A warm-up act as good as the main act. Most readers consider introductions, prefaces, and forewords to books as completely optional, likely a waste of time, and probably an exercise in prefatory flattery for the author. I won't tattle on foreword writers to say that they often don't read the book they are introducing (but it happens, quite a bit). But every once in a while, an introduction is so superb, so thoughtful that it rivals the book itself; it becomes a standalone essay quoted so often that one forgets it was actually an introduction to another work. C.S. Lewis's preface to Athanasius's On the Incarnation (St. Vladimir's Press) is just such an introduction.

2

How do you get a reader to read, really read, an old book? This, Lewis knew, was his challenge. Lewis was writing a preface in AD 1944 for a book that was written sometime just before AD 373. For the modern reader, “old book” means outdated (literally), difficult to read, and relatively impractical for the pressing needs of our day. Lewis had his work cut out for him. And yet, (and yet!) in a few paragraphs, Lewis brings his devastating wit and whim not to argue for reading just this old book but to convince Christians to read many old books in serial fashion.

3

The tension: intimidation and first-hand knowledge. Unless you are already a bibliophile with antique sensibilities, old books likely intimidate you. What do you have in common with a 4th-century church father? Will he use complex vocabulary? Did he even have an editor to ensure the book would be readable? These and other questions bully the modern reader to avoid old books. And yet, there is the desire that most readers have to read the book rather than a book about the book. Many more Christians have heard about Athanasius than have actually read him. This tension goes for all old and famous writers. We learn from others what we should think about men who have, in fact, left us their OWN writings on what we should think about them. Reading primary sources avoids the game of intellectual telephone—one scholar reads the original source, tells someone about it with his own thoughts, who tells someone else about it with their own thoughts, who tells someone else . . . and pretty soon you don't know where Athanasius ends and the thoughts of his critics and commentators begin. You can avoid trying to sort out what is original and what isn't by just reading the original, primary source, if you can get over your intimidation. Which you should.

4

Problem and prescription—50% or better yet, 75%. But if we followed Lewis's advice to read old books, would we read Lewis? Lewis confesses that he is a writer of modern books and very much appreciates his readers. Is there no place for modern books? Of course there is. So what does CSL prescribe? For every modern book you read, read one old book. I think this prescription to be too weak for what is ailing the modern reader. My recommendation is three old books for every modern book (and make sure, as best as you can, that the modern book is actually worth the time you will spend reading it).

5

The avoidance of errors and the error of avoidance. If you avoid old books, you will not avoid modern errors. And this is Lewis's advice. We all have blind spots that are common to those who share a birthday within fifty years in either direction of our own. We don't know what we don't know. It was Stephen King who called reading (and writing) a form of time travel. When we read Athanasius, we are having a conversation across time with someone who is very much like us and yet shares with us what Lewis calls "mere Christianity." When we read old Christian books, we trace the thread of the faith once handed down to the saints, even as it continues to be handed down to new saints. There is no other way (that I know of) to correct for the intellectual deficits of our modern moment than to read books that were not written in or near our modern moment. As Lewis says, "The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."

6

Of pipes and pencils. Lewis has a famous saying, oft quoted, about pipes, pencils, and how to read a book. But that little quip, excellent advice in and of itself, is only half of a larger thought. The modern reader of not just old books, but old theological books may be tempted to believe that said books will be old, crusty, and well, not devotional (whatever that means). Lewis, from experience, believes this temptation to be unwarranted. He eases the anxiety of the would-be old book reader writing, "For my own part I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others. I believe that many who find that 'nothing happens' when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devoition, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand." It is good advice, even the piece about pipes and pencils.

7

The finale of the preface. This, then, is part of the genius of Lewis's preface. He spends most of his little essay making the convincing case that Christian readers would do well to read old, very old, Christian works. He only mentions Athanasius at the very end. At this point, the reader of the preface should be convinced that old books are not intimidating and should be read. So what old book should the modern Christian read? Well, the one to which this preface is attached. Athanasius was a godly and bold Christian, erudite and a gifted writer, who just happened to write (in the 4th century) a classic work on the incarnation of Christ, a work that has stood the test of time. All that is left to the reader is to tolle lege. And when the reader has finished On the Incarnation in a sitting or two, he should tolle lege another old book and find that Lewis said exactly what he needed to say to convince a generation of modern Christian readers that old Christian books are not just tolerable but enjoyable.

I’m sitting in just such a moment framed by tools, technology, and AI. So I figured I’d throw out these disparate threads in the hopes they may be collected together in the future.

