If the afterlife worked the way most fire-and-brimstone preaching assumes it does, near-death experience research should be boring. Good people should report light. Bad people should report fire. Case closed, sermon illustration secured.

That is not what the data does.

I want to build a grid — good people and bad people, crossed with good NDEs and bad NDEs — and then fill in the cells with actual documented cases, not hypotheticals. What ends up in each box, and especially what refuses to show up in one particular box, tells you something. Then I want to run the same people through a second grid: what happened to them afterward. And then I want to hold both grids up next to three things Jesus and Paul said about debt, fire, and the thing actually worth fearing.

A few weeks ago an email landed in my inbox from Tuttle Twins, selling a new “Mindset” course bundle for their homeschool Academy. The pitch opens with Toto Wolff — the billionaire boss of Mercedes’ Formula 1 team — whose father died of brain cancer when he was a teenager, plunging the family into financial trouble. Young Toto sold candles and torches at outdoor gatherings in Vienna. He wore a golden cape and handed out flyers for an electronics shop. He started an economics degree and dropped out.

“That’s it,” the email says. “That’s the ‘official’ education of Toto Wolff — the origin of a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar fortune.”

Three more names get the same treatment — Sara Blakely, Richard Branson, David Karp — each one a hardship-to-fortune story, each one proof, the email argues, that the one skill separating billionaires from everyone else is mindset: the ability to get knocked down and keep moving. Luckily, mindset “can be taught.” Theirs, for $499 lifetime or $269 a year.

There’s a phrase that gets tossed around in certain corners of church culture: “worm theology.” It’s shorthand for a way of talking about human nature — depraved, worthless, crawling — that shows up in old hymns, in fire-and-brimstone sermons, and in the quieter but more corrosive language of spiritually abusive groups. Isaac Watts, in 1707, put it into one of the most sung lines in English hymnody: wondering at the cross, “would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?”

It’s worth remembering, before going further, that Watts doesn’t leave the singer there. The hymn moves through astonishment at grace, into repentance, and closes with the singer giving himself away in response to love, not curling up in permanent self-disgust. Even the hymn most responsible for popularizing “worm” language in devotional English doesn’t treat the worm as a resting place. That’s a pattern worth watching for, because it shows up again and again in the biblical texts themselves — and it’s exactly the pattern that gets dropped when “worm theology” turns into a tool for control.

Strip out the verses where “worm” just means a worm — the ones that ruined the manna overnight (Exodus 16), the ones that will eat Israel’s vineyards if the nation breaks covenant (Deuteronomy 28), the ones crawling over a corpse (Isaiah 66:24, Mark 9:48) — and four passages stand out as especially relevant, where “worm” is applied figuratively to a person. (The underlying Hebrew uses more than one word translated “worm” or “maggot,” so this isn’t offered as an exhaustive concordance count — just the passages that matter for the question at hand.)

A new Andrew Garfield movie, The Uprising, is being sold with a simple moral: it “warns of what happens when we dispense the wrath of God.”

It’s a good line, and it’s not a strawman — it’s the review’s own framing. Christianity Today’s review invokes Romans 12:19 and argues the film shows the “cross-class danger of claiming divine authority,” insisting that “whether we’re powerful or oppressed,” our sense of justice gets clouded by sin. That’s a deliberate choice to place both categories inside a single moral “we.” And there is a truth inside it: equal moral accountability does not change with social class. Vengeance is as wrong for the powerful as for the powerless. But equal moral accountability is not the same thing as equal power.

I think that’s the wrong question, and the pronoun is doing most of the damage. “We” implies a single actor, weighing a single choice, with a single amount of power to misuse. But the events behind The Uprising — England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 — involved actors who were not standing on anything like equal ground. Before asking what happens when “we” dispense divine wrath, it’s worth asking who “we” actually were, and what each of them wanted badly enough to invoke God for it.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up in the unemployment rate. It belongs to the person working 22 hours a week at one job and 14 at another, neither of them offering enough hours to count as full-time, neither of them willing to guarantee a schedule more than a few days out, both of them expecting total availability anyway. On paper, this person is employed. Twice, even. In practice, they are stitching together a living out of scraps that two different managers keep rearranging without asking.

This is not a fringe case. It’s close to the default experience of low-wage service work in America, and it’s worth being specific about why, because the specifics point toward an argument that’s less comfortable than “we need better labor law.” The specifics point toward a culture that has decided dignity is a line item to be minimized, and that no bargaining structure by itself is going to fix that.

