Breakpoint

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said: "We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us."

That's certainly true of books, one of humanity's oldest tools. New research confirms –yet again—just how good it is for us to read books. Reading doesn't simply teach new facts, it wires various functions of the brain.

A recent study out of the University of Rochester confirms that reading fiction measurably boosts emotional intelligence. Stories about playing tennis, for example, light up the same part of the brain used in actually playing tennis. Extended reading sessions also sharpen the ability to focus and grasp complex ideas.

The same studies also suggest a related effect, that the less one reads, the more those skills dissipate. And, to be clear, scrolling on smartphones doesn't count as reading.

Of course, Christians should read books, not only because of how God made our brains but because God chose to reveal Himself in Word. Apparently, He really wants us to know who He is.

One line from C.S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy is both simple and profound: "That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

My friend Max McLean is bringing the story behind this line to life in his new film The Most Reluctant Convert. It premieres in select theaters across the country this Wednesday, November 3.

One of my favorite parts of the movie is the tour of Oxford at the start of the film. There's something magical about seeing Lewis in the rooms, pubs, and streets where he roamed for most of his adult life. The city shaped him: it was his spiritual greenhouse, social club, and intellectual playground. In the film, we take tea with Lewis at "The Kilns," his home of more than 30 years, share a pint with him in his favorite pub, and see him take communion in his tiny parish church.

Simply put, Max McLean's portrayal of C.S. Lewis is incredible. For years now, McLean has been bringing Lewis's life and work to the stage through The Fellowship for Performing Arts, based in New York. His love for the beloved author is obvious. He recently said, "Lewis is a hero of mine. I think he's not just one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but one of the greatest writers of all time."

I agree. C.S. Lewis is a life worthy of appreciation, and The Most Reluctant Convert is a story especially appropriate for this cultural moment. Early in his life, Lewis experienced much of the joy and pain he would later write about, especially in the life and death of his mother. These memories were part of what drove Lewis to become an exceptional children's author. He took the minds and hearts of kids seriously, famously saying that, "a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story."

The lesson for us is that Lewis never talked down to kids, and we shouldn't either. He wrote stories that dignified them as the image-bearers they are. Lewis called them to goodness over evil, and challenged their hearts and minds. As a result, his books continue to resonate today with children and their parents.

Another central theme in Lewis's writing is friendship and, in The Most Reluctant Convert, we see why. Far from coming to faith in a vacuum, Lewis was guided to Christ through conversations with Owen Barfield, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson. Each of these friends showed "Jack" (as they called him) the love of Christ, while steadfastly challenging his materialist ideas.

In fact, it was one particularly fateful afternoon walk, with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, when a deeper aspect of Christianity driven home in Lewis's heart and mind. The Gospels have all the qualities of the pagan myths he loved, with one essential difference: the Gospels are true. In the words of Tolkien, they are God's "myth made fact." In matching Lewis's deep love for classic mythology with the wonder of Scripture, Tolkien found a bridge to his friend's heart.

It's tempting to think that these kinds of conversations are out of reach in an ideologically divided time like ours, but nothing could be further from the truth. Christians still have opportunities to choose friendship with the people God puts in our path, and to reach them through the common ground of imagination. We never know when we might be talking to the next C.S. Lewis.

Today, too, we need a revival of the Christian imagination. One of my favorite scenes in The Most Reluctant Convert is when Lewis reads George MacDonald's Phantastes for the first time. MacDonald's gripping imagery and deep love of goodness did something incredible for Jack, long before his conversion: it taught him to long for holiness. "That night," he would write years later, "my imagination [was] baptized."

That imagination was quickly linked to Lewis's concept of joy: the longing for something deeper and better, and his desire for truth. In his words, it is "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

In The Most Reluctant Convert, we see a young Lewis, an atheist, slowly drawn to the truth and beauty of the Gospel through his longing for joy. One of the best outcomes of this film would be Christians inspired to tell stories in the exact same tradition.

C.S. Lewis might have been "the most reluctant convert," but that only makes what God did in and through him all the more incredible. His is a story worth telling and watching. Don't miss your chance to see The Most Reluctant Convert this week. Its limited release in theaters starting November 3rd. You can get your tickets now at cslewismovie.com.

Facebook announced a "rebrand" this week. In the announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented a vision for social media in the future. Reacting to this news, Maria asks John is this is something we should withdraw from in fear, or whether there is a silver lining to the dystopian vision Mark Zuckerberg offers.

Recently, a boy (who identifies as female) was convicted for having molested two teenage girls in two different schools. According to John, this real-world, and painful, situation is a consequence of ideological shifts about sex. These shifts embody the sexual revolution and is encapsulated in a White House statement on gender equity.

