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Learning to trust
Lore Wilbert: on how trauma makes you viigilant and struggle to truly trust people. But practicing a new way…
ahttps://lorewilbert.com/p/re-membering-the-fractured-self?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=289080&post_id=207790458&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=1j8nh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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Tim Keller: Lessons to be learned — for Christians in politics
Lessons to be learned — for Christians in politics
- Christians can’t wholly support or “buy into” any of these ideologies. Considered biblically,
Some of these ideologies put too much emphasis on systemic, structural factors in dealing with racial and economic injustice and others put too little. Some put too much emphasis on individual responsibility and some too little. Some are too individualistic and others are too collectivistic. Some are too distrustful of the market and too trusting of institutions and government, while others are the reverse. Both nationalism and socialism ironically make group or race or class identities absolute—in different ways—even though the ideologies are great enemies. Some are anti-religious while others tend to use religion for political purposes. Some say you are free to do with your sexuality whatever you want but not your money; others say you are free to do whatever you want with your money but you must hold to traditional sexual ethics. Some tend to idolize the traditional family and exaggerate gender differences while others subvert the traditional family and work hard to blur gender distinctions. Some wrongly believe that science can provide moral values for public policy while others distrust science far too much. Some tend to valorize the poor and others tend to demonize the poor. Some refuse to reform the criminal justice system at all while others want to dismantle it.
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On "longing for home" -- and why we're never satisfied. Moore's reflections on The Odyssey.
www.christianitytoday.com/newslette…
Some of us are pulled toward nostalgia, looking to something better in the past. And some of us are pulled toward discontentment, looking to something better in the future. Regardless of where we turn, we all recognize something is missing. And all kinds of people—politicians, marketers, tech lords—are there to say, “You want to get home, and I can get you there.” But it never works. That’s because homesickness points in contradictory directions all at once. In “Homesick,” songwriter Noah Kahan sings of being stuck in a Vermont hometown of winter “hibernation” that is so slow “I feel my organs failing,” yet he is too disillusioned to find the will to leave. “Spend the rest of my life with what could have been,” he sings. “And I will die in the house that I grew up in. / I’m homesick.” Homer imagines a man desperate to get home. Noah Kahan imagines a man desperate to leave home. Those sound like opposite longings. They’re actually the same. We’re either trying to get back to something (to re-live some place or situation where we once were happy) or trying to get away toward something (a new job, a new love, a new identity that will fill the void of the emptiness we feel). We become bored of what’s familiar and scared of what’s not. For Paul at Mars Hill in Acts 17, the pagan poems demonstrated that, deep down, we already recognize that something’s missing in all our attempts to find and create meaning, whatever our rhetoric. The ancient problem says “I can’t get home.” The modern problem says “I got home—it isn’t home.” One longs for return, and one longs for escape. These are not two problems but one. No matter which way we turn, we don’t know what home is. That’s why Homer still rings true, even in the era of IMAX and SpaceX. And that’s what makes the Christian story stranger than the pagan ones. Odysseus spends 20 years trying to get back to Ithaca. Jesus has spent 2,000 years (so far) telling us to stop mistaking Ithaca for Eden. The Bible is full of odysseys: Abraham leaves Ur. The Israelites leave Egypt. The apostles set out to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 13:47). When describing examples of faith, the Book of Hebrews says none of them “received the things promised” (11:13, ESV throughout). These pilgrimages were not about answering the longing for home with a return to something past. We want a place prepared for us, a place to belong, a place to be known, a place to be loved. But our longing for that can sometimes leave us nostalgic for the wrong thing. The Israelites hungered in the wilderness. They responded to that with nostalgia for slavery: “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic” (Num. 11:5). The longing wasn’t wrong. As a matter of fact, God said the hunger was necessary. The emptiness was in order that “he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3). As C. S. Lewis reminded us, “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.” All of that should lead us to ponder: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Identifying the ache is not the end, but it’s a start. The Odyssey, Homer’s and Nolan’s, assumes the greatest human tragedy is losing the home you once had. The Bible says Abraham was looking for a city he had never seen (Heb. 11:13–14). The Odyssey doesn’t answer the question; it reminds us how to ask it. And that’s not nothing. But once we start asking those questions, we might find a whole Trojan horse full of meanings about which we could never start to ask or even think (Eph. 3:20). Asking those questions just might lead us somewhere else, to a better story than even Homer or Hollywood can tell.
