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Russell Moore’s Favorite Books of 2024

Sara White — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 19:00:34 +0000

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Every year at this time, I kick off the end of the year with my list of favorite books from the last 12 months. Invariably, sometime between now and New Year’s Eve, I will realize that I’ve forgotten one or two and wish I could redo the list. If I waited for a perfect memory, though, this would never get done. Here they are, in alphabetical order by author.

Wendell Berry, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013–2023 (Counterpoint)

My great-grandmother lived to be 104 years old. This meant that for literally 20 years, every Christmas we would say to ourselves, “This is probably Grandma’s last Christmas,” until we finally gave up. Wendell Berry, who’s influenced my life more than perhaps any other living writer, is 90 years old (you can read the birthday tribute I wrote for him for the Library of America here). Several times over the years, I’ve thought, “This is probably the last Wendell Berry book I will get to put on the year-end favorites list.” I’m always wrong—and I hope I keep being wrong.

This latest volume is a collection of “Sabbath poems”—verses Mr. Berry writes on his farm in Henry County, Kentucky, each Sunday. The poems get at things those who read Berry will expect—the givenness of nature, the gift of good land, the joys of long marriage, the wisdom of ignorance, the goodness of limits, the follies of hypermobility and consumerism. Berry is a contrarian about lots of things—which is why we love him—and one of those things is what people call “organized religion.” His faith, though, is deep and wide, and his immersion in what Karl Barth called “the strange, new world of the Bible” is too. One with ears to hear will perceive all kinds of echoes of that affection throughout these poems.

For instance, in a poem from 2014 about the techno-utopianism about which Berry has been warning us for over a half century, he writes, “Will the robotic leader come at last to achieve our objective, feed the hungry, forgive the debtors, heal the sick, give sight to the blind, release the captives, raise the dead? Or do we look for another?” The implied counsel is a mirror image of that given to the disciples of John the Baptist: Yes, we should look for Another.

By definition, poetry must be experienced, not described. So here’s a taste of what’s in this book, from a Sabbath poem in 2015, about what it’s like to grow old:

What a wonder I was
when I was young, as I learn
by the stern privilege
of being old: how regardlessly
I stepped the rough pathways
of the hillside woods,
treaded hardly thinking
the tumbled stairways
of the steep streams, and worded
unaching hard days
thoughtful only of the work,
the passing light, the heat, the cool
water I gladly drank.

My spell checker tells me that regardlessly is grammatically incorrect in the poem above. The computer is wrong, of course, but I’m glad it flagged the word. I could hit “Ignore All” in honor of Wendell Berry and give at least one little protest to the expertise of the machines, knowing that he would have me ignore it all anyway.

Leif Enger, I Cheerfully Refuse: A Novel (Grove)

One of the keys to my philosophy of history comes from a line by the Grateful Dead: “It’s even worse than it appears, but it’s alright.” That’s kind of a summation, really, of Jesus’ words to John at Patmos: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forever, and I have the keys of Death and Hades. Write therefore the things that you have seen, those that are and those that are to take place after this” (Rev. 1:17–19, ESV throughout). In other words, a “cheerful apocalypse” is not an oxymoron for me.

For many people, though, the idea of a hopeful dystopia is unnerving. In his Washington Post review of Leif Enger’s new novel, Ron Charles wrote, “Over the last few years, I’ve read so many dystopian novels that I had to look up the plural spelling of ‘apocalypse.’” This beautifully crafted novel is set in just such a conflation of apocalypses: the aftermath of climate disaster, a Fahrenheit 451-ish culture of book-burning, widespread addiction to a mind-numbing drug, and a popular demand for assisted suicide to escape it all.

The bleak setting is one of the ways this book comes slant at the reader—with a taste of joy and a sense of tomorrow. In many ways, hope comes easier here than faith. Enger has a complicated view of the church, as seen in his description of an impromptu community musical band as “what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.” A pastor is described, brilliantly, as “a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error.”

This book, though, offers us apocalypse—not in the sense of dystopian collapse but in the literal meaning of the word apocalypse. Lark, the owner of a beleaguered bookstore, is the one to note that “the word apocalypse originally had nothing to do with nukes or climate but came from a Greek term meaning to uncover. To reveal.” This book apocalyptically shows us that the bleakness of surroundings is not the last thing to be said.

Much of that is revealed through an emphasis on the creative power of words. In the backdrop is the election of the country’s first illiterate president and Lark, who is searching for a volume, the same title as the novel itself, that she describes as a “covenant with the forthcoming.” One of the characters notes, “Words are one way we leave tracks in the world.” The bulwark against apocalypse is, ultimately, made up of books and of the remembered words of which they are made up.

Perhaps the most important quote of the book comes from Lark after she is asked, “How are you feeling?” Her answer: “Probably doomed and perplexingly merry.” That makes sense to me, and this book pulls back the veil of a little apocalypse so we can see it together. When offered this kind of apocalypse, I cheerfully accept.

Brian Fairbanks, Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever (Hachette)

Right before Thanksgiving, our dog Willie snipped at the veterinarian while getting a shot. I didn’t realize that, in the state of Tennessee, that requires a follow-up inquiry from animal control—and a ten-day quarantine from contact with other animals and with people outside the immediate family. I joked that this was due to our little dachshund being named after Willie Nelson (replacing as he did our dog Waylon). The Nashville establishment has always had it in for the Outlaws.

I knew I would want this book, and I knew I would read it, but I didn’t expect to learn anything from it. After all, I’ve been following the Outlaws—Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and (sometimes, depending on how you count it) Johnny Cash—since I was three years old. The book covers familiar territory, such as Jennings’s grief after having given up his seat on Buddy Holly’s plane with the taunt “I hope your ol’ plane crashes,” and it does. The book details the tension between Music Row executives and this form of music that wanted to transcend the rhinestone sameness of the Nashville sound. The book is about more than all that, though.

The religious aspects of these stories aren’t ignored either. Fairbanks discusses how Cash tanked his career—after his conversion to evangelical Christianity—by singing Christian-themed songs, including hymns. When Cash did a three-album set dividing his work into the categories of love, God, and murder, murder outsold God three to one. “Stop going to church and go back to prisons,” one of the executives pleaded with Cash.

What I found most captivating were the stories about these artists as what they were: a group of friends with very, very complicated relationships. For instance, Fairbanks’s discussion of the Highwaymen—Nelson, Jennings, Cash, and Kristofferson—delves into the political differences, with Jennings on the far right, Cash in the center, Nelson on the left, and Kristofferson on the way left, without reducing them to avatars of those points of view. The Outlaws fought among themselves constantly—and were divided into the red/blue divides of the rest of the country—but still loved each other in spite of it all.

When Columbia dropped Cash from its label, seeing him as hopelessly dated, Merle Haggard told the executive responsible for it, “Let it go down in history that you’re the dumbest son of a b— I’ve ever met.” We all need friends like that. The joy of it could be seen in the gentle jabbing humor Fairbanks records out of each of them. “We marry what we need,” Kristofferson once said. “I married a lawyer, and Willie married a makeup artist.”