Start with the schedule itself. Surveys of service-sector workers — retail, food service, hospitality — find that something like a third are working part-time involuntarily: they want more hours and can’t get them. A large share of the workforce gets less than a week’s notice of their schedule. Around half report working “clopenings” — closing the store at 11 p.m. and opening it again at 5 or 6 a.m., with barely enough time in between to drive home, sleep, and drive back. Researchers who’ve studied this have found that unpredictability isn’t just an inconvenience; workers exposed to unstable, last-minute scheduling are significantly more likely to experience hunger, missed rent, and utility shutoffs than workers earning the same wage on a stable schedule. The instability itself is the hardship, independent of the paycheck.

You don’t always have to choose between two competing accounts of a relationship. Sometimes it’s worth listening closely to what the denial itself reveals.

This week, Aaron Rodgers sat down with his Steelers teammate Cam Heyward and revisited his relationship with Danica Patrick, who ended things with him in 2020. Patrick had already put her version on the record a year earlier, on Sage Steele’s podcast, calling the relationship “emotionally abusive” and saying Rodgers left “a trail of blood” behind him when it ended.

Rodgers’ response was meant to be a rebuttal. Parts of it sound strangely compatible with the allegation.

On April 9, 1944, a church choir from Trinity Lutheran drove through a gap in a barbed-wire fence in Algona, Iowa, to lead an Easter service for German prisoners of war. It’s a striking scene, and Christianity Today recently ran a piece on it — the choir director recalled that the prisoners sang beautifully, that many wept during the Lord’s Prayer, that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. The essay’s argument, drawing on theologian Jeremy Begbie, is that corporate worship “retimes” us: it forces people who disagree, even people who were shooting at each other months earlier, to sit in the same duration together, and that this can cultivate empathy where nothing else will.

It’s a good essay, as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.

Read the piece carefully and you’ll notice what it never says. It never says the word “Holocaust.” It never asks what regime these men had served, or who that regime was simultaneously murdering in the camps a continent away while Iowa farmers were setting out extra plates at Christmas. It gives us crooked teeth and broken bootlaces and homesick tears — the sensory texture of ordinary humanity — but never asks the harder question sitting right underneath the anecdote: what does it mean that people can seem this human and still have served a regime doing what theirs was doing?

A Texas congressman gave a Republican convention crowd exactly what it wanted this week: a land acknowledgment with the punchline flipped.

Rep. Brandon Gill opened his speech at the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas by “acknowledging” — not Indigenous nations, but American settlers. “I’d like to acknowledge that we stand here today in the great state of Texas,” he said, “and the United States of America is the ancestral homeland of great American patriots, pioneers and explorers who put down roots, fight for freedom all over the globe and bled and died to build the greatest civilization ever known to man.” The crowd roared. Fox News ran it as a straight-up win: a firebrand “flipping the script” on Democrats’ “bizarre” latest trend, unapologetic to the end.

It’s a good applause line. It is also, on inspection, a category error dressed up as a rebuttal — and it’s worth taking seriously enough to actually check the history it’s leaning on.

There’s a graphic that’s been making the rounds — white serif text over a shot of exposed drywall and popcorn ceiling, the kind of photo that says “unfinished renovation project” without needing a caption. The headline: “Lord, save me from my side hustle.” Underneath: “Hard work is a virtue. But Scripture warns of its vice.”

It’s a good hook. It’s also doing something sneakier than it looks like it’s doing — collapsing two very different biblical warnings into one, and aiming both of them at the wrong person.

Start with the easy half, because the Old Testament doesn’t treat work itself as a vice. Work isn’t a punishment. In Genesis, Adam is placed in the garden “to work it and keep it” — two chapters before anything goes wrong. The curse in Genesis 3 doesn’t invent labor; it makes labor harder. Thorns, sweat, resistance. The work itself predates the fall.

Somewhere in a transcript archive sits an “Open Line Friday” episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show, recorded right around September 30–October 1, 2011 — the day after a U.S. drone strike killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Nearly three hours of monologue, caller segments, and parody commercials. I went through it and checked the claims that could actually be checked.

The results split cleanly into three buckets: things that turned out to be accurate, things that were opinion or prediction dressed up as commentary, and things that were straightforwardly comedy — fake ads and song parodies that nobody, including Limbaugh, intended anyone to fact-check. Sorting those apart turned out to be the most interesting part of the exercise.

It’s also worth pausing on why that sorting is only easy to do now. In 2011, checking a claim like this meant knowing it existed, tracking down primary sources, and cross-referencing numbers by hand — a task that took real time even for a professional researcher, and that essentially nobody did in real time for a three-hour radio show. To be clear about the mechanism: what changed isn’t that a machine now hands out verified facts — an AI model can be wrong, too, and shouldn’t be trusted as the final word on anything. What changed is AI-assisted search and source retrieval: the ability to pull up the original CNN poll write-up, the original KFF survey, the original news coverage of a specific claim in a couple of minutes instead of an afternoon. The verification still has to happen against a primary source; what’s different is how fast you can find that source. For the entire run of talk radio and cable news as mass media — Limbaugh’s show launched nationally in 1988, Fox News in 1996 — the ordinary listener had no practical way to check most of this at anything resembling the speed at which the claims arrived. The claims got wrapped in enough true and half-true material to feel credible, and moved on before anyone could verify them. The medium was built for an environment where fact-checking was slow and rare; that environment is not the one we’re in anymore.

