There’s a genre of viral video by now: a man stands up mid-flight, or plants himself in front of a Panda Express table, or climbs a step stool in a town square, and starts telling strangers they’re going to hell unless they repent. When people push back — visibly annoyed, sometimes furious — the preacher often reaches for the same defense: this is what the prophets did, this is what John the Baptist did, this is what Jesus did. I’m just being obedient.

It’s worth taking that claim seriously enough to actually check it. Not because tone or manners are the ultimate test of truth, but because if you’re going to invoke scripture as your justification, the theology has to actually hold up — not just gesture vaguely at “the Bible says to preach the gospel to every creature” and stop there. Precedent matters. So does which precedent, and what it actually shows.

To be clear about the standard being applied here: the question isn’t whether scripture explicitly forbids preaching to a captive audience. It doesn’t, and this piece won’t claim otherwise. The question is whether the biblical examples routinely cited to justify the practice actually resemble it. If someone claims captive-audience preaching is justified because it reproduces biblical models of public proclamation, the burden sits with that claim — and it has to survive contact with what those models actually looked like.

A recent sermon from The Compass Church’s Foundations series — week two, titled “Connect in Groups” — uses the healing of the paralyzed man in Mark 2:1-12 to argue that Christian community, specifically participation in a small group, is a spiritual essential. It’s a well-built sermon: a gripping true story (the 1909 Cherry, Illinois mine disaster and the twenty-one “8-day men” who survived by working together), a live illustration involving balanced nails, and a tidy five-point takeaway — gather, bond, notice, help, seek.

But a sermon can be well-crafted and still worth pressure-testing against the text it claims to represent. Here’s how its central claim — that this passage teaches the necessity of small-group community — holds up against the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Jesus’s own recorded words.

The Hebrew Scriptures do supply real support for the sermon’s underlying premise, even though Mark 2 itself is a New Testament text. Genesis 2:18 — God’s assessment that “it is not good for the man to be alone” — is worth a caveat before it gets used here: its immediate concern is the man’s lack of a suitable counterpart, resolved by the creation of woman and marriage, not small-group life as such. Stretched too far, it becomes a version of the same move this article is critiquing the sermon for making with Mark 2 — taking a true general principle from a text whose actual subject is more specific. The honest claim Genesis 2:18 supports is broader and still useful: human beings are made for relationship rather than radical self-sufficiency. Ecclesiastes 4 is the cleaner text for the sermon’s actual point. It makes a practical case for mutual assistance directly: two are better than one because they can help each other up when one falls, and “a cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” That’s genuinely the same logic the sermon is reaching for with its 21 survivors and its ten-person rescue party.

I got into it with a stranger on LinkedIn recently, and it accidentally produced one of the cleanest illustrations I’ve seen of how unpaid domestic labor actually gets valued — which is to say: generously, right up until the moment someone might have to pay for it.

A financial advisor posted a humblebrag dressed up as sound financial planning: he carries $1M in life insurance on himself, and $500K on his stay-at-home wife. His logic was straightforward — if she were gone, replacing everything she does (childcare, the household, “a dozen other line items”) would be expensive. So he insures against that loss. The post was framed as a lesson: don’t make the mistake of only insuring the breadwinner.

On its face, it sounds thoughtful. He’s acknowledging that unpaid labor has real economic value — more than a lot of husbands ever bother to admit. But sit with the framing for a second, because it’s doing something sleight-of-hand: it treats her value as something that only becomes visible, and only becomes payable, in the event of a catastrophe.

My church recently sent out a stewardship email from Heather, one of our pastors. It was a good email — warm, personal, careful to say tithing isn’t a magic formula. It closed with an invitation to “test God” on tithing for six months, built around Malachi 3:10. It got me thinking enough that I want to respond to it here, in public, because I think there’s a better way to read that verse than the one the email lands on — one that actually grew out of my own experience with giving, before I ever went looking for a verse to explain it.

First, some background on where I’m coming from.

Heather’s email opens with her own story of growing up Baptist, where the church mailed everyone offering envelopes — one for every Sunday of the year, and not just to the adults, kids got them too. She learned to tithe the full 10% from elementary school on. I grew up Lutheran, and my version was smaller and less formal: my parents gave me two dollars every two weeks, and fifty cents of it went into the plate. Twenty-five percent, if you want to do the math on a kid’s allowance, though nobody was calling it a tithe.

There’s a particular kind of stuck feeling that shows up when you care about something enough to want to talk about it publicly, and you’re honest enough to notice that talking about it publicly might also benefit you.

I’ve been thinking about this after seeing someone wrestle with it out loud: they want to talk about being neurodivergent, and about neuroinclusion more broadly. But they don’t want to capitalize on it. And they’re right that this is a genuine rock and a hard place, not a problem with an obvious solution.