To close, John recommends a new film coming out this week to theatres across the nation. The Most Reluctant Convert is a dynamic look at the coming to faith of C.S. Lewis. -- Recommendations --

The Most Reluctant Convert Max McLean | Fellowship for the Performing Arts

Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood became a feminist icon for her dystopian novel in which women are enslaved for the purpose of childbearing. Her writing is both the basis for a hit Hulu series and the unofficial mascot of the #MeToo movement.

Recently, Atwood retweeted an op-ed criticizing the use of phrases like "pregnant person" instead of "woman." "Why can't we say 'woman' anymore?" the article's author asked. And the backlash to Atwood's retweet was swift and vicious. Opinion pieces in USA Today and the Independent called her everything from "misguided" to "transphobic." She was compared with Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who has consistently rejected the trans narrative, and each of these onetime progressive heroines are now labeled a "TERF," or "trans-exclusionary radical feminist."

This conflict between the "F" and the "T" in the acronym is real. The feminism of Rowling and Atwood assumes that women are real and are oppressed by men. But those in the camp of T claim that "woman" is a self-identifying construct, which men can fairly appropriate. So what's coming in this narrative? Will feminism eventually be edited to exclude women?

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described faith as "the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods." His is a crucial observation for a world that often pits reason against faith. Lewis understood that faith must always be guarded against the assaults of changing emotion.

Lewis powerfully illustrated this point in The Silver Chair, the fourth book of The Chronicles of Narnia series. The story opens with Jill Pole, a typical English schoolgirl, being called suddenly (and even more strangely than anyone before her) into Narnia. Aslan, the Great Lion, gives her the task of rescuing Prince Rilian, son of Caspian, who had been missing for ten years. To help her, Aslan gives Jill signs to recite and remember, along with this dire warning:

"Here on the mountain, the air is clear … as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind."

Jill learns quickly just how true his warning is. Eventually, having left the surface of Narnia and descended to the depths of the underworld, she, Eustace Scrubb, and Puddleglum the Marshwiggle find Narnia's lost prince. He's so deeply enchanted by the Witch's dark magic that he can no longer tell madness from reality, truth from lies. It's only in the full grasp of his "madness," which actually turns out to be his moments of lucidity, that the prince unknowingly invokes the final sign given to Jill: he calls on the name of Aslan.

In that moment, Lewis masterfully portrays the fog of doubt and deception. Under the Witch's enchantment, it's not clear who is a friend and who is an enemy. In fact, the three adventurers feel sure that the prince will attack them the moment he is free, but as Puddleglum reminds them in a moment of powerful courage, they've sworn to obey the words of Aslan. Only that better commitment, which might be called the right ordering of their loves, sees them through. They cut Rilian loose and break the Silver Chair, destroying the power of the Witch's curse.

Lewis, of course, knew what it was to struggle with doubt. "Now that I am a Christian," he wrote, 'I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist, I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable." That's why faith mattered to Lewis: it grounds us in reality, even in the face of danger or uncertainty.

Today, a generation of young people are debilitated by feelings of meaninglessness, doubt, and depression. They consistently hear that their feelings are their best and highest guide; they're encouraged to look inside and follow their hearts. Aslan's advice is better: "Remember the signs." In other words, only by looking to fixed, sure reference points outside of ourselves, can we orient and know the way forward.

When the Witch returns to the cave, attempting to deceive Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum again, she offers us a dialogue that could substitute for modern textbooks on epistemology.

"What is the sun?" the Witch asks the children, who have been underground for so long, all they have is a vague memory of things like Aslan, the sun, and the overworld. "It's like a lamp," one offers. But the Witch laughs this off. "Your sun is a dream, and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp." In other words, "the lamp is the real thing; the sun is [just] a children's story."

Materialism offers the same argument. Because the idea of God helped us survive, goes the argument, people came to believe in him as real. But all we're doing is taking concrete things around us and inventing fairy stories about their origins. Just as the sun can be forgotten in a subterranean kingdom, Christians can sometimes feel as if there is no immediate proof of God's existence.

GK Chesterton addressed this default appeal to materialism. "As an explanation of the world, [it] has a sort of insane simplicity… we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out." Materialism's explanation for love, goodness, evil, and personhood is comprehensive, but ultimately guts these things of any real substance.

Likewise, in The Silver Chair, the sun, Narnia, and Aslan are real: in fact, they're the most real things of all. It's the Witch's kingdom that is the shallow copy. In the end, only Puddleglum the Marshwiggle can hold on to the truth, which leads him to stomp out the fire and break the Witch's spell for good.

The solution to doubt is, then, according to Lewis, faith. Not blind belief, but a commitment informed by reason, goodness, and imagination. What God has told us in the light of day and which we then know to be true, we should not doubt in the middle of our darkest night.

The only way forward is to, in the words of Aslan, "Remember the signs!"

Last week, Guatemala became the latest nation to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, the 35th nation to proclaim that human rights extend to unborn children.