The book’s most piercing moment, at least for me, came near the end when Fairbanks discusses the final days of Waylon Jennings. He recounts the lifelong guilt Jennings experienced over the Buddy Holly plane crash, and that this was more than survivor’s guilt. It was about the joke. He lived most of his life hoping no one would ever find out he had said that. I might have teared up a little when Fairbanks writes about Jennings’s late-in-life reconsideration of how vapid all the rivalries were between these artists over the decades.

“All the fussing and fighting over who gets played on the radio or headlines the state fairs don’t amount to much more than a range war,” Jennings said. “I think you just make your music, you do the best you can with that, and that’s what you’ll be remembered for.”

“My friends,” Jennings said. “The town is big enough for all of us.” It really is—no matter which town one has in mind.

The book includes the scene of the last call between Cash and Jennings, right before Jennings’s death. Both men said “goodbye” and “I love you.” Nelson eulogized Jennings by saying: “When it came to taking on the country music establishment, he had the guts and self-confidence to lead the way. If it weren’t for Waylon, I might still be back in Nashville looking to please the wrong people.”

The book closes with the reality that, though the Outlaws arguably saved country music, the downtown streets of Nashville, just a few miles away from me, ignore them. On Nashville’s Walk of Fame, Willie and Waylon are absent. Unspoken, however, is the reader’s conclusion at the end of this book: Who would you rather be? The Music Row executive who fired Johnny Cash? The would-be star next up in line, willing to please all the wrong people for the rest of a lifetime? Or Willie and Waylon and the boys?

Nancy French, Ghosted: An American Story (Zondervan)

I’m the guy who’s supposed to pose ethical dilemmas, but this book posed one for me. The author, who is a friend, asked me to read it and blurb it, and I was tempted to lie. The lie was not the kind that one normally faces in such a situation—the kind that inflates the value of something mediocre. It was just the opposite. As I read this book, I realized about a third of the way through that it was one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read by anybody.

If I write what I really think about this book, no one will believe me, I thought. People will assume that I’m enthusiastic about the book because it’s written by Nancy. No one will know that I would be blown away by this book even if I didn’t know who the author was. I didn’t lie, but I understated my enthusiasm in the blurb.

Understatement will not do here. This book is amazing—and it is very, very hard to describe. The reason it’s hard to describe is because it shifts the reader back and forth between laughter and tears but in very unexpected ways. You will find yourself laughing during material that is really dark—and you will find yourself tearing up during descriptions of hilarity.

You’ve probably never run over Mitt Romney on a ski slope. You’ve probably never asked, “What am I doing here?” while backstage at a Donald Trump rally. You’ve probably never had to hitchhike with a neo-Nazi. You’ve probably never had your fortune read somewhere in the Appalachian countryside. You’ve probably not had to deal with your spouse being drafted to run for president of the United States. I’m very sure you’ve probably never suspected your husband of an affair only to find out the women were really looking for Van Halen lead vocalist David Lee Roth. This book will let you feel all of that.

But I’ll bet a lot of you know exactly what it’s like to have someone misuse their spiritual authority over you or to have friends you trusted walk away from you or to worry about the safety of your family. This book takes those everyday fears and frames them in ways you’ve never considered.

The title, Ghosted, has multiple meanings. Nancy is a ghostwriter, someone who helps celebrities and others put their thoughts and ideas into words. The title also refers to those who ghosted her, especially in the conservative Republican world Nancy inhabited, over her stands against Trump and alt-right ethno-nationalism. But it also refers to the ghosts of the past—those moments of hardship and heartbreak that haunt us long after they are gone. The best ghost stories are those that break us out of the denial that there actually is a ghost there, so that we can acknowledge it, ask what it’s trying to tell us, and let it go on its way. This book does that—and does it beautifully.

When you finish this book, you will have laughed and cried and pondered and clenched your fists in vicarious anger and given thanks for things you never knew you loved—and then you will think to yourself something like what I did: “I can’t wait for volume two.”

Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin)

I’ve often said that one of the key problems with the velocity of this era is that there is very little time, when discussing the implications of any technology, between “That’s so out there. We’ll never have to deal with that” and “Well, it’s ubiquitous. What are you gonna do?” The smartphone is a key exhibit in that problem. Most people—including most adolescents—are aware that smartphones are hurting our mental health and our relationships in all kinds of ways. But most of us shrug our shoulders, with the implied, “Well, that’s just life now. What are you gonna do?”

In this book, Jonathan Haidt takes the “What are you gonna do?” and shakes it out of its role as a rhetorical question, hammers it back into place as a sincere question, and then answers it.

I once asked Haidt, when he was working on this book, how it would differ from, say, Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman railing 40 or 50 years ago about television. “When you and I were kids watching too much television, we were not the ones saying it was a problem,” he replied. “The kids themselves are now telling us that it is.”

This book is a jeremiad, but not in the popular use of that word, which often implies an airing of grievances about something that can’t, or likely won’t, be changed. It’s a jeremiad in the sense of the actual prophet Jeremiah—who was unsparing in his honesty about the depths of the problems no one wanted to acknowledge, who pictured a future on the other side of it all, and who delivered the way to live in the time in between those two realities.

Since having Haidt on with me on the podcast several times, I’ve heard from countless parents, teachers, school administrators, church youth groups, and congregations that have adopted recommendations he offers in this book—and they have found them to work. Like his book The Righteous Mind, this volume rewires the entire scope of the debate.

Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration, trans. Daniel Steuer (Polity)

Byung-Chul Han stands in the tradition of Jacques Ellul and Christopher Lasch, writing book after book of social commentary. Reading any one of their books will result in never seeing things the same again. This book does this with categories Han calls “information” and “storytelling.” He defines information as consumable, controllable facts, while a story requires an interplay of knowledge and ignorance, clarity and distance. The information age has thrown us into what he calls a “narrative crisis.”

Information is about problem-solving techniques, while narration is about wisdom, which requires stability, tradition, and continuity. With disconnected facts, we have mere survival, but a narration is necessary for hope. The information age, Han writes, empties the magic from the world and renders things and experiences mute. They do not “speak to us.” The hunger for myth—what Han defines as “ritually staged narratives”—is not satisfied as easily as we might think.

Instead, Han argues, it opens up a market for what he calls “storyselling,” which seeks to mine narrative for the emotions required by stories. This is manipulated by marketers and politicians who use story not to create community but to manipulate consumers.

I wrote earlier this year about how the “crisis of narration” problem should be addressed by confronting rampant biblical illiteracy—especially the kind that believes itself to be biblical by mining the text for doctrinal systems and worldview principles while remaining dead to the biblical narrative itself.

John Hendrix, The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis & J. R. R. Tolkien (Abrams)

I’ve spoken about last year’s phenomenal graphic novel about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Faithful Spy (not assassin, don’t get me started). The ending of that book—Bonhoeffer dreaming of swimming beneath the water to see two hands above pulling him upward—moved me in ways that stay with me all the time.