A post came across my feed the other day predicting that AI collaboration will finally make science fiction good, because now actual scientists — not mere writers — can lead these projects. The theory goes like this: the only people who’ve ever been able to write science fiction are people who happen to be both scientifically literate and gifted prose stylists, and that combination is rare. Large language models remove the prose bottleneck. Now the scientist can be in charge, the AI can supply the sentences, and scientific accuracy — the thing science fiction has supposedly been starving for all these decades — finally gets its due.

I don’t buy the premise. Not because I think AI collaboration is useless, but because it’s solving a problem science fiction doesn’t actually have.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: we don’t need replicators to be decent people.

There’s a kind of person — maybe you’ve been one, maybe you’re one now — who keeps a running tally without ever deciding to start keeping it. A half-beat late on a response at the office. A basket finished before the bell, entered in your favor, though not heavily. A fault noticed in the dark before sleep, filed and carried forward, uncorrected, the way it’s carried forward every day you can remember. You don’t remember opening the ledger. You just notice, one day, that it’s open, and that it has always been open, and that you’ve never once gone into anything — a room, a relationship, a morning — level.

Spinoza spent four propositions in the Ethics diagnosing exactly this apparatus, and naming the four passions that run it. He didn’t think much of any of them. And it turns out that once you’ve spent enough time inside the ledger yourself, you arrive at his conclusions less by argument than by exhaustion — which may be the more honest way to arrive at them.

Spinoza’s Part IV — “Of Human Bondage” — works through a sequence of propositions that all make the same move on four different emotions:

A few weeks ago, Ryan Burge went on the Holy Post’s Skypod and did what Ryan Burge does: he took a survey that had nothing to do with religion and found religion hiding inside it anyway. FIRE surveys upward of 68,000 college students at more than 400 schools every year about self-censorship on campus. Buried in the data were questions about religious attendance and affiliation, broken out by major. Burge mined it, and the internet did what it does with a spicy chart.

The headline findings weren’t surprising. Fine arts, theater, film, English, environmental studies — low religiosity, high secularism. Finance majors were the most religious and the most conservative students in the entire dataset, sitting alone in the corner of the ideology graph like they’d been assigned there. Nursing students were nearly as religious as finance bros, but nowhere near as conservative — moderate, even.

Skye Jethani, hosting, floated a metaphor: greed is the engine, conservative politics is the first car it pulls, and religious identity is the caboose. Burge, more cautiously, offered a narrower theory — finance students end up religious because their future clients are old, rich, and church-going, and religiosity is good for the client pipeline.

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August 2026. That’s the number that makes the headlines. But there’s another number worth putting beside it: $30 an hour.

Thirty dollars isn’t a proposed minimum wage, and it isn’t a scientifically derived poverty line. It’s a benchmark — a round number close to where a reasonably solid full-time income sits right now, and a useful test for what a “job” actually is once you stop counting them and start asking what they pay. A full-time worker earning $30 an hour makes $62,400 a year before taxes. That’s already a little below the current median earnings of full-time American workers. And even at that income, financing two of the standard promises of middle-class life — a child’s college education and one’s own retirement — is genuinely difficult.

So instead of asking only how many jobs America created last month, it’s worth asking a second question: how many of those jobs clear even that modest line?

Every few years, someone rediscovers that an entire generation of American children grew up torturing a purple dinosaur, and someone else turns that into a morality tale. You’ve probably seen the shape of the take: kids are cruel, teenagers especially so, and Barney’s only crime was being too good — too kind, too patient, too earnest — so a culture allergic to sincerity destroyed him for sport. It’s a tidy story. It flatters the person telling it, since it lets them cast themselves as defenders of goodness against a mob of little nihilists. It also happens to be wrong, and you don’t have to dig very deep to find out why.

Ask people who hated Barney why, and one complaint comes up with remarkable consistency: the voice.

