We live in an age of longing—for significance, permanence, purpose. We see it in the stories we tell, the goods we consume, and the goals we pursue. And amid what some have called our meaning crisis, these longings have intensified because our civic and religious lives have been hollowed out, leaving us with  a profound sense of emptiness. While this existential ache takes many forms and has many sources, the existentialist philosophers were spot on in thinking that we feel the pain most acutely when it comes to our choices.  We know this pain all too well. We feel it in those key moments where we know the decision we make could change the course of our lives. Do I take this new position with more pay and more responsibility, even though it will keep me away from my spouse and children? Should we move across the country for a new opportunity, even though we will leave behind everyone we love? Faced with the life-altering consequences of these choices, we go searching for the deeper values within us to help make the decision more clear. Some, however, are left wanting. Lacking some larger story which grounds their decisions, the search within only compounds their crisis. It was assumed that liberating ourselves from any story not created by ourselves would make us feel freer, more alive. But the opposite has occurred. As the West unmoored itself from both religious and institutional authority by redistributing it among the masses, it has simultaneously increased and undercut the very freedom it sought. It increased freedom by removing restraint—only to find that the conditions for freedom actually lie not in the removal of all restraints, but in the acceptance of the right ones. Without a shared story that we tell ourselves, we live these dizzying and disorienting lives and call it freedom. Freedom is a profound burden in a storyless world. Freedom is a profound burden in a storyless world. What the empirical and the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment did not fully grasp is the incalculable importance of values. David Hume recognized that the philosophical foundations of Western values were already tenuous. But could he have foreseen where the Enlightenment project would take us? Values are in some senses pre-rational; they go before all of our choices and frame the conditions in which a choice can rightly be deemed rational. These values, in turn, emerge from the big stories we tell to make sense of the world—stories that speak not only to the material order of things, but to our immaterial longings for meaning, justice, and love. Institutions arise from shared commitments to those values, serving as durable projects that preserve and promote them.  But in locating the center of authority in individual autonomy—the freedom of each person to choose—we severed ourselves from the very stories that gave rise to those values and from the institutions that embodied them. In so doing, we dismantled the framework that once helped us make our most important decisions. Our Strange Inheritance To understand how we got here—and why choice feels uniquely fraught today—we need to consider our cultural context. Andrew Wilson is helpful here in his book Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Wilson, modifying the famed “WEIRD” acronym to become “WEIRDER”, succinctly frames the historical, social, ideological, and economic background of this crisis of choice. Social scientists have been using the acronym for a while to describe people in the West: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Wilson adds to this that we are Ex-Christian and Romantic. Each of these traits shapes not only how we arrived at this crisis but also why we seek spiritual fulfillment the way we do. Think about how our education teaches us to question authority, our democracy makes us value choice above all, and our ex-Christian memory leaves us with Christian instincts (e.g., every human being is valuable) but without doctrinal clarity (but why?). This cultural inheritance explains why we feel so disoriented. We are free to choose but with little guidance on what is worth choosing. We hunger for transcendence––the feeling of being part of something larger than ourselves––but feel the boundaries of Charles Taylor’s “imminent frame” pressing all around us. Decisions are the real pain point. Not one, or two, or even the everyday mundane decisions; rather, the decisions that we intuit will shape our lives when we make them (marriage, children, and so on), or the ones we have made only to see years later that they’ve had lasting consequences.  