When an avalanche buried her husband, one woman used a phone app to help locate him beneath the snow. Her quick thinking and determination played a crucial role in his rescue and survival.

Jesus saw a woman who took a huge risk to get close enough to Him to experience His healing. He saw a woman who longed for the healing only God can give. What can we learn from this woman?

6 Biblical Truths for the Depressed Dad Who Feels Like He’s Failing

Last week, for the first time, a sitting U.S. Army chief of chaplains, Major General William Green Jr., was fired by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The move came four months after Hegseth scrapped the “United States Army Spiritual Fitness Guide,” which Hegseth said promoted secular humanism and which Green oversaw to publication. “Our chaplains are chaplains, not emotional support officers, and we’re going to treat them as such,” Hegseth said. The move is part of a larger push to “make the Chaplain Corps great again.” In a video posted in March, the secretary said that in the army, “faith and virtue were traded for self-help and self-care.” This has rendered military chaplains institutionally weakened and misfocused from their primary mission of being a “pastor and the shepherd of the souls entrusted to [their] care,” he said. In all these actions, the secretary has raised an issue with immense implications not only for the American profession of arms but also for the nation and its future. Possible Interpretations To better understand this, let’s first examine the media campaign. Many have dismissed the secretary’s public announcements as examples of either one of two underlying realities. First, some see this as another expression of Hegseth’s religious predilection toward a robust, public Christianity within the Department of War. As evidence, they point to his renewed emphasis on monthly Pentagon prayer services incorporating clergy from his denomination, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches; his penchant for referring to imprecatory psalms; and his habit of ending his prayers in the name of Jesus Christ. Others are concerned that in making these announcements, the secretary overtly borrowed political language from the administration’s 2024 presidential campaign and thus puts at risk the apolitical heritage of America’s commissioned military officers. But both concerns miss the broader criticism the secretary is leveling, which isn’t at the military chaplains alone but at the wider culture of the American profession of arms. Essentially, Hegseth is excoriating the contemporary militaries for neutering their chaplaincies from caring for the souls of their people—as he sees it, their primary calling. An important qualifier is in order here: Hegseth isn’t only targeting reform of the army chaplaincy but also those chaplaincies in the navy, marine corps, air force, and space force. His goal is broad and ranges across the entire Department of War. In this effort, he’s accurate. From Chaplains to Self-Help Advisers Hegseth’s claim that a warrior has a soul is often contested in the modern American military, yet it was never questioned in historical theology or philosophy. In essence, Hegseth is decrying that the armed services have lost any sense that their personnel possess both temporal and eternal being and worth, as captured, for instance, in the Judeo-Christian ideal that each person is created in the imago Dei, the image of God. Hegseth is excoriating the contemporary militaries for neutering their chaplaincies from caring for the souls of their people. How and when did this occur? Two trends occasioned this phenomenon. The first resulted from the landmark 1979 case Katcoff v. Marsh, where two Harvard Law School students sued the army over the constitutionality of its military chaplaincy. Though the army (and hence the United States government) won the case at the Second Circuit Court in 1985, the Chaplain Corps entered a period of inexorable decline as to its moral authority and pastoral calling to the force. Instead, the chaplaincy institutionalized a reflexive prioritization of its First Amendment responsibilities to ensure the “free exercise of religion” rights of soldiers and families. However, neither the original district nor circuit court rulings stipulated such a rebalance. Rather, the army chaplaincy reacted—as do many organizations under perceived threat—by shifting its priority almost solely to free-exercise maintenance for personnel rather than balancing that against its calling to shepherd the souls of soldiers. This coincided with the general trend in American society of the late 1980s toward an implicit trust of all things clinically therapeutic, particularly under the umbrella term of “mental health.” Scholars such as Carl Trueman have rightly traced this trend to a philosophical imbalance in the anthropology of contemporary American culture, and the army wasn’t immune to this phenomenon. From Self-Help Advisers to Irrelevance As the institution began to slowly and then rapidly consider mental health as coequal with physical health in assessing individual soldier readiness, it gradually pushed out of its collective thinking any genuine consideration of the spiritual health of its force. When the clinical professions within the army (e.g., psychiatry, psychology, licensed clinical social work, and more recently, behavioral health) successfully linked mental health to the army’s primary peacetime mission of maintaining force-wide readiness for war, the army chaplaincy further receded in relevance. It has been struggling to reestablish a link for the army between spiritual readiness and force-wide readiness ever since. Thus, the