The same author/illustrator is back with a biography of the relationship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. The artwork is amazing, but the storytelling is just as good. Even those of us very familiar with the Inklings and the goings-on at the Eagle and Child will be captivated by the way this book seems to take us right there to the Rabbit Room, to the Kilns, even off for a bit into Narnia and Middle-earth. The book expertly defines the word myth in the sense that Tolkien and Hugo Dyson meant it, showing why that matters for the here and now.

The main force of the book, though, is not about mythology or literature. In this sense, it’s similar to the undercurrent of the book on the Outlaws. If you never imagined Waylon and Willie meeting Jack and Tollers, stay with me for a moment.

Like the Highwaymen, the friendship of Lewis and Tolkien was fractured, filled with genuine disagreement and probably unarticulated rivalry. We all know that Tolkien hated the Narnia stories, but Hendrix takes us further up and further in to the disdain, arguing that Tolkien didn’t understand what Lewis was trying to do—to enter back into the tin toy garden he created as a child. Middle-earth was a different kind of threshold to cross.

Hendrix shows us how, after the friendship fractured, the two would sometimes get together after Joy Davidman’s death for a pipe and a drink. “But they avoided the Deep wounds,” he writes. “Neither man could bring himself to bridge that great divorce.”

And that leads to my favorite part of the book, one not rooted in real history but in an imagined ending for Lewis and Tolkien—one in which they forgive each other. “I still object to Father Christmas,” the Tolkien character says (IYKYK). The imagined Lewis says, “So many years trying to find joy … when all along it was a signpost—pointing to a greater country.” The ending of these two enjoying a final kettle of tea before crossing the ultimate threshold wrecked me.

“When somebody you’ve wronged forgives you, you’re spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience,” Frederick Buechner once wrote. “When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you’re spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride. For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins and to be glad in each other’s presence.”

This book gives us a feeling of this, even if that reconciliation is in imagination and not in reality. But as soon as I type this, I can feel myself at the Eagle and Child, peering through the pipe smoke to see Lewis and Tolkien and Owen Barfield and hearing one of them say, “And who says imagination isn’t real?” True enough.

Russ Ramsey, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About the Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive (Zondervan)

When my friend Russ Ramsey told me that his next book, a spiritual sequel to his work Rembrandt Is in the Wind, was centered around Vincent van Gogh, I almost made a stupid joke about cutting off one’s ear. I’m glad I didn’t. The book convinced me that the joking about that incident is not only reductionistic but downright cruel.

I know no one who can get at art like Russ can, even for those who don’t know enough about art to explain why they like what they like. As a matter of fact, as I read this book, I realized it is about much more than art. It’s about human beings and human stories.

The book concludes with this meditation:

Vincent van Gogh said of his art, “I am trying to get at something utterly heartbroken.” Many artists live at the river’s edge. Their work explores the perilous seam where suffering falls off into despair, where affection wells up into passion, where the winds of heaven blow through the stuff of earth. They provide high-relief compositions of the ordinary and matter-of-fact portrayals of the transcendent. They help us see the wonder of being alive and the inevitability of having to die. They read our story back to us, and we, in turn, ask to see the pictures.

In this book, Russ guides the reader through a spectrum of human realities and emotions, each through the grid of a particular piece of artwork—from Leonardo da Vinci to Norman Rockwell and beyond. It is the closest one can come to walking around an art museum with Russ Ramsey, hearing not just a penetrating examination of the artwork but an explanation of what it means to live and to die and to question why. This book is even better than Rembrandt Is in the Wind—and that is saying something.

My only negative word about this book is the title of one chapter: “I Don’t Like Donatello, and You Can Too”—but only because I think he should have saved it for the title of volume three of what definitely should be a trilogy.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Belknap)

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age revolutionized the way both secularists and Christians think about secularization, noting that it is not just that some societies become less religious over time but that the very experience of religion is different from what it once was. This book, I would argue, is just as important. The present age relates differently not just to God but also to what moderns would call “nature.” What’s left is a sense of absence—of longing, the sort of “everydayness” that Walker Percy described in his “The Man on the Train” essay.

Taylor traces this trajectory in poetry, arguing that the poetic form is itself an attempt at “re-connecting” with the rhythms of the cosmos, a cosmos ordered by Word. In so doing, Taylor provides piercing analysis of poets ranging from Shelley and Keats to Eliot and Miłosz.

Many will be tempted to skip this book because it’s massive (around 600 pages). Even if you only read the very beginning and the very end, though, the book is more than worth your time at figuring out a diagnosis and some proposed remedies for the “deadness” and “muteness” of the world as it seems to be right now.

This is not a nostalgic narrative about the tragic loss of “enchantment,” looking backward to the myth of an idyllic agrarian yesterday. Taylor sees genuine moral steps forward, for instance, on human rights and self-government. In such matters, Taylor argues, we now ethically demand of all people standards once expected for persons of exceptional moral strength.

The longing for cosmic connection, Taylor argues, points to a kind of “interspace” between a human observer and the universe. As the Romantics pointed out, sometimes a sense of awe and wonder comes flooding in, but, as Eliot warned, the experience is fleeting and ambiguous.

Taylor writes: “The great advances of the natural sciences over the last three centuries, which in recent decades have accelerated, have (understandably but wrongly) helped create a mindset which refuses to take any knowledge claim seriously which cannot meet the validation conditions of these sciences—unless they be about everyday observable realities (How many chairs are in this room? How many people attended the meeting?)” The ongoing need for cosmic connection, though, does not go away. Taylor argues that’s because it is necessary to what it means to be human.

This book is necessary for those of us who wish to see a resurgence of historic, apostolic Christianity because we see all around us the wreckage of attempts (both “fundamentalist” and “modernist” and otherwise) to build doctrinal systems or to mobilize movements without answering that longing that calls from deep unto deep.

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically (Zondervan)

A couple years ago, I was meeting with some friends in a church fellowship hall in Washington, DC. Two rabbis and I arrived early, and we walked around the old sanctuary, looking at the stained-glass windows. The rabbis recognized all of the scenes depicted from the life of Christ, with the exception of one: the transfiguration of Jesus, which happens to be one of my favorite accounts in all of the Bible. So I told the story.

When I said, “And then Moses and Elijah appeared,” one of the rabbis yelled, “No way!” with the kind of surprise I hadn’t heard since Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield showed up on the screen in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

I loved telling that story to people who knew the Hebrew Scriptures but had never heard about the Transfiguration, because I could kind of hear it all over again for the first time, listening through their newness to it.

I thought of that moment as I read this excellent book. In some ways, I regret the title because, for many Christians, “hermeneutics” reads as the cerebral act of examining the text for meaning. This book is about more than that. The author, theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, poses the question “What do I love when I love the biblical words as the word of God?” The book engages debates with scholars, alive and dead, about how, for instance, to interpret Christ in the Old Testament, but it goes beyond that, demonstrating how the readers of the text—you, when you give attention to the Bible in front of you—are addressed by God.