For instance, I recently heard Second Lady Usha Vance recounting Vice President Vance’s conversion to Catholicism, and the many discussions that naturally ensued about how they would raise their children in light of one of them being Catholic (J.D.) and the other (Usha) being Hindu. Two competing stories make it difficult enough to make the most important decisions of our lives. Imagine the difficulty without any stories.These sorts of decisions, like an itch in our throat, send us searching for deeper wells from which to draw. In these moments a crisis of choice emerges. This existential ache of choosing, with enough time and occurrence, can bring about profound anxiety. To cope with the underlying crisis of choice, people often adopt spiritual practices in search of peace, even if these practices are devoid of belief in spiritual realities. Whether it be yoga, mindfulness, or fasting, many want the transcendent benefits while limiting themselves to an immanent frame. From Crisis to Calling As Christians living in this modern age, we know this crisis all too well. We weren’t and aren’t immune to its effects. But what we do have is a better story to tell. Part of the problem of adopting various spiritual practices and beliefs is that they always lack coherence and connection. As Chris Watkin has shown, Christianity as a story coheres across multiple domains of existence, and in that sense makes truth claims that correspond to reality. It uniquely accounts for the material order (the intelligibility and structure) while also addressing the immaterial longings (meaning and purpose, love and justice, and so on) in mutually inclusive ways. Lesser stories want to take up one side or the other, but Christianity dignifies both aspects of our experience of the world. Christianity does not just correspond and cohere. It also provides the tools to reconnect the concepts and ideas that have been fractured in modernity. Modern spiritualities don’t have the conceptual capability to connect the physical and the spiritual, facts and values, or truth and meaning. But Christianity tells a story in which all of these are aspects of a connected whole. As Christians engaging in the marketplace of ideas, we tell the story in which the world is created in love by a triune and transcendent God who draws near through his Son and Spirit. In this story, the brokenness of the world is not due to imbalance or illusion but rebellion and disorder that affects persons, relationships, and the entire material universe. The problem of adopting various spiritual practices and beliefs is that they always lack coherence and connection. This is a redemption story, one in which souls, bodies, peoples, and places are made new. “How?” your skeptical friend might ask. By God himself entering the story through Jesus in the incarnation. In Jesus, the immaterial and material meet, making him the source of healing for both through his substitutionary death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. His resurrection is not only the promise of personal renewal but the firstfruits of new creation, where all things are being made whole. This story is big enough to explain the universe and fulfill our deepest longings.  Søren Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom,” understanding it as the cost of moral responsibility. But in Christ, freedom is no longer the anxious burden of limitless choice; it’s the glad responsibility of living within wise restraints—where our choosing becomes a joy, not a crisis, and our limits become a path toward fulfillment.

Over the past few weeks, the mainstream media has been sounding the alarm on a worrying new trend. “AI is coming for entry-level jobs. Bill Gates says Gen Z may not be safe no matter how well they learn to use it,” blared Fortune. “AI is wrecking an already fragile job market for college graduates,” declared The Wall Street Journal. “Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs,” wrote The New York Times, “Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.” They’re right that unemployment for young college grads—those 20 to 24 years old—is higher than the average U.S. unemployment rate (though both are still historically low). They’re also right that AI tools are flooding the job market and that improved efficiencies are probably shifting job responsibilities around. “A senior-level programmer can give a bunch of prompts to ChatGPT and write 1,000 lines of code or more every day, which before would’ve taken three or four or five entry-level people to do,” said Jonathan Bentz, an engineer at a large AI technology firm. On the other hand, he said, “If we don’t hire entry level workers, we’ll get to the point where we don’t have the next generation of people who can become senior programmers.” Bentz is skeptical that AI will result in a net loss of jobs. “Whenever anything gets more plentiful and cheaper in our country, we can do one of two things,” Bentz said. “We can either have the same productivity and work less, or we can work the same amount and have more productivity.” So far, he said, Americans seem to keep choosing the latter. The Gospel Coalition asked Bentz why college grads are struggling to find tech jobs, what qualities he looks for in new hires, and if he’d let his college-age children major in computer programming. Why are college grads with tech degrees having trouble finding jobs? I think companies are signaling that the skills those grads are leaving college with are not as valuable anymore. You’ve probably seen the movie Hidden Figures, right? Where NASA engineers had to work out by hand the calculations to send humans into space? We don’t need those skills anymore. Nobody would ever say, “We really wish we had more jobs, so let’s have humans