Part of what’s driving the discomfort is real and worth naming directly. There’s a visible pattern of influencers turning their own traits into a punchline, then packaging that up into a course or an app to sell. The struggle becomes content. The content becomes a funnel. The funnel becomes a product.

Paul Fisher wants you to know he’s sorry.

For years he worked as a modeling scout, recruiting young women on what he’s described as drug-laced trips through bars and nightclubs across the country, feeding talent to a boss he now calls “unsavory” and “a maniac.” He says he’s not proud of the culture he helped build. And now, as the founder and CEO of Radiant Mobile — a new “Jesus-centric” wireless carrier running on T-Mobile’s network — he’s framing the whole venture as atonement.

It’s a good story. Christianity Today ran it as one, framing Fisher as someone who “wants to atone for his fashion world past with his startup.” Supermodel scout finds Jesus, builds a phone company to make it right. It’s a clean redemption arc, and CT tells it as one.

The words get used almost interchangeably in business conversation: stakeholders, shareholders, “doing right by everyone involved.” But they aren’t synonyms, and the gap between them isn’t just rhetorical. One is a legal category with teeth. The other, in most of American corporate law, is a courtesy.

Stakeholder means everyone touched by a company’s decisions — workers, customers, suppliers, the community it operates in. Shareholder means, literally, people who own shares. And under the law that governs most large American companies, only one of those groups gets an enforceable claim on how the business is run.

Once a business only has to answer to shareholders, the incentives are set. Share value has to go up. Everything else is optional — permitted, sometimes encouraged, but optional.

New York City just brought back the shame sticker, and the discourse has arrived right on schedule. A giant lime-green adhesive slab, glued to your windshield by the Department of Sanitation, informing you and the entire block that you are the reason the street didn’t get cleaned. Scraper required. Fourteen years gone, and now it’s back, and everybody has a take.

I have a take too. The sticker is the right call. But the city needs to own what it breaks.

Let’s start with the thing everyone keeps dancing around: alternate-side parking isn’t a suggestion. It’s the price of admission for a genuinely good deal — free, or near-free, parking on a public street in one of the most expensive cities on earth. You get the spot. In exchange, you move the car twice a week so a sweeper can do its job. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

There’s a specific move that happens in every one of these Smithsonian-style fights, and it happens on both sides. Someone accuses a museum of “revising” history to fit an agenda. The museum’s defenders respond by pointing out, correctly, that the underlying facts aren’t in dispute — the events happened, the documents exist, the record is the record. And then everyone acts as though that settles the argument in the museum’s favor.

It doesn’t settle it, exactly — but it points somewhere specific. Because the real fight was never about whether these things happened. It’s about what “neutral” means. And once you define that word correctly, a lot of what looks like a contradiction turns out not to be one at all.

When Congress presses a museum director to be “nonpartisan,” the unspoken assumption is that neutrality means something like innocent until proven guilty — that a truly impartial account of the past would be gentler, would spread the blame evenly, would decline to say plainly that a given policy was a moral catastrophe. Under that definition, any museum that describes slavery as slavery, or redlining as engineered, or internment as a violation, has already tipped its hand. It has taken a side.

There are two ways to test a philosophy of power. You can read what it says about itself. Or you can watch what happens to the person standing underneath it.

A recent piece on this Substack, What Is Authority For?, proposed a diagnostic for exactly that second approach: every exercise of power can be judged by a single question — does it move outward, toward protecting the vulnerable, or inward, toward protecting itself? Scripture, the essay argued, is far more suspicious of authority than most of its defenders admit. Kings are a concession, not a blessing. Submission is a survival strategy, not a moral seal of approval. And the cry of the harmed, not the confidence of the powerful, is the test that actually matters.

It’s worth running that test against a very different document: Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a creed. Not because the two texts are arguing about the same thing — one is about technology and markets, the other about interpersonal and institutional power — but because they collide, hard, on a handful of very specific claims. And once you start pulling on those threads, they lead somewhere concrete: soda bans on food stamps, a hundred years of “redistribution is communism,” and a 2026 labor market that makes the whole abundance story a lot harder to take at face value.

There’s a piece of financial folk wisdom that’s become almost conventional strategy among the wealthy: don’t sell your stock, borrow against it. Avoid the capital gains tax. Keep your shares. Get the liquidity anyway. Repeat until you die, at which point your estate settles the loan and your heirs inherit the stock at a stepped-up basis — erasing the gain that would have been taxed had you sold it yourself. People call this “buy, borrow, die.”

It’s often framed as a free lunch: money enters circulation, GDP ticks up, everybody wins. But it’s worth asking a sharper question than “does this technically count as economic activity.” The better question is: what kind of economic activity does it produce, how fast, and at what cost — and how does that compare to just putting cash directly into the hands of people who’ll spend it?

