Culture – Family Council

Reinventing the Sabbath: Guest Column

Aug 26, 2026John StonestreetCultureChristianity, Culture, Sabbath

A recent article by science writer Elizabeth Svoboda at the Wall Street Journal argued that an occasional 24-hour break is good for mind and body. As she wrote:

These micro-retreats have proven so energizing that I now take a few each year—and science suggests such hiatuses, despite their brief duration, can renew enthusiasm and relieve mental exhaustion in potent ways. They’re a welcome temporary escape from a chaotic and overclocked world.

This is not about getting away from reality, she explained, but about getting into a better head space. Because modern work involves jumping from one task to another without time to properly focus, a regular break is a simple, constructive way to improve life.

Christians and Jews might think, “Congrats! You’ve invented the Sabbath!” Thousands of years ago, before anyone had done studies on rest and brain activity, Moses told God’s people to take off one day in every seven. In fact, secular takes on life practices and rituals often reflect truths the Bible has always proclaimed.

Svoboda learned to prize rest and time away as a mom with small kids. But everyone needs rest. This is especially difficult for Americans, who can have trouble taking vacation, at least compared to our European counterparts. We might blame our bosses, but even when given the chance, Americans aren’t good at rest.

As Jay Dixit wrote in an article a few years ago, “We’re Doing Downtime Wrong,” the habit of scrolling or streaming to “relax” still requires the brain to focus, even if on irrelevant things. By contrast, Dixit noted, studies suggest that the “imagination network” of the brain is as essential as the “task-positive” network.

That’s why Archimedes’ Eureka moment came to him when he was sitting in the bath, and why Newton formulated the law of gravity when he saw an apple fall in an orchard. The epiphanies that seem to bubble up from nowhere when your mind is wandering are actually products of the imagination network.

Though the average working American still works a roughly 40-hour work week, there is far less shut-off time. Our phones function more like our computers, keeping us tethered to work at all hours. In other words, the rhythm of constant activity in our culture—even while lying on the couch or sitting on a beach—is not the rest we read about in Scripture.

In his book 24/6: A Prescription for a Happier, Healthier Life, physician Matthew Sleeth noted that the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word “remember” is the one about the Sabbath. As Sleeth put it, “It’s almost as if God knew we would forget.” If we do remember, we often think of the Sabbath as a burden instead of a gift. But as Jesus said, man was not made for the Sabbath; the Sabbath was made for man.

And that is because God is for us, not against us. Remember the Sabbath, not to follow a rule but to receive one of God’s gift to His creation. In doing so, we remember our frailty, and we can be refreshed by hearing His voice and better following His calling for our lives.

Return to What Built the West

Aug 5, 2026Erin HoganCultureCultural Commentaries, Culture, Western Civilization

C.S. Lewis, when writing the final book of his interplanetary science fiction series, decided on a name for his climax book based on a poem by sixteenth century Scottish poet David Lyndsay. In this poem, Lindsey referenced the shade of the biblical Tower of Babel as “the shadow of that hideous strength.” When Lewis wrote his book That Hideous Strength, he had already faced a tumultuous twentieth century. Two world wars had torn through the world and the hearts of thousands of battle-worn soldiers across the globe. The twentieth century also brought about a significant rise in industrialization and technocratic society which dehumanized society in ways that were new and disturbing. Politics became controversial as totalitarian measures like emergency private property seizures were taking place and a new technological reproduction preventative called contraception was on the rise. Dictators like Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler dominated the national picture of the century with the mass killing of millions.

As Lewis predicted, man’s technological advances took on a dramatically different result than its original intent. Technology was supposed to make life easier, provide additional protections for national security, and improve the health and quality of life for all humanity. Thankfully, many of these advances did result in a better livelihood for millions of people across the world. On the other hand, technological advances, in many ways, have resulted in the loss of understanding of what it means to be human. As ethics and morality, stemming from Christianity, have been set aside for secularism and postmodernism, the advances that were supposed to advance and help humanity have also dehumanized it. This can be seen in the advancement of radical abortion as a form of birth control and transgenderism as a way to express yourself, ignoring biological reality.