The declaration rebuffs today's Western imperialism: exporting abortion in the name of so-called "women's rights." When nations like Guatemala sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, they're committing to fight pressure from the U.S. and other wealthy Western nations pushing them to legalize and publicly fund abortion.

The Geneva Consensus Declaration was created by U.S. officials in the Trump administration. It came with little media fanfare and the day President Biden took office, his administration disavowed it and scrubbed it from the Health & Human Services website. Weeks later, the Biden administration announced it would launch new initiatives pressuring the global community to call abortion a "human right."

The Geneva Consensus Declaration is worth celebrating, not only because it will protect women and babies, but because it poses a real threat to the ideological colonialism attempted by Western nations like the U.S. If it didn't threaten this ideology, the President wouldn't be nearly so concerned.

"The Big Quit." is not just a shift in the employment of millions, it's an expression of our culture-wide search for purpose.

According to The Washington Post, "a record 4.3 million people — about 2.9 percent of the nation's workforce — quit [their jobs] in August." And, Gallup polling suggests that nearly half of working Americans are actively considering finding a new job.

What's driving this trend away from work? It seems to be a perfect storm with many factors. Clearly, the pandemic has reshuffled priorities across society. Back in April, Forbes magazine's Keir Weimer suggested,"How we work has changed forever." A bit of hyperbole perhaps, but he's touching on something obvious and important.

More than half of respondents from one survey said they would trade compensation for workplace flexibility. Having worked from home throughout the last year, they are hesitant to give up the time with friends and family, the luxury of not commuting, and a more home-centered vocational life.

At the same time, working in certain industries is more difficult. For example, in the food industry, there are a "staggering 1.2 million jobs unfilled… right when customers are crushing through the doors, ready to eat, drink and finally socialize." Many point to the increased hours required, the unemployment benefits which exceed even increased compensation, and the stress of maintaining COVID-related policies in the workplace. And as more employees leave this industry, remaining workers with their hands even more full.

Even so, the biggest reason for workers leaving work could be because they can. Between government stimulus policies, rising home values, and money saved during COVID, many Americans are simply, to borrow words from David Leonhart of the New York Times, "flush with cash." This is exactly the opportunity they've been waiting for to make a change.

Still, as important as the economic factors are, they do not tell the whole story. As more than a few observers have pointed out, "the Great Resignation" isn't just a search for a better job. What we are witnessing is part of our culture's search for deeper meaning. Studies suggest that rising rates of "burnout," such as exhaustion, stress, and overall dissatisfaction across workplace sectors, are leading workers to quit.

Columnist Whizy Kim of Refinery29 puts it this way: "[We] want to believe that our jobs can not only provide financial stability, but also emotional and spiritual nourishment... In a time of increasing secularism, work remains our steadfast religion. Burnout hits when our work fails to live up to expectations of it."

Surveys show that Americans work more hours than any other industrialized nation. That becomes an incredibly important factor when work is not seen as meaningful, i.e., not part of something bigger than ourselves. In certain extreme cases, work takes the place of God. We look to it as the source to fill our emotional, vocational, and relational needs.

That's unsustainable. To the extent that the so-called "Great Resignation" is a cultural reset, it can be a good thing. On the other hand, it will not be unless it is a reset of more than work hours, policies, and minimum wage. It has to be a reset of our understanding of what work is for, something that would require rethinking what humans are for.

Any search for a perfect, all-fulfilling job will be fruitless. Rather than rethink their search, some are opting out of work altogether. This is a mistake, not just because savings eventually run out and bills inevitably pile up, but because we were created, in part, for work. Work existed before the fall, and is therefore inherently connected with our worship and dignity as image-bearers.

To be clear, work is not our full identity, but it is inseparable from who we were created to be. Even knowing this can help eliminate the stress of where to work; it's easier to make rational choices when one's entire sense of self doesn't hang in the balance. And yet, because our work is one way that we worship God, it's meaningful even when mundane. It's worthy of our highest efforts when, in mirroring our Creator, we bring order out of chaos, provide for our fellow creatures, and cultivate His creation.

Especially in this cultural moment, how Christians work is part of our witness. Christians can demonstrate God's goodness by the joy and vibrancy we bring to our vocation. We can show His love, concern, and provision for people by how we manage people in love and service. We can dignify God's design for human beings in how we work and in how we rest.

All told, it could be that "The Big Quit" is, for Christians, an even bigger opportunity to begin.

John and Shane answer a listener who asks how we get past the erroneous "new" definition of racism (prejudice + power), and address old racism (prejudice based on pigmentation), when anti-racism and CRT doesn't allow "whites" to participate to the discussion? The pair also discusses how the unity and differences in the definitions of a Christian and biblical worldview before answering a challenge to population control in impoverished or resource-scarce countries.