The best part of the book is the last third, in which Vanhoozer deals specifically with the event at Mount Tabor and the biblical references that point forward and backward to it in the rest of the Bible. He argues that the apostle Peter is intentionally showing us how to read Scripture when he ties the words “more fully confirmed” with the voice he heard on “the holy mountain” (2 Pet. 1:18–19). “Peter urges his readers to pay attention to the prophetic word ‘as to a light shining in a dark place,’” Vanhoozer writes, “and the best way to do that is to recall the role of the transfiguration in the economy of light.”

This book will help you interpret the Bible as a “mere Christian,” but more importantly, it will focus your attention on the truth seen in a moment on that mountain: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

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Beth Moore and Russell Moore in Conversation

CMS Admin — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 05:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the first episode of the two-part Losing Our Religion special series finale. This episode and the one to follow were recorded at a special live event with Bible teacher and author Beth Moore and Russell Moore in Houston on August 9, 2023. Beth and Russell gathered with hundreds in person and thousands online for a discussion of Russell’s new book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. They shared the story of their friendship and the similarities in their Southern Baptist upbringings. Beth asks Russell a series of "getting to know you" questions about his family of origin, marriage, children, and ministry. They spoke to the loss and disruption of ultimately leaving the SBC and the ways their ministries have affected their families. Tune in for thoughts on not giving up on people who are deconstructing, walking by faith, and honesty with God. Beth and Russell’s discussion covers shifts in evangelical Christianity, how politics is asked to bear a weight it cannot support, and our common desire for belonging. Make sure you check out the next episode, which features Beth and Russell answering questions from the live audience! This special series of episodes around Russell Moore’s newest book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, explores the Christian faith in confusing times. Check out the other episodes in the series:

Resources mentioned in this episode include:

Grab a copy of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America here! Do you have a question for Russell Moore? Send it to questions@russellmoore.com. Click here for a trial membership at Christianity Today.

“The Russell Moore Show” is a production of Christianity Today Executive Producers: Erik Petrik, Russell Moore, and Mike Cosper Host: Russell Moore Producer: Ashley Hales Associate Producers: Abby Perry and Azurae Phelps Director of Operations for CT Media: Matt Stevens Audio engineering by Dan Phelps Video producer: Abby Egan Theme Song: “Dusty Delta Day” by Lennon Hutton

The post Beth Moore and Russell Moore in Conversation appeared first on Christianity Today.

‘Moral Leadership and Personal Convictions’ with Russell Moore

CMS Admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:45:00 +0000

Even as a young child, Russell Moore was always in a church pew. That strong seed of faith and biblical knowledge has provided him with the firm foundation needed to navigate complex ethical and leadership issues throughout his ministry. And amid the trials, questions, and ever-changing culture, one truth Russell has leaned on consistently is that God is faithful. He continues his good work, even through our human failings and heartache.

Guest Bio Russell Moore is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and the author of several books. His latest is Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House).

The Wall Street Journal has called Moore “vigorous, cheerful, and fiercely articulate.” He was named in 2017 to Politico Magazine’s list of top fifty influence-makers in Washington D.C. and has been profiled by such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME magazine, and the New Yorker.

An ordained Baptist minister, Moore was president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2013 to 2021. Before that role, he served as provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also taught theology and ethics.

Moore was a Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and currently serves on the board of Becket Law and as a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.

He also hosts the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show and is co-host of Christianity Today’s weekly news and analysis podcast, The Bulletin.

A native Mississippian, he and his wife Maria are the parents of five sons. They live in Nashville, where he teaches the Bible at their home congregation, Immanuel Church.

Notes & Quotes • “[Some will say] ‘Well, there’s a golden age back there in the past and somebody’s keeping us away from it and we’ve got to get back to it.’ And the stakes are so high that we can morally adjust in order to get there. And I think biblical eschatology, you know, is calling us away from all of that.”

• “I think I had a sense of the way that God works in the long term, which is often to bring a kind of crisis and then to rebuild and recreate out of that. And that’s what you see are communities that are broken up, but then new communities that are reformed and are coming together.”

• “You know, nobody would choose to go through that, but nobody would choose to go through any crisis in his or her life. But almost everybody, if you say, where are the times that God has really been active in ways that have changed your life, it’s usually in a time of crisis that they would have never chosen.”

Links Mentioned

• Learn more about Russell’s current role as editor-in-chief with Christianity Today.

• Listen to Russell’s podcast, The Russell Moore Show, on your preferred podcast platform.

• Check out Russell’s latest book, Losing Our Religion, on Amazon.

• Visit the VOICES website to sign up for emails. Get new episodes sent straight to your email.

• Tell us how much you love Where Ya From? by rating us five stars and leaving us a review.

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The post ‘Moral Leadership and Personal Convictions’ with Russell Moore appeared first on Christianity Today.

Russell Moore’s Favorite Books of 2023

CMS Admin — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Every year I cobble together a list of my favorite books of the year. For many years, I had a rule that I would never include books written by friends. As you can see, I’ve tossed that rule aside—largely because I kept breaking it. The list usually skews more to the non-fiction side, even though at least half my reading is probably fiction and poetry. That’s because I limit the scope to those books published in the last calendar year, and I usually find that the fiction or poetry I like has been published before that.

The list is in alphabetical order by author’s last name—not a ranking of first to tenth. I tell you why I like the book and then give you a quote from it to give you a sense of the vibe.

Richard Adams, adapted and illustrated by James Sturm and Joe Sutphin, Watership Down: The Graphic Novel (Ten Speed Graphic)

Once, I mentioned the novel Watership Down and a young man said, “Yeah, I read that when I was a kid. It was really sweet.” After a couple of minutes of confusion, we realized he was thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit. The rabbits in Watership Down are anything but velveteen. The book deals with the darkest aspects of human existence projected onto the lives of warrens of rabbits—murder, envy, rivalry, exile, and scapegoating.

That’s why I loved this graphic novel. The artwork captures what the book is attempting: to give the reader the vertigo of seeing animals we are acculturated to view as harmless while at the same time seeing the tension, peril, and depravity that we pretend we don’t see in ourselves. The last page, particularly, is astoundingly beautiful.

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you—digger, listener, runner, Prince with the Swift Warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people shall never be destroyed.”

Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (Harper)

This one was hard to read because I am a “character” in a lot of the story. And in this story, American evangelicals make the Watership Down rabbits look like the Easter Bunny. Alberta examines what happened to American evangelicalism in the Trump era, in venues ranging from Liberty University to the Southern Baptist Convention to a prosperity gospel preacher’s revival tent.

Meticulous in research and gripping in storytelling, the most powerful aspects of this book are rooted in the personal backdrop. At the start of the book, Alberta—a pastor’s son—recounts being handed a note at his father’s funeral from one of his father’s congregants, rebuking him for reporting critically of Donald Trump. When he showed it to his wife, she “flung the piece of paper into the air and with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: ‘What the hell is wrong with these people?’”