In his new book The Desecration of Man, Dr. Carl Trueman describes this radical drifting away from God when he writes, “We have desecrated that which should be sacred and yet failed to fulfill either the Marxist goal of true liberation or the Nietzschean goal of creating our own rich, sacred meanings to replace those we have destroyed.” In other words, secularism, postmodernism, Marxism, and other false ideologies failed humanity and dehumanized it in the process. Only a return to Christianity and what built the West will direct humanity in the right direction again. This is a return to truth worth fighting for.

Guest Column: Unlaughable Comedy

Jun 18, 2026John StonestreetCultureComedy, Culture

Over 13 million people watched the Netflix celebrity roast of comedian Kevin Hart. Irreverent insults are part of roasting, but the recent series of celebrity roasting has featured increasingly outrageous and often profane jokes, from mocking abortions to vilifying women. However, Hart’s roast has won the prize for the vilest yet.

The extremely inappropriate comments made at this roast about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, for example, demonstrate how debased mainstream comedy has become. Even worse, in a social media context, comedy is captive to likes and shares, so the desire to provoke and shock is ever escalating. So, what is the proper approach to comedy? Can the current state of comedy be redeemed?

Sociologist Philip Rieff coined a unique term for understanding many elements of modern culture, including debased comedy. Cultures produce artifacts. Cultures without a moral center produce what he called “deathworks,” or cultural artifacts that don’t build up but only tear down the sacred orders of a civilization. Roasts like the one for Hart are a deathwork, leveraging humor for no constructive noble or redeeming purpose. It’s just about degradation or, to borrow Carl Trueman’s term, desecration all the way down.

Humor is a unique, human characteristic that reflects the creativity and world-making for which humans were made. As such, it should rise above the mere profane and childish.

A Christian worldview offers the kind of moral framework humor needs, including the ability to discern between what one should laugh at and what one should not. If, on the other hand, nothing is sacred, then nothing is off-limits. Truly creative comedy operates within a worldview that identifies what is humorous while recognizing—and respecting—what is sacred. Put simply, if everything is funny, then nothing is sacred.

A notable exception to the current comedic trend is Nate Bargatze, a comedian who professes belief in Christ and stands out from virtually everyone else in his field. Bargatze’s humor is clean and avoids morally objectionable content. And yet, he has emerged as the top grossing comic in the world. His Saturday Night Live skit “Washington’s Dream” and its sequel, “Washington’s Dream 2,” became two of the most popular SNL skits in recent memory, with the first sketch now having amassed an amazing 30-plus million views on YouTube. In it, his comedic genius highlighted quirks of American culture that we hardly notice.

Or consider the Babylon Bee and its humorous satire on real-life events. Bee humor includes both inside jokes, that point out the foibles of the Christian community, and outside jokes, that expose dangerous ideas that need to be taken captive. A common experience after reading a Bee headline is to chuckle and then to think, “That sounds like it could be real.” That’s because they use satire to speak truth from the Christian worldview in a post-truth culture when others do not. As Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said at our 2025 Great Lakes Symposium, humor is effective as a “vehicle for truth delivery,” and to “expose an absurdity for what it is.”

The gulf between comedy that acknowledges the sacred and comedy that denies the sacred reveals to us truth about reality. In the Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described how modern attempts to remove man’s moral discernment has formed “men without chests.” As he put it:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful.

Notice Lewis’ words, “we laugh at honor.” In a morally castrated culture, nothing is truly sacred. In such a scenario, nothing is off limits from what is considered “funny.” When the counterbalance of a Christian worldview is removed, and the laughing gas is emitted, we laugh at anything—even the honorable.

Such a perspective brings to mind the less-than-morally upright comedian, Woody Allen, who sometimes closed his routines by saying, “I’m sorry I can’t leave you with something positive—would you accept two negatives?” At least Allen’s joke acknowledged the objective nature of mathematics. Still, since so much modern comedy is deathworks, there is opportunity for something better. Comedy that’s not only funny but, properly speaking, holy.