keep doing the work of calculators.” Companies aren’t necessarily saying they don’t need the next generation of workers. They’re saying that the skills students leave college with are ones they don’t need. So do colleges need to do a better job of teaching updated tech? I don’t know that universities will ever be flexible enough to keep up with the tech industry. My suspicion is that companies will take graduates and essentially retrain them, because big tech companies have the resources to train their people to do what they need. I think we’ll see more opportunities like mentoring programs to help with that. The skills students leave college with are ones they don’t need. It is incumbent on the universities to understand what the job market needs, but also to provide that in a way that doesn’t sacrifice liberal arts education. Because I do worry about universities becoming factories for building people into jobs. My own liberal arts education at Dordt University taught me all kinds of things, from history to philosophy to theology, that aren’t on my job description but make me a well-rounded person and better employee. If you can’t always look for up-to-date tech skills when hiring new grads, what characteristics are you looking for? We are looking for people with a willingness and desire to keep learning. You can teach almost anybody a skill. If you gave me a few hours a day for the next three weeks, I could teach you to program. I’m confident you could learn that—but do you want to? That’s a different thing. We also do want you to use AI tools in ways that make you more productive. And I tell new employees that being able to have a human-to-human conversation is now a superpower, because anybody can text, type, or scroll. Having the ability to communicate face-to-face is more important now than it used to be. Finally, and I’d tell this to anyone in any field, look for ways to make your manager’s life better and easier. I have experienced many people during interviews saying, “I did this,” and “I did that.” If I hear too many I’s, I think, I know you’re trying to sell yourself to me, but I want to know how you’re going to raise the team. So have the spirit of helping, of making sure that what your company is doing is successful. Talk about how your skills can contribute to that. What’s your biggest worry about AI? One of my biggest concerns is our inability to have thoughtful conversations about it before the technology is out of the box. Because by the time the government gets around to policing anything technological, it’s too late. “What should we do?” is a harder question than “What can we do?” Another question I have: Is the goal ultimately efficiency and productivity? I’m on the board of our local Christian school, and we’re grappling with how to use AI tools in the classroom. Because we need some friction to learn—I’d never want to say fourth graders don’t need to learn the multiplication tables. Even though when they’re engineers, they’re going to use calculators, that’s still foundational information that they need. By the time the government gets around to policing anything technological, it’s too late. So the real question is: How much is foundational, and how much are we okay with the tool doing for us? We can take that even further and ask, “What is the purpose of a job?” Is it to produce something? Then bring on the AI so we can produce more. Or is it to shape our souls to worship God? Then maybe we want to slow down, allow the friction to sanctify us, be more careful in the way we communicate with others, and make sure what we’re creating is serving the world and people God made. Sometimes technology makes us promises it can’t keep. Social media promises us connection but isolates us instead. Video games promise adventure but trap us in our rooms. Pornography promises easy romance and ends up wrecking our ability to love well. Is AI also malforming us? I think you’re hitting on something. All of these things overdose us. So social media gives us the opportunity to be social with 1,000 people until we can’t even be social with three people. With AI, does having the ability to access any information all the time dilute the value of knowledge? Will we have an increasingly difficult time figuring out what is true and what is false? You’ve got kids in high school and college. Would you let them major in tech jobs like computer programming? Or would you steer them into different majors so they could have a better shot at a job after graduation? I jokingly tried to get my daughter to major in tech, but she’s majoring in missional ministries and business instead. If they want to, I’d be fully supportive of my other kids majoring in tech. If they did, I’d tell them to learn how to use the tools. If you’re going to trade school, and you’re really good with a hammer but can’t use power tools, you aren’t very marketable. In the same way, I’d tell technology majors to learn how to use AI as a tool. Their first job experience will be different than mine, because they won’t have three or four years of grunt work. That’s going away. They’ll have a different foundation—perhaps one that’s more creative and interesting!