This book asks and answers that question.

“Instead of testifying confidently to the presence of a supreme and sovereign God—a celestial chess master rolling his eyes at our earthly checkerboard—Christian conservatives have acted like toddlers lost at the shopping mall, panicked and petrified, shouting the name of their father with such hysteria that his reputation is diminished in the eyes of every onlooker.”

David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (Random House)

When former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger died, someone posted a piece from The Weekly Standard that David Brooks wrote well over 20 years ago—a satirical piece on how to become the next Henry Kissinger. The piece was funny and insightful and skewered a certain kind of Washington pretension. The piece said to the real and would-be Kissinger-types: I see you. I know what you’re doing, and it’s ridiculous.

I cannot imagine David Brooks writing that article today. That’s not because he is any less provocative or alert to hypocrisies and foibles. His writing has changed, it seems, because his definition of the sentence I see you has deepened and widened. He is—like one of his most-quoted public intellectuals, Reinhold Niebuhr—a “tamed cynic.” This book is about not just taming but transforming.

The book, in typical Brooks fashion, examines the issues from a wide range of vantage points: brain science, psychology, ancient philosophy, world history, popular culture. In addressing the question of empathy, Brooks deals with practical wisdom as well as theoretical insight: how to have a conversation, how to ask questions, how to wrangle one’s personality in ways that expand rather than diminish others. “Empathy” in this book is not a vague emotional setting or a polite set of social skills but a way of moving through a broken world with one’s soul intact. This book changed the way I see “seeing.”

“Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding data, making the case for a proposition, and analyzing trends across populations. It is not great for seeing an individual person.

“Narrative thinking, on the other hand, is necessary for understanding the unique individual in front of you. Stories capture the unique presence of a person’s character and how he or she changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and strive, how their lives are knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. When someone is telling you their story, you get a much more personal, complicated, and attractive image of the person. You get to experience their experience.”

Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (PublicAffairs)

Sometime in mid-2016, I heard myself say with sarcasm to a friend, “I, for one, welcome our new Kardashian overlords.” What I was lampooning was a world in which really serious areas of responsibility—from leading a congregation to holding the nuclear codes—seemed trivialized to the point of a badly scripted reality television series. Bless my heart: I thought it was temporary.

Tara Isabella Burton wrote Strange Rites, what I believe to be the best work of our time on emerging spiritualities. In this new book, she interacts with Charles Taylor’s claim that the secular age is one of “expressive individualism.” Where Burton disagrees with Taylor is his point that this shift is a “move from a religious worldview to a secular one.”

Instead, Burton argues that “we have not so much done away with a belief in the divine as we have relocated it. We have turned our backs on the idea of a creator-God, out there, and instead placed God within us—more specifically, within the numinous force of our own desires.”

In a tale as old as Eden, the attempt at self-creation doesn’t lead to deification but to dehumanization. This book shows us how we arrived here—how this moment affects every single one of us in all kinds of ways invisible to us—and how we could start to think of a way to something other than the Kardashian way.

“The story of self-creation, at its core, is not only a story about capitalism or secularism or the rise of the middle class or industrialization or political liberalism, although it touches upon all these phenomena and more. It is, rather, a story about people figuring out, together, what it means to be human. It is a story about trying to work out which parts of our lives—both those parts chosen and those parts we did not choose—are really, authentically us, and which parts are mere accidents of history, custom, or circumstance. It is, in other words, a story about people asking, and answering, and asking once again the most fundamental question human beings can ask: Who am I, really?

“And it is the story of how one answer—in my view, the wrong one—became dominant: I am whoever I want to be.”

Tobias Cremer, Godless Crusade: Religion, Populism, and Right-Wing Identity Politics in the West (Cambridge University Press)

With all the Old Testament warnings about idols, we sometimes imagine that these idolatries started with religious exploration—the way a “searching” modern might seek out a new spirituality. In reality, most idol worship started with much more mundane ends in mind: political alliances, military coalitions, marriage compacts. The graven images have changed over the millennia, but this part of it is still true.

This book is about how this dynamic plays itself out right now in the ways that Christian symbols, images, and concepts are co-opted by ethno-nationalist right-wing movements all over the world. For example, Cremer shows how it’s no accident that January 6 insurrectionists saw no contradiction between a “Jericho March” and the “QAnon shaman,” storming the Capitol in the garb of literal paganism. In short, Cremer explores with data how these movements use “Christianity” in order to give transcendent authority to blood-and-soil ideologies about race and nationalism before, ultimately, secularizing or paganizing the supporting religions themselves.

The thinking here is clear, and the warnings are dire. Perhaps most importantly, Cremer does not adopt the sort of fatalistic cynicism that many white American evangelicals display. He shows how some (small “o”) orthodox European Christian leaders and communities actually have succeeded in keeping their religions from being co-opted in this way.

Additionally, I find Cremer’s personal background relevant and motivating: He is the grandson of a Confessing Church pastor who almost lost his life opposing the conscription of the Nazi-era German church into a gospel-less Führer cult.

“Yet, they all saw such Christian symbols as remnants of an identity, community, and home that they had lost through the processes of secularization, globalization, and individualization. Worse still, in the eyes of these protesters, the ‘liberal elite’ (who are in many ways the winners of these processes) were perceived to delegitimize and ridicule their very yearning for community and group identity. National populists have recognized this problem and offered their own remedy: a godless crusade in which Christianity is largely turned into a secularized ‘Christianism’ and a symbol of whiteness that is interchangeable with the Viking veneer, the Confederate flag, neo-pagan symbols or even secularism.”

Jonathan Eig, King: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

I’ve found that I am reluctant to even look at a biography of a handful of figures whose lives seem so well-known that one wonders what else there is to be said. Abraham Lincoln would fit in that category, as would Martin Luther King Jr. This biography is effective precisely because it steals past that sense of familiarity with the kaleidoscopic complexity of an actual person, the story of one who was more than an abstraction of ideals and speeches and movements.

Drawing on interviews and records that were previously unavailable, this biography contributes to the history and the sociology but does not bypass the psychology. In reading this, one can actually start to imagine the sheer exhaustion King faced as he headed into Memphis for those last few days. In fact, by this point in the story, one wonders how a human being could endure that level of exhaustion. The described humanity of the subject—along with the sharp analysis of the context of mid-20th-century America and what led up to it—makes this a biography that will influence the way the next generation sees one of the most important figures in American history.

“Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King; only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before.”

Esau McCaulley, How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South (Convergent)

In a culture like ours, it’s hard to feel the force of what God revealed at Sinai, that we should honor our father and mother. That command forces us to confront our creatureliness. No matter what the ambient culture tells us, we actually are not self-created. We came from somewhere; we are part of someone else’s story. Part of what it means to show honor to those who came before us—as well as to show gratitude to the providential God behind all of it—is to conserve and to re-tell those stories.