Barney’s harshest critics didn’t object to niceness. They objected to a very specific register — the sing-song, treacly, everything-resolves-in-four-minutes tone that talked at children instead of to them. Academic write-ups of the backlash describe critics zeroing in on the “dopey” voice, the fixed toothy smile, a personality read as self-centered rather than warm. The sharper version of the critique wasn’t about tone at all, though — it was about content: Barney’s shows didn’t help kids learn to deal with negative feelings, because along with the giggles and unconditional love, they offered a one-dimensional world where everyone had to be happy and everything had to resolve immediately. That’s not a complaint about excessive goodness. That’s a complaint about dishonesty — a show performing goodness by refusing to admit anything bad exists, which is a different and much emptier thing.

A recent piece made the rounds arguing that anxious, self-condemning thoughts aren’t really us — they’re an attack from an old, sinful nature at war with a new, believing one. Feel like a failure? That’s not your assessment, that’s the enemy talking. Doubt that God will answer a big prayer? Not honest uncertainty — spiritual sabotage.

The framing has real appeal. It gives an uncomfortable thought a face, an enemy, a battle plan. But underneath the metaphor is a much simpler problem, and once you see it, the “war” language stops doing any real work at all.

Suppose you have one of these thoughts:

In the last piece, I looked at the biblical basis for the idea that faithful action can “hasten” the end — and at how vague, undefined invocations of “God’s work” tend to borrow the weight of that idea without ever specifying a mechanism. This one is about a more specific claim that circulates in the same orbit: that a coming war involving Iran and Israel is the fulfillment of Ezekiel 38–39, the “Gog and Magog” invasion, and that it will end the way it’s supposed to — with Israel nearly overrun, and God stepping in at the last moment.

To take that claim seriously, it’s worth doing something people rarely do with it: actually laying the real history of Israel’s wars next to the text, and checking whether the pattern people expect matches either one.

Ancient Israel and Judah were invaded constantly, and the outcomes were genuinely mixed — not the unbroken record of last-second rescue that the Gog-Magog framework implicitly assumes.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance sat down with a 22-year-old Christian podcaster to promote his new memoir about converting to Catholicism, and somewhere past the hour mark the conversation drifted, as these things do, toward the end of the world.

“Do I think we’re in the end times? I don’t know,” Vance said. He admitted he’s been fascinated by end-times prophecy since he was ten or eleven years old, said he wouldn’t be shocked if the Antichrist is “walking among us” right now, and then landed on the line that made the clip travel: “What I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, okay.”

The reaction was swift and mostly mocking — “Make Armageddon Glorious Again” was one of the gentler jokes — and it landed at an uncomfortable moment, with the administration bombing targets in Iran and Trump promising an even bigger strike was “waiting in the wings.” Critics weren’t wrong to notice the timing, though the piece that follows won’t make that timing its whole argument.

Across the ancient world, cultures repeatedly told themselves some version of the same story: we occupy a special place in the order of things.

That claim took different shapes. Some cultures claimed unique ancestry — a founding figure who sprang from the local soil itself, unlike everyone else’s ordinary descent. Some claimed sacred land — a homeland singled out by the gods for special favor. Some claimed a providential destiny, a plan unfolding across generations toward some appointed greatness. Some claimed outright election — a god who picked this people, specifically, out of all the others available.

These aren’t identical claims, and it’s worth resisting the temptation to flatten them into one. What unites them is a shared social function: each one locates the storytellers in a privileged relationship to the divine or cosmic order, relative to everyone else. Call it sacred exceptionalism. It’s a remarkably widespread pattern — recurring in widely separated cultures — which means the interesting question isn’t really whether a tradition made this kind of claim. Almost all of them did, in some form. The interesting question is what, if anything, a given tradition did to keep the claim from curdling into permission to mistreat everyone left outside it.

A recent piece at American Greatness used Syracuse University’s budget crisis as a launching pad for a familiar argument: college is losing students because academia — especially the humanities — has become an ideological project rather than an educational one. The essay traces this back through a genuinely interesting piece of intellectual history: Dwight Waldo’s 1948 attack on “value-neutral” public administration, and the 1968 Minnowbrook conference at Syracuse’s own Maxwell School, where a generation of administrators were taught that neutrality was a myth and that process should serve values rather than the other way around. From there, the argument goes, that anti-neutrality ethos leaked out of public administration and into the broader academic bloodstream, and now, seventy-plus years later, it’s why Syracuse can’t fill its freshman class.

It’s a more careful piece than most in this genre — it doesn’t pretend ideology is the only problem, and it does real intellectual history instead of just gesturing at vibes. So let’s grant its premise. Suppose humanities faculties really do skew left, and suppose that skew is exactly as pronounced as the piece assumes. The harder question is the one it never really asks: why should we believe that explains why fewer students are showing up? There’s a much more direct, much more measurable cause sitting right next to it — what it actually costs to go to college right now, and who’s stopped paying their share of it — and that cause doesn’t need Dwight Waldo to do any work at all.

Start with the money, because it’s the more immediate and more measurable problem.