Midweek Musings - April 22, 2026
Death and Resurrection; Sasse on Higher Ed; A Cry for Reality?; Micro-Colleges; Chesterton; Free Bread Rankings
For several years, I taught an evening single-session class every semester to a group of students on ecclesiology and eschatology. Most of them were already quite busy: working professionals or stay-at-home mothers who came to class having completed very full days in very busy lives. But it was one of my favorite teaching experiences in my career. To get to discuss the doctrines of the church and last things with them was a gift.
In that class, I found myself regularly telling the students, “If you want to understand a culture, look at how it treats its dead.” That never failed to prompt some looks of surprise and raised eyebrows. It does sound a bit morbid, I realize. And surely there are other bellwethers that are more reliable indicators of ideological trajectories and worldviews. But I remain convinced.
In recent days, I was with a group of friends and made the observation yet again. We were discussing the practices of the church in our life together, including some of the particularities of American evangelicals in general, and especially those here in Southern California. I suggested that the moment churches stopped maintaining graveyards signaled a turning point in the way we approach our life together. My point was that it’s really difficult to navigate your way into Sunday worship past the graves of your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents and then merge right into a consumeristic religious entertainment commodity marked by the ephemeral and frivolous. In fact, for most Christians in the West for over a millennium, before one ever sat down in a pew, there was already a forming of the soul that had begun simply by walking past the dead and being reminded of our fallenness and finitude.
So you can imagine how delighted I was, while reading Carl Trueman’s magnificent new book, The Desecration of Man, to come across this:
“To go to a Sunday service by walking past the graces of the dead, perhaps even of one’s parents, siblings, spouses, or children, would be significant in how one experienced worship. It would be worship in the proximity of dead loved ones, perhaps not quite as dramatic as the early church practice of refigeria but still significant. Today, just as we have pushed death out of the home and into hospitals and the hospices, so in the church we have done something similar. And this lack of physical proximity to reminders of mortality no doubt fosters a different kind of spirituality to the one where, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, “in the midst of life we are in death.””
You’ll have to read the whole book, including this particular chapter on death. I hope you will.
Trueman acknowledges that any number of external pressures may inhibit churches from a more direct engagement with the realities of death — and those pressures are certainly present here in Southern California in acute form, whether through zoning restrictions or the sheer availability of land. That said, there seem to be ample opportunities for individuals, families, and churches to gradually recover a more distinctly Christian approach to how we relate to death. If nothing else, perhaps there is a moment upon us to interrogate the ways in which we’ve simply been swimming in the cultural waters around us, unaware of how those waters have shaped our assumptions of what is good, true, and beautiful.
My own family knows I have my particular pet peeves here. The most meaningful funerals I have attended have involved open caskets — not because I particularly enjoy looking at the dead, or because I have some emotional need to capture one last glance of the departed to better commit them to memory. Quite the opposite. Those dead bodies are signs and reminders of the horrible curse of death, but also of the promise of resurrection in Christ. Standing before an open casket and looking upon the body of a friend or family member is a summons to faith, a reminder of the gospel truth that “the dead in Christ shall rise first” (1 Thessalonians 4:16).
No one wants to be the person who brings up death at a dinner party. It’s a downer, to be sure. But it’s hard to understand the realities of resurrection if we don’t first reckon with the realities of death. There is no pathway to resurrection that doesn’t lead through death first.
These reflections have felt especially pressing over the past couple of weeks, as death has arrived from several directions at once. Like many, I’ve been following Ben Sasse’s very public terminal diagnosis. His recent interview with Ross Douthat has understandably captured a great deal of attention.
If you want to hear a Christian navigating death honestly and in faith, here you go:
Douthat: Do you think you’re ready to die? Do you feel ready?
Sasse: I don’t feel ready. But to whom would I go? I have confidence that when Jesus says to the disciples he didn’t want to be identified as the Messiah yet, keep these crowds away, don’t tell about the water-into-wine miracle at the feast — how amazing is it that Jesus’ first miracle is a big-ass party? Let’s drink more together.
But he says: You can’t keep the children from me. And we’re told that we get to approach the Almighty, we get to approach the divine and call him Daddy, Abba, Father? That’s pretty glorious. And I know that that’s what I need.
At the same time, good friends of mine are grieving the loss of a lifelong friend who died far too young of a brutal form of cancer. This past weekend, I learned of the unexpected death of an older man in our church who had befriended me in recent years — a widower himself, he died in his sleep.