This book does just that—with beauty and with force. In the blurb for this book, I wrote that I believe it to be Esau McCaulley’s best writing yet. Given what he’s written before, that is really saying something.

McCaulley traces the stories of impoverished tenant farmers in Jim Crow Alabama all the way to his own story in the present day in a way that hits with the force of a great novel. He describes viscerally not just circumstances but emotions and motivations.

Like all good writing, the particularity of this story is what makes it universal. McCaulley describes the human condition when it comes to such matters as mourning the death of a father with whom there was a complicated relationship. I laughed with recognition at his descriptions of learning how to preach—and wondered if he could ever live up to what was expected of him. This book combines gratitude and humility with wisdom in a way that shatters the self-creation myth and drives us to mourning and to celebration, all at the same time.

“I once feared that running was a genetic trait, and that I, too, would leave when my family needed me. So I built a life as the antithesis of my father’s. We were to be two different people, as far apart as the East is from the West. But lives that are connected are not so easily separated. Every hug I give to my children and each sporting event I attend brings with it memories of my own youth. Am I doing these things because I care about my children, or am I trying to prove something to myself? Is it love or some mad experiment?”

Beth Moore, All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir (Tyndale House)

Sometimes over the past several years, I have felt as though I have a hyphenated name—with the last part being “(not related).” That’s because Beth Moore and I lived through an awful experience together—a sliver of it in public view—and any story that referenced both of us would have to make clear that these Moores weren’t related. The problem is that, precisely because of those shared experiences, I feel like we are related.

As grateful as I always am for Beth, this book made me even more so. From the very first chapter, it is clear that she had no time for public relations or image-building. She writes from the vulnerability of one who has lived through the “knotted-up” realities of such darkness as child sexual abuse, families under stress, and trying to follow God’s call as a woman in some really misogynistic contexts. And yet, with all of that honesty about hard truths, this is a book about joy. Not only does Beth not yield to cynicism—or even almost yield to cynicism—she shows the rest of us how we can do the same.

From the Access Hollywood controversy on, I would often think, “If Beth can get through this, so can I.” I thought the same thing—about a whole range of dangers, toils, and snares—as I read this book. And, though the book is about much more than marriage, I will give this out to engaged couples from now on because of the wisdom here that being “one flesh” doesn’t always mean being “one mind,” and how to love through all of that.

My wife Maria (related) wants me to make the point that, from her point of view, this is one of those books where the audio version is much more than just a way to “consume the content.” I read the book the old-fashioned way, while Maria listened to it too, and she said there’s something especially powerful about hearing not just the story, but the voice telling the story.

“I’m not very sure of myself anymore, if I ever truly was. But I am utterly sure of one thing about my turn on this whirling earth. A thing I’ve never seen. A thing I cannot prove. A thing I cannot always sense. Every inch of this harrowing journey, in all the bruising and bleeding and sobbing and pleading, my hand has been tightly knotted, safe and warm, with the hand of Jesus. In all the letting go, he has held me fast. He will hold me still. And he will lead me home. Blest be the tie that binds.”

Mark A. Noll, C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 (InterVarsity Academic)

Behind me on my wall right now as I write is a portrait of C. S. Lewis lighting his pipe. For the Christmas season, I’ve added a Santa hat to the top of his head. He would loathe this and would no doubt dismiss it as very American of me—and not meaning that as a compliment.

This book examines the question of why so many Americans were (and continue to be) influenced so deeply by this utterly British man. The book speaks with authority, as it is written by one of the truly preeminent historians of our time.

Noll examines how Lewis was received by three American audiences: Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and evangelicals. Perhaps surprising to some, for the duration of Lewis’s life, the evangelical audience was the least enthusiastic about him of the three. Noll demonstrates why this was and how it changed. For my fellow evangelicals, many familiar places and names play key roles—Wheaton College, Southern Seminary, Cornelius Van Til, and Elisabeth Elliot.

“An apostle to the skeptics is bound to offend some of the skeptics, which did not seem to bother Lewis in the slightest. (Lewis did, however, take seriously criticism from his own small circle of friends). He thus shows that trying to express what we know to be true, hopefully while enjoying a small circle of sympathetic friends whose critiques we trust, is more important than trying to impress whatever gatekeepers police the higher reaches of our particular fields.”

Perhaps somewhere in the great cloud of witnesses, J. R. R. Tolkien will note that it was not an American who put Father Christmas in the mythos of Narnia, so maybe the Santa hat won’t get me kicked out of the wardrobe.

Eugene H. Peterson, Lights a Lovely Mile: Collected Sermons of the Church Year (Waterbrook)

We lost Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message and author of countless books (my favorite of which is As Kingfishers Catch Fire), in 2018, and many of us assumed that we had read our last book from this sage. Long before Peterson was an author, though, he was a pastor and a preacher. The books we read were fermented in the soil of preaching and discipling a specific group of people, Christ Our King Presbyterian Church in Bel Air, Maryland.

This book assembles a series of these sermons, arranged around the church calendar. These messages carry with them what we loved about Peterson: biblical saturation, poetic insight, and the authority that comes with the integrity of a life lived before God. I never expected to be moved and energized by a sermon about Simon Magus, but I was. Included are all those small sentences that stay embedded in my mind because they make the truth resonate in new ways. An example: “To skip reading the Old Testament would be to skip the first thirty-nine chapters of a forty-chapter book.”

“And there are a number of things you can sell in church. You can sell the need of adding an extra dimension to a person’s life. You can sell the importance of Christian education in the lives of children. You can sell the personal benefits of religion. You can sell the need for a new church in this community. But when you get to the center of the church’s life, you can sell nothing, for there it is all given. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’ (John 3:16). If we persist in our salesmanship at that point, we will participate in the sin of all those priests who have separated people from God and have acted as such miserable substitute gods in individuals’ lives.

“Both buying and selling in the church exist on the periphery. In the center it is all grace, God’s giving himself freely to us and our responding in our poverty to him. And that is not for sale in this church.”

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

The post Russell Moore’s Favorite Books of 2023 appeared first on Christianity Today.

Listener Questions for Russell Moore and Beth Moore

CMS Admin — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 05:30:00 +0000

On the final episode of the Losing Our Religion special series, Russell Moore and Beth Moore answer listener questions as a continuation of the August 9 live event in the prior episode.

Tune in for their answers to these 11 thoughtful inquiries:

Considering everything they’ve been through, how do Beth and Russell guard against bitterness?
What are their favorite things about Houston, Texas?
Why hasn’t the church figured out how to help address the epidemic of loneliness?
What do Beth and Russell most appreciate about their SBC upbringings and their current church families?
What would they tell someone starting seminary who wants to teach and keep their faith in the long run?
In addition to Losing Our Religion, what are three important books for people interested in the future of the evangelical church in America?
How do our current news forms contribute to our modern culture, how can believers remain knowledgeable about society while resisting the negative effects of various news mediums, and how much time is faithful to spend on news relative to spending time serving others?
What advice does Russell have for pastors leading “Trump-enthusiastic” congregations?
What do Beth and Russell love about their current seasons of life and ministry?
How might the church effectively engage with culture today?
What is giving Beth and Russell the most hope and joy when they think about the future of the church?