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Oskar Eustis - Public Theater – on model of nonprofit theater. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/2…®i_id=65067095&segment_id=223523&user_id=f072b8cd33fd7a4bada76d1ea460dee7
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Neighbors drawing near…and changing a life.
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The question used to be whether to use AI. Now it’s how to live alongside it. co-existence.ai
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AI on writing - Ethan mollusk on his new book .
AI on writing - Ethan mollusk on his new book .
“AI is not a great long-form writer. It has difficulty telling good stories, it has instantly obvious textual tells, and it is kind of dull to read too much of. For all of those reasons, I wrote every chapter draft myself, with all the parentheticals and dumb jokes you expect from my writing. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t use AI in the book writing process; I just used it carefully and with judgement. I had AI readers go through each chapter for feedback (as did my human readers and editors), I had a council of AI models check my facts (and yes, I read every paper or citation), and I used AI to unstick me when I hit dead ends. I think the book is better as a result. But gains came with losses—not only the intellectual struggles I may have resolved too quickly, or the possibility that my thinking was subtly redirected, but simpler things as well. My last book contained 128 em-dashes (maybe the one in the last sentence made you suspicious?) but this time I used far fewer in a desperate attempt to continue to prove the text was human..”
…
“I can tell you that working with AI that is sometimes better than you, and sometimes hilariously worse, is not a problem you solve once. It is a relationship you negotiate, and re-negotiate, as the models get ever better. That negotiation is what Co-Existence is about. You can read about it in the book (which would be great), but I think we are going to live through it either way.”
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Family Owned Busienss - identity issue
The Survival Math
According to long-cited Kellogg research, only 30% of family businesses survive into the second generation. By the third, 12%. By the fourth, just 3%. The math is brutal — and rarely because the business isn’t strong. Family Business Advisor Kile Graves has spent the past several years working closely with dozens of family-owned enterprises navigating this exact handoff, and his argument is that these aren’t really succession conversations. They’re identity conversations. He’s hosting a free 60-minute webinar for family business leaders at any generation on June 23 and July 7. Everyone who registers gets a copy of The Torch, his framework guide. Click the link to register. Cornerstone (Sponsored)
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Great commencement speech: Six Strings
Six Strings
Country singer Eric Church returned to Chapel Hill and delivered the rarest of commencement speeches, one that wasn’t really a speech, it was a guitar lesson. Church organized his address around the six strings of a guitar, mapping each to a principle for the Class of 2026, with faith as the deep low E and family as the A, working up through heart, ambition, community, and a sense of self. His sharpest line was aimed at the smartphone generation specifically, that they face “a temptation no generation before has ever faced. The temptation to perform to everyone and belong to no one,” and the prescription was to plant themselves somewhere, learn actual names instead of usernames, coach the team, build the thing the community needs. At a moment when most graduates are being told the future is portable, optimized, and increasingly virtual, a Carolina kid stood at Kenan Stadium and told them the most subversive thing they could do is grow roots.
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AI and religion and ethics
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Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half sorrow.
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Christian Humanism and AI
“What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.”
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Do I Have to Post More on Social Media to Grow My Agency?
Almost every agency owner asks me this at some point:
“Do I have to post more on social media to grow my agency?”
No, you don’t.
In fact, I discourage it for most agency owners.
The instinct is good. Behind the question is a real truth: growing a business usually takes more or better marketing.
So what is “marketing?”
The clearest explanation I’ve heard comes from a book that isn’t even about marketing: For the Culture, by Dr. Marcus Collins. He says “marketing” literally means “to bring to market.” And a “market” is “a set of players who interact in pursuit of exchange”. So to grow an agency, it makes sense that you need to reach a bigger set of players in pursuit of exchange for you to interact with.
Posting more on social media can help with that. But the real reason agency owners jump to it so fast is that it’s the only kind of marketing they know.
