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.”

The Pentagon just decided the 17-million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints doesn’t qualify as Christian. There’s just one problem: the government has absolutely no business making that call.

“Christian” is not a trademark. It is not a licensed designation. No federal agency holds the registration. No act of Congress defines its membership criteria. The word has been in continuous dispute — theological, cultural, political — for literally two millennia, and the ink dried on the First Amendment more than two centuries before any Pentagon bureaucrat decided to sort service members into a government-approved list of who counts and who doesn’t.

And yet, here we are.

There is a moment in James 2 that should stop every pastor cold.

“If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,’ but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit?”

James is not describing a cruel person. He is describing a religious one. Someone who uses the right words, offers a genuine-sounding blessing, and walks away having done nothing. And James’s verdict is devastating: that faith is dead.

Every person who holds power stands under the same evaluation:

Am I using this authority to protect the vulnerable, or to protect myself?

That question — drawn from a recent piece on what authority is actually for — is more uncomfortable than any policy debate. It cannot be answered by citing accomplishments. It cannot be hidden inside good intentions. It is answered in behavior. And it is measured not by the condition of the powerful, but by the condition of the person standing beneath them.

A strange thing happened recently.

A former reality television villain found himself being discussed as a serious candidate for public office.

Predictably, much of the conversation focused on who Spencer Pratt used to be. The manipulator from The Hills. The tabloid celebrity. The professional attention-seeker.

One of the reasons I write books is because I believe money is a tool.

Not a scorecard. Not a measure of worth. Not something to be accumulated indefinitely while people around us struggle.

A tool.

It is Pride Month. Somewhere this June, a sixteen-year-old is sitting in a pew listening to adults debate whether she deserves to exist openly in public life. She is hearing from legislators, activists, pundits, and neighbors. The one voice she needs most is her pastor’s. And too often, that voice says nothing.

This piece is for her. And for everyone who has sat in that silence and wondered if they were wrong to expect more.

A recent Christianity Today post argued that the church’s rush to issue statements on every controversy is a sign of unfaithfulness. “Urgency is not faithfulness,” it declared. The piece invoked the image of Jesus spending 30 years in obscurity before speaking a single public word — suggesting pastors might do well to follow suit.

“Not For You To Judge”

[Verse 1]

You come with your scripture, your stones already thrown
Like the rainbow that hung there was yours and yours alone
It was a promise, not a weapon, not a word meant for your war
So tell me who made you the keeper of that door

There is a phrase that circulates through Christian communities like a well-worn coin, passed from hand to hand until its edges have gone smooth: God has a plan.

It gets said at funerals. At hospital bedsides. In the awkward silence after someone shares news that has no good response. It is meant as comfort, and the people who say it usually mean it that way.

But ask the parent whose child just died whether it helped, and you will often get a look — the one that says I know you’re trying, but please stop.

There is a statistic that stops most people cold when they first encounter it.

In the United States, men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. In the UK, suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 45. Globally, in every country on earth without exception, men die by suicide more than women.

And yet women attempt suicide at roughly three times the rate of men. Women experience suicidal ideation more often. Women are diagnosed with depression at twice the rate. Women are, by almost every measure of mental suffering short of death, in more distress.

Doug Wilson is easy to dismiss.

He’s the pastor in rural Idaho who wants to reinstate anti-sodomy laws and thinks women shouldn’t vote. He preaches at the Pentagon at Pete Hegseth’s invitation. He covered up child sexual abuse in his congregation for eight months. He is, by almost any measure, an extreme figure — and his extremism makes it easy for ordinary evangelical churches to point at him and say: that’s not us.

But the estrangement isn’t coming from Doug Wilson’s church alone.