This special series of episodes around Russell Moore’s newest book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, explores the Christian faith in confusing times. Check out the other episodes in the series:

Resources mentioned in this episode include:

Grab a copy of Russell’s new title, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, here!

Do you have a question for Russell Moore? Send it to questions@russellmoore.com.

Click here for a trial membership at Christianity Today.

The post Listener Questions for Russell Moore and Beth Moore appeared first on Christianity Today.

Losing Our Religion and Russell Moore’s Hope

CMS Admin — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 04:00:00 +0000

A few years ago, the faith community Russell Moore loved—and the country he respected—seemed to be becoming unrecognizable. As Moore looked at his surroundings, a metaphor from The Lord of the Rings came to mind. Had the Shire, the place he loved and believed to be home, really been the evil realm of Mordor all along? On this episode of The Russell Moore Show, CT director of podcasts Mike Cosper interviews Moore about his new book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. Moore talks about changes in the political landscape, church culture, and his own life over the past decade. He and Cosper discuss deconstruction, the difference between losing faith and losing religion, and how misogyny can become intertwined with poor theology. Their conversation also covers tribalism, Christendom in America, and how to respond to cynicism or despair. Turn up the volume for a rich conversation filled with humility, discernment, and wisdom for living hopefully in a broken world. And tune in to the next several episodes as Moore hosts specific conversations with exciting guests about navigating the Christian faith in confusing times. Resources mentioned in this episode include:

The Bulletin
Uneasy in Babylon: Southern Baptist Conservatives and American Culture by Barry Hankins
Tim Keller on Jeremiah 29
The music of Willie Nelson
The music of Waylon Jennings
The writings of Jack Kerouac
Keys to the Deeper Life by A. W. Tozer
Bonus Episode: “Tim Keller’s Heavenly Hope ”

Grab a copy of Russell’s new title, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, here! If you’re able, join us for a live event hosted by Beth Moore in Houston on August 9. Click here for details. Do you have a question for Russell Moore? Send it to questions@russellmoore.com. Click here for a trial membership at Christianity Today. “The Russell Moore Show” is a production of Christianity Today Executive Producers: Erik Petrik, Russell Moore, and Mike Cosper Host: Russell Moore Producer: Ashley Hales Associate Producers: Abby Perry and Azurae Phelps CT Administration: Christine Kolb Social Media: Kate Lucky Director of Operations for CT Media: Matt Stevens Audio engineering by Resonate Recording Video producer: Abby Egan Theme Song: “Dusty Delta Day” by Lennon Hutton

The post Losing Our Religion and Russell Moore’s Hope appeared first on Christianity Today.

Top 10 ‘Russell Moore Show’ Episodes of 2022

CMS Admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 06:00:00 +0000

2022 was the first full year of Russell Moore hosting his podcast at Christianity Today. As the editor in chief and director of CT’s Public Theology Project, Moore discusses a range of topics that exist in the tension between faith and culture, theology and politics in the public square. CT’s editorial staff have selected the top 10 podcast episodes that listeners have engaged with on The Russell Moore Show this year:

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Check out the rest of our 2022 year-end lists here.

The post Top 10 ‘Russell Moore Show’ Episodes of 2022 appeared first on Christianity Today.

Russell Moore: I Already Miss Tim Keller’s Wise Voice

CMS Admin — Thu, 25 May 2023 09:25:00 +0000

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

“Gandalf isn’t supposed to die.”

That text appeared on my phone yesterday from a New York City pastor who worked closely with Tim Keller. It made me smile and cry at the same time. So many of us called Tim “Gandalf,” in part as a tribute to his frequent J. R. R. Tolkien references, but also because he fit the image of the sage wizard guiding us hapless hobbits out of harm’s way.

In the opening chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien writes that Gandalf’s “fame in the Shire was due mainly to his skill with fires, smokes, and lights. His real business was far more difficult and dangerous, but the Shire-folk knew nothing about it.”

By any measure, Tim was an impressive figure—the most significant American evangelical apologist and evangelist since Billy Graham. Most people think immediately of his skill in the areas of preaching, cultural analysis, church-planting strategy, and apologetics. All of that is true. But Tim’s real business went beyond his skills and gifts. He was smart, yes, but what made him unique wasn’t intellect but wisdom.

“Well, wait, let’s think about this for a minute, Russell.”

Those words from Tim kept me from more dumb decisions than I can recount. They prefaced the counsel from Tim that kept me in my position as president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. In the wake of my refusal to support Donald Trump as president, I was facing significant backlash.

“Let’s list all the people trying to drive me out that are under the age of forty,” I said. “None. I can’t think of one. As a matter of fact, I’m having trouble thinking of more than four or five that are under the age of seventy.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Tim said. “Don’t do something stupid.”

Four years later, after consulting scores of friends and counselors about whether to leave the ERLC for a new field of ministry, Tim was the one who convinced me to go. I told him the decision was really hard to make, and he said, “You’ve already made the decision. You know what to do. Your mind is just fighting what your soul already knows.”

When I protested that I didn’t want to make a rash decision I might later regret, Tim said, “Honestly, Russell, of all of the possible responses from anywhere in the world, do you really think even one of them will be ‘Why so soon?’”

I laughed—and the decision was made. With just the right joke, Gandalf helped my mind and soul align.

Untold numbers of people have similar stories. Tim would call to encourage us, even while he was undergoing chemotherapy treatments. He sent his last text to me from a hospital room while he was nearing death. He wanted to check on a prayer request I had given to our Wednesday night book club the week before.

Tim was able to care for so many of us in times of trial because he didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear, and we knew that he knew what he was talking about. His wisdom came from decades spent in the presence of Christ. He cultivated closeness with the Spirit through the Word, and as a result, he, like Jesus, so often “did not need any testimony about mankind, for he knew what was in each person” (John 2:25).

Over the past several years, Tim and I were often in conversation with unbelievers—some curious and irenic about faith, others dismissive and hostile. I remember stifling laughter when an atheist whom Tim loved and respected told a group of us that the need for transcendence could now be met with psychedelic mushrooms. I watched Tim’s eyebrow go up. I felt like White House chief of staff Leo McGarry on The West Wing when he saw President Jed Bartlet at a press conference put his hand in his pocket, smile, and look away.

Watch this, I said to myself.

In every one of those interactions, I never once saw Tim humiliate someone with arguments, even though he could easily have done so.