The short answer is that borrowing against stock wealth is a monkey’s paw. The wish — liquidity without selling — is granted. But it comes wrapped in structural weaknesses that make it a poor substitute for real, broad-based economic circulation, and in some conditions, actively dangerous.

A recent post making the rounds quotes a popular leadership book calling Deborah “a fantastic illustration of how God does the unexpected” — because, we’re told, “women had no rights and the rulers, warriors, and decision-makers of the world were men.” God, apparently, “enjoys using people others might discount or dismiss.”

It’s a nice sentence. It is also not supported by a single word of the text it’s citing.

Judges 4:4 introduces Deborah the way it introduces every other judge: no backstory, no controversy, no committee debating whether a woman could really handle the job. She’s just already there — “leading Israel at that time” — and “the Israelites came to her to have their disputes decided.” Present tense. Ongoing. Unremarkable. When she tells the general Barak to take the army against Sisera, he’s the one who won’t go without her: “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go” (4:8). That is not the posture of a man discounting a woman. That’s a man who knows exactly whose authority the mission depends on.

There’s a moment in Gladiator — you know the one — where Maximus turns to a bloodthirsty crowd and asks them the question the whole arena was built to avoid answering honestly: is this what you wanted? The crowd doesn’t care who’s under the helmet. They care whether the fight was good. That’s the deal the arena makes with everyone in it, spectators included: entertainment first, provenance never.

Publishing is having its own version of that question right now, except we’ve been arguing about the wrong half of it. The AI-writing conversation keeps circling “can you detect it” — can a classifier tell, can a reader tell, is the jig finally up for people who use AI to write. That’s a real question. It’s also the smaller one. The bigger question is the one Maximus actually asked: what did you come here for in the first place? Because the answer to that determines whether detection was ever the point.

Not all writing makes the same promise to its reader, and that’s the thing “does AI writing work” flattens.

There’s a genre of think-piece now — videos, newsletters, panicked LinkedIn posts — that goes something like: remote work is quietly ruining a generation. It’s making young people poorer. It’s making everyone lonelier. It’s widening the racial wealth gap. And there’s real data behind these claims. The problem is where the finger ends up pointing.

A quick caveat before I swing “capitalism” around, because it’s doing a lot of work in that headline: none of what follows is about markets in some abstract sense. It’s about specific decisions — weak labor protections, an exemption carved into a 1938 law, decades of zoning choices, the slow defunding of civic institutions. “Capitalism” is shorthand for that stack, not a replacement for naming it. A skeptical reader would fairly say “that’s not capitalism, that’s zoning” or “that’s not capitalism, that’s weak unions” — so let’s name the mechanisms.

But those mechanisms aren’t accidents sitting around waiting to be discovered — they’re actively defended. Take the FLSA’s failure to cap salaried hours: it’s not a quirk nobody’s gotten around to fixing. The Department of Labor has tried to raise the overtime salary threshold twice in the last decade, in 2016 and again in 2024, and both times business groups sued and won, keeping the threshold — and millions of workers’ unpaid hours — right where it was. That’s not a gap nobody’s minding. It’s a gap that gets re-fought every time someone tries to close it, by interests that benefit from it remaining. So the fairest version isn’t “capitalism” as some diffuse atmospheric force, and it isn’t “just policy” either — it’s that specific, well-resourced actors have a direct stake in keeping these gaps exactly where they are, and show up in court to make sure they stay there.

Matthew LaMaster’s recent piece, “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me,” lays out seven fronts on which he’s broken with what he calls the “evangelical left”: cultural naïveté, mystical sophistry, toleration of Marxism, Trump derangement, theological drift, family values, and respectability. It’s a candid, well-written piece — genuinely one of the more self-aware entries in the “why I left X” genre, especially in its closing admission that the pull toward respectability is something he has had to actively resist in himself.

But read closely, the essay is almost entirely a document of posture rather than argument. Across seven distinct disputes — several of them squarely theological — Scripture is invoked exactly twice, and both instances land in the final paragraph, in service of the meta-point that the church should be unified. Not one of the seven substantive disagreements is argued from a biblical text. The case is instead built from personal anecdote, a college reading of Marx, a sociologist’s book, and an appeal to “confessionalism” as a structural safeguard.

I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because the phrase gets thrown around loosely. By “vibes theology,” I don’t mean intuition or lived experience — those are legitimate inputs to any moral reasoning. I mean something narrower: arriving at a theological or cultural conclusion primarily through inherited instinct, tribal loyalty, or aesthetic reaction, and only afterward reaching for theological language to justify a position that was never actually derived from the text. The tell isn’t that someone has strong feelings. It’s that the argument could be fully restated without losing anything if you deleted every reference to God, Scripture, or the church.