About 5.8 billion of the 8.2 billion people on Earth have at least one social media account. That’s roughly 70% of the world. So most people already know what it feels like to be marketed to. It seems logical: if you want to reach more people, go to the places that hold the most people. But that’s a trap. The biggest crowds also make the most noise. As the saying goes: everyone’s selling something.
To stand out in all that noise, you have to build a presence and grab attention. We have a word for that: “going viral.” But going viral is way harder than it sounds. Even the creators who teach you how to go viral don’t do it every time. They can pull in big numbers, sure, but one post gets 50K views while the next gets 5M. If they really knew the secret formula, wouldn’t every post hit the top number? They don’t, because attention is always moving. The real skill is reading those waves and riding them as they shift.
The advice you always hear is to post a lot and post consistently, so you can keep learning where attention is at any moment. A common starting point is posting 5 to 10 times a week for a full year. Top creators like Alex Hormozi have talked about posting around 250 pieces of content per week across multiple platforms. In his words: “To get 5× the results sometimes you have to put in 50× the effort.” Is that the game you want to play?
Whenever I bring this up, I hear the same pushback: “I don’t need a million followers or hundreds of millions of dollars. I just need a small piece of that.”
Ha.
That’s like saying, “I don’t need to swim across the whole lake. I’ll just swim a quarter of it.”
If you’re only going to swim a quarter of the lake, why swim it at all?
If your plan is to post once a week, you probably won’t reach enough people to grow your agency in a way that makes a difference for you.
Again, the instinct to market more or better is a good one. But picking social media as the way to do it is a mistake.
The goal isn’t to find the biggest market. The goal is to find the biggest market where you can actually be seen and heard.
I think other kinds of marketing work much better for agency owners than social media.
The proof is in the numbers.
You can run a $1M agency with about 10 clients who each pay you around $100K a year.
Let’s use a conservative win rate of 10%. If you win 10% of the projects you go after and you need 10 clients a year, then you only need to talk to 100 clients that year to hit your goal.
If you only need to talk to 100 clients, why are you posting to platforms with billions of users every day?
Yes, your 100 potential clients are probably on LinkedIn or Instagram. That’s not the problem. The problem is they’re buried among hundreds of millions of people who are not your potential clients.
Where can you talk to your 100 potential clients without also shouting at hundreds of millions of people who aren’t?
That’s the magic question.
The strongest marketing I know for agency owners is to make a list of 100 potential clients and send each one a well-written pitch. Yep, 100 emails, written by you, a real human, sent to another real human. In my experience, this is by far the best way to get more clients with the least effort.
(The fancy term for this is ABM, or “account-based marketing,” if you want to do more research.)
“100 custom emails? That’s so much work,” agency owners whine.
That’s because they’re doing two things wrong: they’re underestimating how much work other marketing takes, and they’re not scoping it out properly.
How many posts do you need to write in a year to do social media well? 5 posts a week × 52 weeks = 260 posts. At the very least. That’s way more than 100 emails.
Break it down. 100 emails a year is 25 a quarter. Or about 8 a month. Or 2 a week. Or 1 every 3 days. I know you can write 1 email every 3 days.
So why don’t more agency owners try this? Because it’s hard in two very different ways.
First, it’s hard creatively. You have to think hard to do this. Where do you even find 100 people for the list? That’s not easy. But if you can track down a specific screw at your local hardware store or a dress on Etsy that fits just right, you can do this too. It takes creative work. And that’s the tricky part: it requires you, the design agency owner who clients pay to be creative, to confront the idea that you might not be as creative as you think.
Second, it’s hard emotionally. When you email a real person, a real person can reject you. A real person can ghost you. A real person can insult you. That’s scary to think about, and it stings when it happens. Even though social media takes more work, the rejection there feels more dull. If a post flops, you can blame the algorithm. You can shrug it off because it’s “just a post.” No big deal, because “not every post is a banger.”
But the fact that it’s hard is exactly why it works. Sometimes it works because it’s hard. Since it’s hard, most people won’t do it, which makes it rare, which makes it valuable. That’s the whole point of a service business: doing something for someone that they can’t or won’t do themselves.