Steve Lacy was born on May 23, 1998, in Compton, California. He began playing guitar at age seven and attended the Academy of Music and Performing Arts at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles. His early interest in music production led him to experiment with GarageBand on his iPhone, a method he would later use for his first professional recordings. Lacy’s career took off in 2015 when he joined the R&B band The Internet as the guitarist, shortly after their previous guitarist left the group. He contributed to their third studio album, Ego Death, which was released in June The post Complete List Of Steve Lacy Songs From A to Z appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

While Washington, D.C., residents are enjoying feeling safe on the streets of their community once again, angry middle-class suburban protesters want the National Guard to leave the crime-ridden city. When Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the National Guard troops at Union Station this week, protesters used their First Amendment rights to express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.   There were over 180 homicides in Washington in 2024. If it were a state, it would have the highest homicide rate in the nation. But Washington’s anti-law enforcement protesters appear more consumed by a political agenda than the safety of those who live and work in the city.  ? Protester argues with BASED police officer who asked if wearing a keffiyah is cultural appropriation:She says she is “wearing a scarf that is trying to stop a genocide.” @DailySignal pic.twitter.com/pw4c4nD7as— Elise McCue (@EliseMcCue) August 20, 2025 On this week’s edition of “Problematic Women,” we discuss the radical Left’s bizarre campaign against the Trump administration’s efforts to improve safety in the city.  Also on today’s show, President Donald Trump is working to secure a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, which might explain why Trump made fewer public appearances this week following his meeting with European leaders on Monday.  And Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese joins the show to give us an inside look into Air Force One and the press briefing room of the White House.  Plus, California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom is flooding social media with memes. His office claims it’s part of a campaign to show the Trump administration how silly its own meme game is, but no one is buying it. Newsom is playing the meme game because it works. And the Travis Kelce photoshoot is … well, we’ll let you decide. All this and more on this week’s show! The post Unhinged Washington Protesters Show Why Democrats Are Losing Ground appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Zohran Mamdani is now the Democrats’ nominee for mayor of New York City. He is also an openly anti-Semitic socialist.His nomination puts the Democratic Party in a position not unlike the one Republicans faced in 1991, when David Duke — a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan — became the GOP nominee in Louisiana’s gubernatorial runoff.Now it’s the Democrats’ turn. They must reject Zohran Mamdani and the hateful, dangerous movement he represents, just as the Republicans did with David Duke.This is the Democrats’ David Duke moment. And they’re failing the test. Principle over partyIn Louisiana’s 1991 “jungle primary,” the two top vote-getters were:Edwin Edwards, a former Democratic governor who had been charged with bribery and later convicted of extortion and money laundering; andDavid Duke, the former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who ran as a Republican.Duke received only 32% of the vote, but that was enough to advance to the runoff. Although he had run for office several times in the 1980s as a Democrat, Duke ran as a Republican in 1991 — and won the Republican candidacy.Faced with an impossible choice of backing an unrepentant white supremacist on their party’s ticket, Republicans rallied around Edwards, launching a campaign under the nose-holding slogan: “Vote for the crook — it’s important.”And it worked. The crook Edwards defeated Duke, 61% to 39%.That crossover vote was no small feat. This was the early 1990s — a time when Southern Democrats were in full collapse. Just three years earlier, George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis by 10 points in Louisiana. Even the governor at the time, Buddy Roemer, had switched parties and run as a Republican because the Democratic brand was so out of favor.In fact, bipartisan revulsion at Roemer’s political opportunism contributed to Duke finishing second in the primary. But in the end, Republicans knew what needed to be done. They didn’t like voting for Edwards, but a white supremacist was a nonstarter. Failing the testThirty-four years later, a Jew-hating red is the Democrats’ candidate for mayor of New York City, one of the most prominent political offices in America. This is the Democrats’ David Duke moment. But instead of rejecting Mamdani — who, like Duke, should have been a washout from the start — prominent Democrats are embracing him. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for example, told Fox News that Mamdani is the “future” of the Democratic Party.Mamdani isn’t some garden-variety progressive. He occupies a darker corner of the political spectrum — somewhere between Vladimir Lenin and Hamas. His candidacy should be as repugnant as a KKK grand wizard.In 2021, he summed up his anti-Israel worldview in one sentence: “There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s [boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel] or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production.”Mamdani doesn’t just support the BDS movement against Israel. He’s defended calls to “globalize the intifada” — a phrase that means exporting terrorism against Jews to every corner of the world, including the United States.Mamdani has refused to condemn the global terror campaign against Jews, explaining that globalizing the intifada simply reflects a “desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”Then, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered nearly 1,200 innocents on October 7, 2023, Mamdani condemned Israel, not Hamas. Imagine a candidate who refused to condemn lynchings. He’d be ostracized on the spot — and rightfully so. But Mamdani cannot bring himself to denounce the murder of Jewish women and children — and Democrat leaders can’t bring themselves to denounce him either.A terror-sympathizing socialistDomestically, Mamdani is also extraordinarily sympathetic toward Islamic terrorists, having publicly criticized the U.S. government for putting al-Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki under surveillance.RELATED: Socialist Mamdani promises to 'Trump-proof' New York City, expel ICE Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesAlthough Mamdani won the Democratic primary, he is actually an official member of the Democratic Socialists of America. That group’s radical platform includes:Defunding the police;Releasing prisoners;Abolishing prisons;Nationalizing industry and abolishing capitalism;Eliminating carbon-based fuels;Providing public housing for all; andClosing all U.S. military bases.As reported by the Free Press, Mamdani’s social media history is full of disqualifying statements for any serious candidate. A few examples:“Taxation isn’t theft. Capitalism is.”“Queer liberation means defund the police.”“We don’t just need more accountability. We need fewer police.” Bigger than politicsFor conservatives, it’s tempting to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of Democrats self-destructing. But this is bigger than party politics.Both major parties have a responsibility to reject mainstreaming communism and Islamism in the United States.In 1991, Republicans chose principle over party. They helped defeat a candidate who represented the worst of their history.Now it’s the Democrats’ turn. They must reject Zohran Mamdani and the hateful, dangerous movement he represents, just as the Republicans did with David Duke.Because, as the bumper sticker said in 1991, “It’s important.”

“The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved. Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting. The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, for ever.” – Psalm 93 (KJV) The post The Editors’ Quote of the Day: appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

To be prepared for a crisis, every Prepper must establish goals and make both long-term and short-term plans. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors review their week’s prep activities and planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, ranch improvements, bug-out bag fine-tuning, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year.  We always welcome you to share your own successes and wisdom in your e-mailed letters. We post many of those — or excerpts thereof — in the Odds … The post Editors’ Prepping Progress appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

(Continued from Part 1.) TRYING AN AI APP After my wow experience with my daughter showing me how her drawing app works, she showed me the ropes and I started doing some pictures myself. Since I have the artistic ability of a quadriplegic starfish, it was a lot of fun to be able to create some photos, paintings, and cartoon characters. I’ve been working on illustrating the events of my life the year I was nine years old. While it’s done nothing to develop the artistic portion of my brain, it’s physiologically too late for that, it’s been amusing. And … The post My Concerns With Artificial Intelligence – Part 2, by St. Funogas appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

On August 23, 79, Mount Vesuvius began stirring on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, and went on to destroy Pompeii. (Note:  Some recent evidence suggests that the eruption actually occurred after October 17, 79.) Above: Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum (c. 1821) by John Martin. — August 23rd is the anniversary of the declaration of the independent state of “Franklin” in Eastern Tennessee by the settlers there in 1784. Unfortunately, the Continental Congress rejected it, so the state of Franklin never became a reality. — In 1833, Britain abolished slavery in the colonies and 700,000 … The post Preparedness Notes for Saturday — August 23, 2025 appeared first on SurvivalBlog.com.

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