies widely by state and typically runs well under $1,000 for a single adult. The programs are also time-limited, generally lasting 4 to 8 months while a new arrival finds work. Rubio is comparing a permanent monthly retirement benefit to the combined, temporary value of a crisis safety net.

If you study a machine long enough, you stop asking why it broke and start asking whether it was ever designed to do what you thought it was doing.

This is not a hostile question. It’s an engineering question. Machines don’t lie. They do what they were built to do. When a mechanism consistently produces the same output across centuries, across cultures, across reformations and councils and papal apologies — the honest observer eventually has to consider a different kind of explanation.

Not conspiracy. Not malice. Something more mundane and more difficult to argue with.

An analysis of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity

There is a moment in Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV’s sweeping new encyclical on artificial intelligence, human dignity, and social justice — where the sitting Pope asks forgiveness on behalf of the Catholic Church for its participation in slavery. Not just its slowness to condemn it. Its actual participation. Papal bulls legitimizing enslavement. Ecclesiastical institutions that owned human beings. Eighteen centuries before the Church explicitly recognized the incompatibility of slavery with Christian conscience.

It is a remarkable admission for a document that is simultaneously presenting the Church as humanity’s moral guide through the challenges of the digital age.

There’s a certain kind of man who, upon learning he’s a Scorpio, feels a deep sense of recognition. Intense. Powerful. Built for dominance. He carries this with him. It explains the hard edges, the need for control, the way he talks over people at dinner. It isn’t a flaw — it’s cosmically ordained.

Now meet his evangelical cousin. He has discovered, through careful study of the New Testament, that God designed men to lead, to take dominion, to be strong where women are soft, aggressive where they are gentle, authoritative where they are submissive. He carries this too. It explains the hard edges, the need for control, the way he talks over people at dinner. It isn’t a flaw — it’s scripturally ordained.

The comparison has limits — and it’s worth naming them upfront. A complementarian theologian engaging ancient texts in a two-thousand-year tradition is doing something more substantive than consulting a horoscope. The question isn’t whether the texts are real. They are. The question is what happens when a reading of those texts consistently produces exactly the conclusions the reader started with — when scripture functions not as a challenge to the self but as a validation of it.

Every candidate for governor is asking for authority.

Not just the procedural kind — the power to sign legislation and negotiate budgets. They are asking for the kind of authority the Berean Fruit framework describes as morally weighted: power over people’s lives, power that “amplifies the consequences of moral failure,” power that scripture treats not as a crown but as a burden.

Xavier Becerra enters the November general election as the Democrat in a state that has elected Democrats to the governor’s office for fifteen consecutive years. His biography is genuinely compelling: the son of Mexican immigrants who arrived in America with twelve dollars in their pockets, a first-generation college graduate, Stanford-educated, who spent thirty-five years in public service before running for the state’s highest office.

Every candidate for governor is asking for authority.

Not just administrative authority — the power to sign budgets and appoint judges. They are asking for the kind of authority the Berean Fruit framework describes as morally weighted: power over people’s lives, power that “amplifies the consequences of moral failure,” power that scripture treats not as a crown but as a burden.

Steve Hilton is now headed to a November general election against Xavier Becerra, positioned to become California’s first Republican governor in 15 years. His story is genuinely compelling: the son of working-class Hungarian refugees, born in Britain, who made his way through the corridors of Downing Street and eventually to California, where he became a citizen in 2021 and is now asking to lead the most populous state in the nation.

Christianity Today recently published a piece arguing that James Talarico’s Christian faith won’t win him many evangelical Republican votes. The author, Bonnie Kristian, frames this as a straightforward observation about political reality. And on one level, she’s right. But buried inside that argument is a confession the article never quite makes: the evangelical political movement has spent decades deciding that some moral issues count and others don’t — and the ones that count happen to line up perfectly with Republican Party priorities.

The three issues Kristian cites as the insurmountable barriers? Abortion. Transgender rights. Immigration under Trump.

Let’s call them what they are: the three bugbears. The monsters held up in the dark to keep the faithful voting the right way. And the remarkable thing — the thing that should unsettle every political operative who has relied on them — is that they’re working less and less.

Somewhere between the fall of Christendom and the rise of the personality quiz, we lost our ability to just be a person.

Now we need a title.

If you grew up in church, you know exactly what I mean. Spend enough time in certain spaces and you’ll notice that regular introductions have been quietly replaced by spiritual résumés. People don’t say I’m working through some things anymore. They say I’m in a season of refinement. They don’t say I have strong opinions. They say I move in the prophetic. They don’t say I’m exhausted and overcommitted. They say I’m a servant of the Most High.

Every human being eventually finds themselves holding power over someone. The question the previous essay in this series posed is not whether authority exists — it is what authority is for.

And the diagnostic that cuts through the noise:

Am I using the authority I have found myself with to uplift others — or to elevate myself?

Two centuries of Supreme Court cases, IRS rulings, and congressional statutes have built an elaborate legal framework for defining religion. The through-line is consistent: the government can ask if you’re sincere, but it cannot tell you whether your faith is real.

Here is the foundational paradox of American religious liberty: the First Amendment forbids the government from establishing religion, but to protect religion, courts and agencies have to know what counts as religion in the first place. Every attempt to draw that line creates the very entanglement the clause was designed to prevent.

Legal scholars have acknowledged the impossibility openly. Any definition that focuses on the particular characteristics of religious practice is “destined to fail” because definitions establish what religion is and therefore dictate what a religion must be — thereby contradicting the idea of freedom to practice whatever faith a person feels compelled to observe. Many scholars believe a government definition of religion is “contrary to the entire concept of religious liberty” and will only “create stagnancy by restricting the present and future growth of religion.”