A topic-by-topic review of the livestream conversation between Tim Whitaker (Tim Whitaker Speaks) and Pastor Matt Lamaster, prompted by Lamaster’s Substack essay “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me.”

Tim Whitaker and Pastor Matt Lamaster spent nearly two hours working through Lamaster’s essay paragraph by paragraph — biblical inerrancy, whether evangelicals put Trump in office, family policy, “wins” of the current administration, and the politics of respectability inside evangelical institutions. It was unusually civil for the genre: real concessions were made on both sides, and neither party strawmanned the other much.

But a lot of numbers got thrown around in real time, the way they do in any live conversation. Below, I’ve pulled out the major empirical claims from each topic and checked them against available data. Where a claim holds up, I say so. Where it’s wrong, exaggerated, or missing context, I say that too.

Every tax fight in America eventually turns into the same argument: why should I pay for something I don’t use? Non-residents shouldn’t fund NYC services they don’t consume. Downstate shouldn’t fund a Chicago train they never ride. Someone in the suburbs shouldn’t fund a bridge they’ll never drive across.

It sounds like a tax argument. It isn’t, not really. The rates aren’t actually that different from what other rich countries charge. What’s different is that we’ve stopped expecting the thing we build with the money to be good — and somewhere along the way, we stopped being embarrassed about that.

For most of American history, wealth and public monuments were the same project. Carnegie didn’t quietly write a check to the government and hope it got spent well — he put his name on 2,500 libraries and made sure everyone knew it. And it wasn’t just generosity. It was competition. Industrialists raced each other to endow the tallest building, the grandest concert hall, the university wing that would outlast them by a century. Cities raced each other too — for the best skyline, the best parks, the fair that would put them on the world map. Nobody remembers the Hoover Dam because it was the cheapest option. They remember it because it was built to be one of the great engineering feats of its age, and everyone involved knew it, and wanted their name near it.

On March 30, 2023, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed Act 372 — a law that does two distinct things to the state’s libraries and bookstores.

Section 1 makes it a crime — up to a year in prison — for a librarian or bookseller to knowingly furnish, display, or otherwise make available to a minor any item that is “harmful to minors.” That phrase isn’t left undefined; it’s a three-part test, and all three parts have to be met:

The average adult, applying community standards, would find the material has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex to minors.

The obvious rebuttal to the last piece is: but there are small groups. Life groups, home groups, growth groups, whatever the branding — most large-campus churches build an entire second structure specifically so people can talk, ask questions, and process the sermon together in a living room instead of a sanctuary. If the Sunday stage is one-to-many, the small group is supposed to be the many-to-many. That’s a fair point, and it deserves its own honest look, because on paper it answers everything the last piece complained about.

It’s worth being fair about what small groups are actually for, most of the time, for most people in them. Nobody joins a life group hoping it’ll double as a shareholder meeting. People join for the casserole when someone’s in the hospital, the honesty that’s easier in six chairs than six hundred, the prayer request nobody would say into a microphone. That relational function is real, and it’s not the thing this piece is questioning. The question here is narrower: when a small group does become the place where someone raises a real objection — to a sermon, to something political said from the stage, to how the church has handled a specific harm — what happens to it there. Not whether small groups are worthwhile. Whether they’re built to let that particular kind of concern go anywhere.

Almost none of these groups sit down and talk about whatever’s actually on someone’s mind. They work through a curriculum: a printed guide, an app, a set of “discussion questions” tied to that week’s sermon, usually written by the same staff who wrote the sermon. The questions are rarely do you agree with what the pastor said. They’re closer to how can you apply what the pastor said this week. The sermon isn’t up for discussion. It’s the assigned text, and the small group’s job is application, not evaluation. That’s a completely different activity than dialogue. It’s guided practice.

To be clear about scope: this isn’t a claim about every church. Quaker meetings, house churches, small Bible studies, plenty of congregational-governance traditions build real dialogue into how they gather. What follows is about a particular, very common shape — the large-campus, generally white evangelical church that has, not by accident, become one of the more comfortable spaces in American life to be openly MAGA. That’s the room I’m describing.

Go to a wedding and, at some point, someone hands you a microphone. It’s the toast — the best man, the maid of honor, sometimes half the reception, each getting a turn to say something in front of everyone. It’s ordinary. Almost nobody thinks twice about it. The room is built, on some level, for voices other than the one running the show.

Now go to one of these churches on a Sunday. Sit through the sermon. Try to imagine a moment — any moment — where you could stand up and say something in front of everyone the way you would at that reception. There isn’t one. There was never going to be one. And increasingly, there isn’t even a person in the room to say it to. It’s a screen.