In 2019, Templeton Prize winner Marco Gleiser made waves when he said that "atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method." In his view, atheism is a "categorical statement of belief," and doesn't depend on evidence as much as assumptions.

This, of course, clashes with claims of the so-called "New Atheism," that science has officially debunked God as an explanation for the universe.

Gleiser is an agnostic, and thinks scientists shouldn't close off the possibility of God.

This accomplished scientist is saying something very important: atheism is not science's default position.

On the other hand, it's important to note that science is not completely silent on the God question either, which is why generations of scientists have been drawn to a belief in the Creator precisely because of what they noticed in the universe they were observing.

To put it another way, atheism isn't inconsistent with the scientific method just because it's a "categorial belief," but because it denies the order, complexity, and intentionality that point to God-centered conclusions.

As the "Big Quit" happens across America, the Christian vision of work could be more relevant and impactful than ever. Which, as history attests, is saying quite a lot.

Physical labor was devalued in the ancient world. The exception, in classical Greece and the early days of the Roman Republic, was farming, which was considered the proper pursuit of citizens. All other labor was viewed as demeaning. In the later days of the Republic, as plantation agriculture replaced small farms, the work of farming was also seen as demeaning and relegated to slaves.

By the time of the Roman Empire, all physical labor was only thought proper for slaves and lower classes. Though the foundation of the empire's wealth, the upper classes believed that production was beneath them. Their attention, or so they thought, belonged in the more "refined" areas of life, such as the arts and philosophy.

Of course, the biblical view of work is completely different. Scripture frames work as a good thing, an essential part of what it means to be human. Because God created us to work, at least in part, it's inherently connected to our worship and dignity.

Put differently, work is not the result of the fall. It was, however, tainted by Adam's sin. God's created purposes for humanity, to fill and form His world through work, would now feature pain and frustration. Aspects of human work were twisted from dignity to drudgery. Human efforts to cultivate the earth, designed by God to be part of the joy of imaging Him, became sources of frustration, pain, sweat, and sorrow.

Because of the uniqueness of the Biblical framework, even the early Christians approached work with a very different view than their pagan neighbors did. They thought of work as good but marred by sin. So, for example, in monastic communities, monks were expected to do physical labor, if for no other reason than to grow their food. In his Rule for Monastic Life, St. Benedict of Nursia (480-547) insisted that monks should work both to fulfill the biblical mandate that God gave Adam, and to encourage humility in a world that thought of work as demeaning.

Within a full understanding of the Biblical story, from Creation to New Creation, Christians came to understand the Gospel as Christ redeeming us of sin as well as all of its effects. In addition to forgiveness of sin and security of eternity, salvation also included the redemption of anything infected by sin. This included work, which led Christians to attempt to restore work away from "toil" and back to the kind of meaningful labor God intended.

So, in the middle ages, many monasteries became centers of technological innovation, focused on making work more significant. A prime example is the waterwheel. Although the Romans knew about waterwheels, they rarely made use of them. After all, why invest in an expensive machine when you have unlimited slave labor? The monks had a different view of human value and the value of work which inspired them to develop ways of using the waterwheel to mechanize production.

Initially, waterwheels were likely used for grinding grain. This required converting the vertical rotation of the wheel into horizontal rotation for the millstones, which the monks accomplished through a system of wooden gears and wheels. Later, the waterwheel was adapted for a wide range of other applications including powering bellows in forges, operating trip hammers in smithies, sawing lumber, and fulling cloth.

Soon, even secular communities began to invest in building mills. While some might say secular communities adopted water wheels for economic impact, the economy in Rome was very specialized. Therefore, the Romans did not deploy waterwheels. What made communities adopt these and other technologies was likely the influence of the Christian idea of work, as it moved out from the monasteries to penetrate and shape the culture.

Many more inventions were developed during the Roman and Middle Ages, stimulating economic activity and making work more efficient and meaningful. These developments were inspired by the idea that Jesus' work in redemption meant restoration was possible in all areas of life, including reversing the curse of the Garden.

Though other countries had innovative technologies, some far more advanced than the West, the West's use and employment of technology was unique. According to Indian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi, the West used technologies to make the work of the common person easier and to aid in production, rather than to cater to the elites.

In our current cultural moment, many see work as frustrating, unrewarding, an dnot worth it (that is, as toil). So, in our cultural moment, Christians have an incredible, better vision of work to offer the larger world. We've also got a history to tell, of how a vision of human dignity and innovation became a blessing across economic and class lines. Just as in the past, the Christian view can move our imaginations about work beyond drudgery, to a renewed and redeemed way of thinking and living.

This vision shaped the work of men like Johann Gutenberg, whose motive for inventing printing with movable metal type was to produce Bibles that were "no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine." The same vision can find traction today, in a culture that doesn't know what work is for and needs an example of redeemed human labor, production and meaning.