Death comes in such a variety of ways and experiences. It seems absurdly obvious to point that out, but for some reason it strikes me with fresh force these days. The hard truth is that none of us know the form in which death will arrive for us. For all of our obsessions with biohacking, longevity, wellness, and risk management, there is no way to set the terms and conditions of our own mortality. Some forms seem preferable, to be sure, but we have no real control over them.
This, of course, is the great lie and temptation of the euthanasia movement. It promises agency and rational control, telling us that choosing the timing and manner of our death is somehow dignifying — a way to preserve our humanity. The horrible irony is that it actually does quite the opposite. In 2024, over 5% of all deaths in Canada were via medically assisted death (MAID), and the rates show no immediate sign of slowing. When the state is in the business of regulating death, it is surely a harbinger of some rather disturbing and dehumanizing destinations — again, Trueman’s book addresses this with care and force. No matter the form death takes for each of us, it comes not by chance or coincidence. There is a great deal of theological mystery in that claim, but it is as certain as anything else we know about God and His revealed nature, wisdom, and power.
And yet, for all the diversity of ways in which death may come, the ultimate reality of it is universally inescapable. The heart rate flatlines. Brain activity ceases. Organs fail, and the body does what bodies do in those post-mortem moments. I write that not as an exercise in existential nihilism — not a Siggy moment — but as a reminder, at least to myself, that we are all headed for the same destination. Our culture may try to pretend otherwise, and the route may take different shapes and turns for each of us, but we know where it ends.
If this week’s essay has taken a sad and dark turn, that’s fitting enough. There is no path to resurrection that doesn’t first necessarily involve death. And that is the great hope in all of this for those redeemed by the One who has himself conquered sin and death. He still speaks a better word than the grave, assuring us with a Galilean accent: “I am the resurrection and the life.” If that is true — and there is nothing more certain in the universe — then death, in all its brutal ugliness and pain, loses its sting. And if our days are indeed numbered by God himself, if our very heartbeats and breaths are measured out for each one of us, then we need not fear how our mortal pathway will take shape. In the end, being found in Christ means a very different end to the story: one in which we become more fully human than we could ever imagine, sharing in His resurrection.
Sasse on Higher Education
Above I mentioned Sasse’s interview with Ross Douthat. The mortality-related reflections are those that rightly catch our attention. But there’s also something really significant in there on higher education:
“So many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists that liberal arts colleges — and I say this as a historian, I say this as somebody who loves the liberal arts — have so obviously abdicated any responsibility for preparing a next generation that we’re now five consecutive decades into higher ed in America having students choose by major, voting with their feet, to move from liberal arts majors to more STEM majors.
Five consecutive decades, students migrating from liberal arts toward STEM disciplines. But the liberal arts, instead of then saying, “Well, let’s use the core curriculum as a way to prepare people for the rest of life, not just the jobs that they may have that may be in engineering or health professions or whatever,” are getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
Their power, the power of those faculties, is increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum. But the classes aren’t very good. They aren’t very big, they aren’t very rigorous. They aren’t big in terms of grand questions. They’re not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true and the beautiful.”
I can assure you that Sasse is right on target here.
Young Americans for Reality
Writing for Commentary, Christine Rosen attempts to interpret some emerging trends among younger Americans and their use of technology.
“The desire for “real life” interactions is notable enough that McKinsey & Co. published a report this year about the growth of the “in-person experiences market,” with consumer research showing that Gen Z is far more likely to visit “immersive experiences” at museums and pop-up exhibits. In addition, “52 percent of Gen Zer say they splurge on experiences when traveling” even though they will “look to save money on almost anything else,” including flights. Throughout the U.S., consumer spending data show that “growth in discretionary spending on experiences has outpaced spending on goods.”
Read the whole thing, but I do think it rings true of the young adults I encounter on our campus. And when it surfaces, it’s reason for hope. Or, as Rosen puts it in her conclusion:
“For anyone of conservative sensibilities, it is these small acts of rebellion, restoration, and skepticism by those most affected by these technologies—Gen Z and, after them, Gen Alpha—that signal more promising and sustainable cultural change than is possible with legislation or regulation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was correct to note that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” If the emerging culture of Gen Z is one that cultivates greater skepticism about the technologies that seek to harvest and monetize their time and attention, then maybe the kids will be alright after all.”
Amen.
Micro-Colleges and the Future of American Higher Education
Spend time around folks in higher education and the mood can turn pretty gloomy pretty fast. There’s lament galore to be found about the perceived loss of “the good old days” of consistent enrollment, budget increases, and simpler political times. Throw in a few closures every semester and you get the picture.