Strategist Alex M. H. Smith says it well in his article “If you make content online, here’s the problem:”
The key thing to understand about content creation and thought leadership in the post-saturation economy is…: If it’s not difficult, it won’t work. The entire reason it’s stopped working is because it’s become too easy, letting too many people into the market. So the trick to making it work again is to make it hard again. A better question than “should I post more on social media?” is “Am I willing to do a hard, scary thing that actually works?”
Make a list of 100. Write a real pitch. Send it to a real person. Get rejected by a real person. Repeat.
Somewhere in that cycle, a “no” turns into a “yes.”
When I first opened my agency, I made a list of 300 people to reach out to to ask for work. I got through 30 and was booked for 6 months.
—Dan
P.S. - I’m building a self-paced video system for agency owners who just need the frameworks without the coaching, community, and accountability. Reply “BETA” if that’s you and I’ll send you early access when it’s ready.
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Soft Fascination
In the LA Times last year, environmental neuroscientist Marc Berman (his 2025 book is called Nature and the Mind) had a lovely explanation of why nature is ‘softly fascinating’:
“You don’t often hear people say, ‘Oh, I can’t look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It’s just too interesting to look at. I’m too tired’ … When you look at that waterfall, it doesn’t capture all of your attentional resources. You can still mind-wander and think about other things while you’re looking at the waterfall. If you’re in Times Square, it’s also super interesting. It captures a lot of your attentional focus, but it does so in an all-consuming way. The kind of stimulation that gives you this restful, restorative experience has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating.”
I love this distinction between harsh and soft fascination. What if we integrated more soft moments into our modern and harshly scheduled days? For some of us, even our breaks (meant to be relaxing!) have a sharp edge.
We close our laptops…but then scroll on our phones. Or, we go for a walk…but listen to a podcast as well. In my case, a morning jaunt with the dog turns into an opportunity to optimize for steps (and the best coffee) rather than calming surroundings. Just chill out, Lady!
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The internet was once simply a place you visited to learn things. Now it learns you.
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30 Alarming Facts about Childhood Today
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The importance of boredom
Boredom is an ancient cognitive signal, one that pulls attention inward, lets the mind wander, and surfaces ideas that focused effort can’t reach. The shower insight, the long-walk breakthrough, the answer that arrives unbidden. These aren’t accidents. They’re what happens when the brain is finally left alone. The fix is simple and uncomfortable: 20 minutes, no input, no escape. Just sit with the itch until something useful emerges.
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How to respond to AI?
THIS is the focus in age of AI
“AI is phenomenal at generating, summarizing, analyzing, and pattern-matching. It is not good (yet) at: original judgment, deep relationship building, physical-world problem solving, moral reasoning, cultural intuition, or leading people through ambiguity. Double down on those skills. They become more valuable as AI handles everything else.”
Also. 11) Use the tools. Today. Not tomorrow. 2. 2) Think “with,” not “instead of.” 3) Expand your ambition. 4) Invest in what AI can’t do. 5) Study history — and refuse to repeat it.
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What I can Do because of AI:
“Because those tasks are faster, I’ve been freed up to do higher-order work that I never had time for before. Strategic thinking. Deeper creative projects. More relationship building and networking. Building things I’d been putting off for years because the execution cost was too high. And (this is the part that I enjoy the most), having ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
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Plan and Prompts and Schedule for a “Think Week” or “Think Day”
We should do this for Open Book. I love these prompts.
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What AI Can't Do -- and why I think Open Book matters.
“The truth is there is a lot more disorder, unpredictability, and humanness in so much of our lives.” … “But you know what it can’t do? It can’t work a source over for years on end. It can’t / doesn’t / won’t bear witness to live events. It reminds me of the famous Good Will Hunting scene, where Robin Williams is chastising Matt Damon about being such a smart ass but not being able to describe what the Sistine Chapel smells like. Damon is the AI.
I say this as someone who has experimented a ton with the latest versions of ChatGPT Matt is writing about here. I can feed it limitless writing of mine from my archives and then have it write a take about a new current events story; I’ve tried, actually, because if it were good it would save me hours of work every day. But it is always useless. Not sometimes; always.