secretary’s larger problem isn’t one of reforming the military chaplaincies, though such reform is much needed. His latest effort to remove chaplain rank insignia from uniforms and firing Green are efforts toward that end. Rather, his greater challenge will be to change the military culture concerning not only their chaplains but also the nature and worth of the people whom chaplains serve. In his December message, the secretary hinted at this when he said he was ordering “a top-down cultural shift, putting spiritual well-being on the same footing as mental and physical health.” Time for Change Effective cultural change of large, complex organizations, especially where attitudes and predispositions have become embedded over time, takes more than a series of signed memorandums or directives. The army gradually pushed out of its collective thinking any genuine consideration of the spiritual health of its force. Edgar Schein, a foremost academician on managing business change, has rightly noted that culture becomes slowly entrenched and requires an organization-wide, focused, and consistent program of change to correct. Though not a profit-oriented entity, the American army isn’t immune to such a need. Changing the minds and actions of those leaders in charge of such a vast enterprise as the Department of War, including relative to chaplains—particularly about concepts so vital as the nature of warriors, their purpose, and their relationship to God—will take decades of consistent institutional reform. Neither this secretary nor this administration has such time, so how they embed this change remains a critical but open question. With the nation now embroiled in a self-chosen conflict against a nuclear Iran and facing increasingly technologically dominated future battlefields, the debate that Hegseth has begun needs clarification, immediate leadership resolution, and disciplined consistency to achieve the results our warriors, their families, and the nation needs.

A sprawling river system runs through four counties in West Tennessee, but it’s the pronunciation that reveals a local every time. Nonlocals say “forked” in one syllable; locals say “fork-ed.” “The Fork-ed Deer River.” In my sophomore year, I took a “Gibson County History” elective taught by a local historian. I still remember him describing how the Fork-ed Deer once carried small barges between counties, some even drifting to the Mississippi and on toward New Orleans. From above, the river resembles leaf veins—tributaries branching, curling, and gathering westward into the Mississippi. It’s easier to find your way downstream to the larger body of water, but in trying to return home it’s easy to lose track of which tributary you’re supposed to follow. In Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin University, argues that true knowledge of God comes not through mastery and certainty but through mystical “unknowing” in the darkness. That perspective helped Smith through a dark season of the soul, but it’s less clear how his version of mysticism can serve the broader church. Tributary Project By my reading, Smith’s book is a tributary project—branching beyond yet curling back to his earlier works, such as How to Inhabit Time and his 2002 project, Speech and Theology. The former work invites an extended meditation on time and human finitude, surveying how cultural liturgies and shared stories shape our presence in the world. The latter book is a bedrock of Smith’s ongoing theological-philosophical concern: the relationship between transcendence and immanence and the distinctiveness of a Christian epistemology. There, he reflects on how God condescends to meet humanity, speaking and revealing himself as “Other” within the “This-ness” of our creational conditions. In Smith’s literary library (from his Cultural Liturgies trilogy to How (Not) to Be Secular) he warns his readers of the influence of our past—especially modernity and its subversive, epistemic sway in our daily lives. How we see our world draws from this history, this deep genealogy with forebears who have influenced how we know. Mystical Knowledge Modernity’s main actors like René Descartes wrestled with doubt while craving indubitability. Descartes’s experiment of discovering indisputable truth and escaping the fears of uncertainty and darkness has primed Western imaginations for centuries. While most Americans have never read Descartes, they instinctively live by the same epistemic rule: Uncertainty makes us uneasy, while certainty feels safe and desirable. Uncertainty makes us uneasy, while certainty feels safe and desirable. Smith offers an alternative account, and he hopes readers will consider a contrarian history and an epistemic paradigm of the Christian mystic traditions of St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, the unnamed author of The Cloud of Unknowing. Where Descartes wants to rescue us from epistemic darkness, Smith, drawing from these mystics, wants us to make our home in the darkness. This is the underlying question for the reader throughout the book: When we’ve reached the place of not knowing, where do we go? Insecure in this dark, we’re beckoned by Cartesian epistemology to find answers through logic, syllogisms, and our own rational powers. But what if these methods can’t deliver us? What if we’re too rationally feeble to make our way out on our own? Or maybe we’re meant to dwell in the dark? Smith invites readers “to be when [we] don’t know” (xi). His work is an approachable yet raw philosophical memoir exploring that phrase. In places of real uncertainties, like at a father’s deathbed, or the abysmal pangs of postpartum depression, or the discovery of marital