So I was intrigued to read Matthew Smith’s essay for ARC, an outlet of the Danforth Center at Washington University. Smith is the president of Hildegard College, an institution here in southern California that certainly fits within the profile of the sector he describes.
“To be sure, we will continue to see new colleges that combine rigorous liberal arts programs with career development. Such programs are innovative on both ends. Unlike the hyper-focused minutiae that characterizes prestigious private colleges, they approach the liberal arts as interdisciplinary and grounded in historical primary sources. And unlike traditional business and professional majors, their smaller sizes provide greater opportunities for students to participate in apprenticeships, mentorship, and real-world experience.”
Smith is especially right to note the ways a competitive market has the potential to force a realignment.
“Yet in addition to the ideas that drive innovation, the alternative college movement is, at heart, an economic phenomenon. What characterizes and will continue to differentiate startup schools is their radical acceptance of market accountability. Universities are among the most economically insulated organizations in the country. They are protected by accreditation and by federal and state funding. New ideological and religious models enter the field without this armor, allowing them to say and deliver with refreshing clarity what their education is for.”
Like many, I am encouraged by every good work I see done by Christians for the common good. So I’m all for these emerging institutions, all with the capacity to serve students well and enrich our civic bonds.
Of course, I also happen to believe that legacy institutions—including established universities and colleges—have a far greater ability to be reformed and revived, should their governing boards and leaders be willing to display the kind of courage and nerve needed.
Chesterton for Today
Over at Law & Liberty, Rachel Lu reflects on the legacy of G.K. Chesterton:
“With a vast corpus and a wide range of interlocutors, Chesterton did a lot of shooting in his lifetime, hitting some targets and missing others by wide margins. He was winsome, whimsical, profound but also preposterous, maddeningly unsystematic, and often in error. Somehow even his bad shots feel dignified. And he himself reveals the reason here in the first lines of Orthodoxy. Chesterton understood his entire public career as a kind of answer to a challenge: the challenge of reductive, rationalist, soul-destroying pathologies of modernity.
He viewed himself not as a prophet or a philosopher, but as a pious re-articulator of ideas that are precious precisely because they are neither novel nor original, but rather inherited. They had been honed and cultivated by great minds across the centuries with grace as a guiding light. Chesterton’s classics make ideal reading for Holy Week. Few writers have illustrated the beauty of a reflective traditionalism as vividly as Chesterton.”
As Lu points out, Chesterton inhabited some rather dark times in English culture and society. Perhaps there’s something there for those of us convinced that civilizational renewal demands a somewhat longer view.
Ranking Free Restaurant Bread
There’s some hard-hitting investigative journalism out there that confronts the most difficult issues of our time. With all due respect, that’s not what Caity Weaver has set out to do in The Atlantic with a quest to identify America’s best free restaurant bread. Perhaps you wonder, Why?
“Here is where the notion for the undertaking came from: Tucked within the viscera of the continental United States is a restaurant that gives away superb free bread. Every time I have eaten it (before this past year, three times total), I have said aloud (to my husband, who did not care), “This is the best free restaurant bread in America.” The thought made me feel the way you do when you realize you were just a half a moment away from being plowed by a car, and were spared only by a chance nanosecond of dawdling before stepping into the street: giddy and flabbergasted and grateful to be alive. It seemed incredible, but also possible, that this really could be the best free restaurant bread in America. What if it was? Even more dizzyingly, what if it wasn’t? What if—unfathomable—someone else was giving away an even better bread for free? The thought drove me crazy. I begged for the opportunity to investigate.”
You’ll have to read Weaver’s essay to get the introduction to the world of high-end bread service in Las Vegas. But there’s also some cultural history in all of this:
“People have judged restaurants on the quality of their free bread from the institutions’ earliest days. In what is possibly America’s first restaurant review (a madcap meta-account published in The New York Times in 1859), the bread at New York’s Astor House is deemed “the best bread in the universe.” And although dozens of poll respondents insisted to me that complimentary bread, as a concept, has been lately abandoned in this country—that “every” restaurant charges for bread “now” (not true)—in fact, people have been complaining about vanishing complimentary rolls for at least a century. In 1912, the Times devoted days of coverage to outrage over a new 10-cent charge for bread and butter: “HOTEL DINER BRINGS IN HIS OWN BREAD ,” read the headline of an article that described one man’s attempt to skirt the fee.”
If you’re feeling starchy, read the whole thing.
What I’m Reading
Arthur Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (Portfolio)