Why? Because the AI still can’t predict when certain emotional elements of a story drive me away from a previously held position; because it doesn’t know what happened to me that week, or what stories I’ve read about the topic at hand, or an experience my grandmother had that my family always talked about that informs my view on, say, antisemitism or Israel. It just predicts where I’d land on an issue based on what I’ve written before, which is actually not a great way to understand humans who are always moving in new and different directions.”
From here: x.com/SahilBloo…
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AI: Formation, Not Information is the Real Crisis/Opportunity
See Finding 3 in Scott Crosby’s article: parrishtree.substack.com/p/we-are-…
Formation, Not Just Information, Is the Real Crisis
Understanding AI as a map rather than a mind or mere tool helps us see where it can genuinely serve spiritual formation—and where it cannot. I do think that the notion is right, that this moment is a “rite of passage” for our species. The bottleneck isn’t just whether we can build safe models. It’s whether we can become the kind of people who live with God’s presence in this new terrain, rather than trying to wield this power apart from Him.
Part of my research develops a series of pastoral letters for what I call Sacred Terrain—eight recurring “seasons” that God uses in our formation (Beginning, Discovery, Testing, Crisis, Waiting, Renewal, Collaboration, Steady).
The core insight: the same circumstances can either form us or deform us, depending on whether we live them with God’s presence or apart from it. A season of waiting, for example, can produce patient trust (the Spirit’s fruit) or cynical bitterness (fear without God). Same external terrain, opposite formation.
Where does AI fit?
What AI can do:
Recognize patterns across your story that you can’t see yourself—when old habits are at work versus when real growth is happening Surface connections between Scripture, history, and your current season that would take you years to find Help you see formation as it unfolds in real time—distinguishing genuine patience from its counterfeits (apathy, cynicism) Map patterns across all the different areas of your life at once—work, marriage, parenting, friendships—and how the seasons in each are connected and shaping each other What AI cannot do:
Experience God’s presence the way persons do—it has no interior life or personhood Walk the formation journey for you or make your choices about how to respond Replace the Spirit’s work of illuminating truth to your heart The real constraint isn’t AI capability—it’s human character.
We need:
Steadiness in Testing when the newsfeed screams crisis Wisdom in Collaboration as humans, institutions, and tools all pull on each other Hope as we move between seasons, especially as whole professions reshape around new capacities The church has something unique to offer: not just a set of rules about technology, but a story of formation where suffering, limits, and waiting are not glitches but ingredients. Where the same pressure can produce either bitterness or hope, depending on whose presence we’re living in.
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ON AI -- combatting fear with possibility
ON AI:
That question—what is this making possible?—is the most valuable question you can ask right now. About AI, about your career, about your life.
The knitting machine didn’t ruin England. It made it the wealthiest nation on earth.
The power loom didn’t destroy the textile industry. It expanded it beyond anyone’s imagination.
The computer didn’t end employment. It created the modern economy.
AI won’t shrink your future if you refuse to let fear shrink your vision.
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On the myth of the exit sign (medical-assisted suicide or otherwise)
Russell Moore: “I want to encourage you to live. That’s not because I am worried you will go to hell. God’s mercy is greater than all our sin. It’s because your life is worth living. Your life is a mystery—indwelt by God—even when you don’t feel like it. You are not alone. It’s okay to pray now for future Max, but you don’t need to store up the grace you will need then. It’s already in the future waiting for you. I can’t imagine the suffering you face or will face. But Jesus loves you, this I know.”
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The Paradox of Control -- making meaning in life
“Evans shared something that initially sounds discouraging. The correlation between good decision-making and desired outcomes is zero.
Let that land.
How well you think through something today has no causal impact on the future. Too many variables intervene. Other people make choices. Circumstances shift. The world doesn’t cooperate.
But here’s the twist. Good decision-making, coherent living, still matters. If you ran the same experiment across a thousand parallel universes, the person making thoughtful, aligned choices would succeed more often. The odds improve. You just can’t guarantee any individual outcome.”
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