“Well, let’s think about this for a minute,” he said to the atheist arguing that morality could be explained by evolutionary process alone. Tim explored this man’s objections to human slavery, imagining them in the context of a cosmos without any transcendent moral order. In so doing, he affirmed the rightness of the man’s moral intuitions while simultaneously showing how his theory couldn’t bear the weight of those same intuitions. Once again, he showed where the mind and the soul (or the mind and the conscience) were at odds and pointed to a better way.

At the end of the conversation, there was no question that Tim understood the argument and had responded with devastating clarity. But we also knew that his talk wouldn’t end up as a YouTube video titled “Watch Tim Keller Own the Atheist.” He really loved the man and engaged him without passive retreat or intellectual intimidation.

When I invited Tim to guest-speak in the Institute of Politics class I taught at the University of Chicago, most of the students were disconnected from people of faith and didn’t know who he was. David Axelrod, the director of the program at the time, said, “These kids have highly tuned B.S. detectors, and it’s almost like you could hear the shields coming down three minutes after he started talking.”

Many of them realized, Wait, this pastor is as smart as or even smarter than we are, and he’s not the least bit embarrassed about Christian orthodoxy and biblical authority.

That wisdom freed him from personal ego too. Sometimes he would call and say something along the lines of “Well, I just wanted to check in on the other inerrantist, complementarian, Marxist social justice warrior I’m seeing on YouTube.” Then he would reference a video from the “TheoBros for Confederate Blood and Rage” or whatever.

“I wouldn’t in a thousand years even know about that video,” I said. “Why on earth do you?” He was aware of it because he had compassion on his critics—and not just the rational, good-faith ones. With astounding accuracy, he could see the pain they were experiencing.

“A lot of people are hurting and don’t feel significant,” he said. “They try to find significance by attacking people they think others will find significant.” When he saw those critics and others coming after him, he didn’t feel attacked. He saw it as a prayer request and prayed accordingly.

“I wish I were that magnanimous,” I said in response to the TheoBros video. “But I don’t look at those things because I would want to call down fire from heaven.”

He responded with a smile, “Well, I guess we all have a little theobro side to us, don’t we?” Ouch.

Tim’s wisdom wasn’t just about treating people well. He would almost assign the task of tracking people who needed support, even before they knew they needed it. For example, when Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren started writing a weekly column for the New York Times, he said, “She’s going to be great; she’s such a good writer. In that venue, though, no matter what she writes, she’ll probably get a lot of criticism. She can handle it, but it’s never fun. We need to encourage her when that happens.”

In those and other similar moments, he showed more than intellect. He exhibited wisdom through compassion, maturity, grounding, solidarity, and good intuition.

The pastor who texted me “Gandalf is not supposed to die” knew Tim wouldn’t live forever. By that he meant he has trouble imagining a world without Tim’s voice of calm, steady, joyous counsel.

Gandalf once said to Frodo, “Good-bye now! Take care of yourself! Look out for me, especially at unlikely times!”

The next time we see Tim Keller will be at the consummation of all things in Christ. On that day, Tim won’t have to talk any of us out of stupid decisions. He won’t have to give any of us a reason for God. But I like to think he’ll say to C. S. Lewis or Herman Bavinck or one of the countless skeptics he led to Christ, “Well, wait. Let’s think about this for a minute.”

And like many times this side of the Shire, we’ll see that Gandalf can indeed die for a little while, but the gospel he carried stands forever.

Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.

The post Russell Moore: I Already Miss Tim Keller’s Wise Voice appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Weight of Unending Weariness

CMS Admin — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 10:39:00 +0000

The man on the other end of the phone was a former pastor, now deconverted from his faith. But his voice lacked the triumphant tone of a newly inducted atheist.

“I hope no one does what I did,” he confessed. In a vortex of church conflict and ministry burnout, compounded by adrenal fatigue, he sought escape. First, it was pornography, then escalating alcohol use. “It didn’t feel like hedonism,” he explained. “But I became more and more numb, until I could feel nothing at all.”

I think about that man often. His story echoes that of many embattled pastors I know. While not all face addiction, the temptation to emotionally shut down is pervasive, rooted in a fatigue the ancient desert monks termed acedia. This weariness, more prevalent in an era of unceasing outrage and divided congregations, is not just stress or tiredness—it’s despair.

Identifying this despair is the first step, followed by slow, gradual progress through the ordinary means of grace. For some pastors, however, renewal may not be possible within ministry. The decision to step back and chart a different course, made with careful discernment and self-compassion, should not be seen as a failure but as an act of courage and respect for one’s own well-being.

Renewal is slow, often invisible work, akin to how yeast moves through dough. That’s what this special issue is about: how to navigate these challenges when your congregation relies on you and you feel exhausted. The expectation to appear strong and unflappable weighs heavily on church leaders. How can you admit to being spent when you are the one others turn to for strength? Yet, the promise of Jesus in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” is not just a verse to be preached from pulpits. It is a personal invitation from the Word of God himself, extended to you, to each of us, every single day.

The post The Weight of Unending Weariness appeared first on Christianity Today.

Q&A: Reasons for Christian Hope in an Election Year

CMS Admin — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Is the term evangelical worth holding on to anymore? Is it imperative that Christians participate in elections? What is the way forward for families that have been fractured by political disagreements? These are some of the listener questions that Russell and producer Ashley Hales address on this episode of The Russell Moore Show. Tune in for a discussion that digs deep into the political dynamics of modern American life while sharing universal truths for living Christianly in a broken world. Questions addressed during this episode include:

Does Russell read every book that shows up in his newsletter?
What are some tips for reading more regularly?
Is it okay for Christians not to participate in voting for president?
How can Christians whose families are divided over politics prioritize God and one another?
What does the evangelical support of Donald Trump do to the term evangelical and its reputation?
How can believers deal with Christian nationalism in their relationships?
What is Christian nationalism?
How might the upcoming election affect local churches?
What hope is there for Christians discouraged by American politics?

Resources mentioned in this episode include:

Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell Moore
Russell’s newsletter
“Should Christians Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils?” by Russell Moore
“Incurvatus in Se”
“C. S. Lewis on Chronological Snobbery”

Do you have a question for Russell Moore? Send it to questions@russellmoore.com. Special offer for listeners: Russell Moore will join friends David French and Curtis Chang in Washington, DC, for The After Party LIVE! on April 19. As a faithful listener to the podcast, we’d love for you to join us and use this 20% off offer just for listeners! The After Party is a free six-part video curriculum designed for people & pastors alike, and offers “a better way” for Christians to engage in politics. Learn more and buy tickets here—we’ve saved a seat for you! Click here for a trial subscription at Christianity Today.

“The Russell Moore Show” is a production of Christianity Today Executive Producers: Erik Petrik, Russell Moore, and Mike Cosper Host: Russell Moore Producer: Ashley Hales Associate Producers: Abby Perry and McKenzie Hill Director of Operations for CT Media: Matt Stevens Audio engineering by Dan Phelps Video producer: Abby Egan Theme Song: “Dusty Delta Day” by Lennon Hutton

The post Q&A: Reasons for Christian Hope in an Election Year appeared first on Christianity Today.