disloyalty, we’ve imbibed a way of knowing that tries to “analyze, dissect, quantify, and instrumentalize” our situations so we can get out and move on (99). He urges the reader not to rush past the darkness but to remain within it—waiting, attending, and learning to wonder. Mystical Practices for the Dark The Christian mystics offer four key practices for the dark: anachoresis (a movement of withdrawal, a retreat to solitude), hesychia (achieving stillness to dwell in silence), docta ignorantia (the cloud of unknowing, the dark night of the soul), and mysterion (emergence to wonder, a new form of attention). Smith is careful here. This fourfold path isn’t our salvation or some therapeutic method to follow so we can escape our wounds and worries. To do so would be to reintroduce Cartesian promises of method and mastery. Yet the mystical fourfold path is an epistemological “re-storying” and remediation of our imaginations to consider an alternative awareness while dwelling in the dark (11). What Smith retrieves from the mystics isn’t confined to monasteries or spiritual elites; it quietly persists today in practices we rarely name as contemplative—particularly in the arts. Painting, sculpture, films, novels, and music train us in a form of attention that seeks not to solve or conquer but to receive a gift from the Giver. One doesn’t stand before a canvas, a carved figure, or a requiem to master it but to dwell with it, to be addressed by it, often without clear resolution or conceptual payoff. Smith argues that no argument for God’s existence lifts us out of our lonely, distressed trenches. We exert our mastery by knowing; the mystics lose themselves in a cloud of unknowing. We assert our singularity and self-sovereignty; the mystics find themselves in union. Our default is suspicion; the mystics claim we float in a Love that is before all things. (156) When despondence sets in—if I may be vulnerable for a moment—the theological insights of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Edwards, and Barth don’t do much to steady me. This is precisely the point Smith presses: When we’re plunged into uncertainty, what we want most isn’t logical rebuttals but the assurance that we’re seen and that Someone is searching for us. When we’re insecure and afraid in our unknowing, like Descartes, we’ve been taught to ask questions like “Why?” or “How can I know?” (168). But the singular question Smith poses is “Who’s there?” (168). As we carry our anxieties and uncertainties to the precipices of what we can know, Smith dares us to yell into the dark, “Is someone with me?” Two Hermeneutical Tributaries In the epilogue, Smith charts what he calls a “mystical” path forward. Resisting what he describes as the “binary mode” of analytical dogmatism, he advocates instead for an episteme of mystical wondering—a “disciplined attention to the complexity, plentitude, and mystery of things” (197–98). This move, however, will likely give many evangelical readers pause, as it redirects the flow of interpretation into two competing tributaries. One tributary reads the book as a critique of evangelicalism—portraying certain conservative camps as dwelling in “darkness” while elevating mysticism as a form of illumination beyond their dogmatisms, a potential reading based on Smith’s discussion in the epilogue. Along this stream, the project may appear to advance an apologetic for a more deconstructive Christianity—likely in light of Smith’s public support for the acceptance of LGBT+ behavior in the church and at Calvin University. Another tributary flows in a different channel. Here, the book reads less like a critique of conservative evangelicalism and more like confession—a phenomenological memoir of human limitation, where “darkness” names our fragility and God meets us in the depths of despair. Following this current, readers may see the work as a deepening of Smith’s ongoing phenomenological projects, shaped by an Augustinian sensibility and his own acknowledged struggles with depression captured in his interview with Publishers Weekly. Those who appreciated much of his other work in that vein will likely also appreciate this volume. Smith argues that no argument for God’s existence lifts us out of our lonely, distressed trenches. Both tributaries lead into the the same riverbed; the question is which tributary the reader will trace as they read Smith’s book. My primary critique concerns the book’s vision for the future of Christianity—specifically, its cultural embodiment. Citing Karl Rahner, Smith writes, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all” (200). Aside from brief references to contemplative practices—such as meditating on the mysteries of God—the reader isn’t given a clear explanation of why or how this “mystical mode” meaningfully shapes the church’s future or why it should be considered the mode for the future (202). This lack of clarity is significant, especially given the complexity of the mystical tradition itself. Some mystics, such as Eckhart, employed language about union with God that seemed to blur the distinction between Creator and creature. Others, like George Fox, elevated personal spiritual experience in ways that appeared to minimize Scripture, sacraments, or ecclesial authority. While often intended to express deep communion with God, such tendencies can drift toward subjectivism and theological ambiguity if not properly flowing from the kephalē—authority, source, origin—of Christ and his Word (Eph. 5:23). Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark is reflective and evocative, but it underdevelops the case for how a mystical Christianity might alter the spirit and structure of the church of the future.