Wiley’s Book

Honestly, I’m withholding some of my public comment on AI because my private thinking is still a mushy mess. What I’m looking forward to is ’s upcoming book on the topic. I want to take the time to engage with his extensive research and conclusions before writing more on the topic.

You can find some of his thoughts on AI in these two talks, presented at the King’s Domain Conference this past April. They were excellent.

Wiley’s book will be a must-read. You can also read what ended up on the cutting room floor. And if that is what ended up on the cutting room floor, the book should be excellent.

To My Surprise

I was recently talking to a friend on this topic and remembered that I had written about AI and technology in the past. My friend asked to read what I had written, and so I went searching for articles I had long forgotten. To my surprise, I’ve written on that topic a little more than I remembered. Here is a quick index of things I’ve written in the past on a Christian view of technology.

• Don’t Be Dominated by Your Tools1

• On Choosing Digital Tools

• The Church in the Digital Age

• The Dangers of Technology

• The Double Edge of Technology

This conversation isn’t going anywhere, we haven’t figured out much of it yet, and the challenges are only going to get more significant. Christians can’t sit this one out.

We Started a Podcast

A good part of the work I've been doing is hosting a new-ish podcast we've put out at Grimke. The aptly named "Grimke Podcast" has been rip-roaring fun, on camera, no less. The fact of the matter is that Bryan Laughlin, Doug Ponder, and Doug Logan are some of my longest-standing friends. We've been talking about ministry, life, and everything in between for years and years. Then we had this idea to turn a camera on during those very same conversations. And the result has been encouraging. We could always turn the camera off and still have the same conversation among friends. But for as long as people benefit from listening in on our banter, we're going to keep doing this podcast thing.

You can listen to our podcast here. This episode on “words” may be the nerdiest I have ever been on camera (which is actually most of my waking life).

Coaching

I still coach a handful of some of the greatest clients an executive coach could hope for. I'm still not all that much a fan of the term "coach." All too often, I get called a "life coach," which is a dagger to my soul, though I rarely correct people. If you've seen The Godfather, what I do could be more of what that movie calls a "wartime consigliere." I have the privilege of talking to Christian men who are in the trenches, doing hard work in ministry and business. I get to take everything I know about people, business, ministry, the heroes of Wester Christian civilization, the Bible, and my own mistakes and ask some really aggresive questions that get leaders thinking about the way out of the challenges they are currently facing. It really is great fun.

Dean

I'm also leading up Grimke College as its dean. I have students scattered all over the continental US and beyond. These are Christians investing in their local churches, looking for education and training to pursue God's calling on their lives. I grade their papers, structure their courses, and answer whatever questions they lob my way. It is a privilege to teach them.

Doctoral Work

I'm also starting on doctoral work that will culminate in a dissertation presented (hopefully) at the end of 2026. If you take everything I've said so far in this brief post and warp it up into doctoral work, that is what my dissertation will be. I hope to show that Christian leaders have deprived themselves of an older, better tradition for Christian leadership formation in favor of saccharine substitutes that are steeped in therapuetic, sociological, branded gobbly gook. I believe that Christian leaders took the wrong exit between 1860 and 1970. It's time to find the way back to the highway.

The Future of This Site

I still plan to post updates like this regularly. I've found that some of the friendships I treasure the most are on this site. I'd love to update you on my work. I also plan to start posting more popular presentations of my academic work. The hope would be that my dissertation would spawn one or more popular-level works on Christian leadership. I don't want to wait to start writing that material. And Substack seems to be the best place to start publishing it. I'll likely put those posts behind a paywall to keep the AI bots away (or make them pay), to narrow my commenting audience, and to give the opportunity to several of my readers to support my work (I've had a few requests).

So, as always, I'm grateful to you, my readers and friends. Godspeed, give a read, and leave a comment.

The Problem with Leadership

And a good bit of this has to do with the way we use the word leadership. In the realm of dictionary wars, there are two philosophical points of view: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivists think it is the duty of the dictionary compiler to prescribe how the English language should be used. These are the gate-guarders of appropriate English usage. They don’t sit around checking the previous year’s list of zeitgeist word usage, ready to admit words based on their popular usage. Instead, they see themselves as those to whom the English language has been entrusted. And they take that trust seriously. A language can degrade and grow over time. Someone has to tend the garden of English usage. Prescriptivists are the gardeners.

Then there are the descriptivists. These are the anthropologists of the English language. They see their task as charting and recording how language changes over time. If some words decrease in popularity or grow in popularity, or pop on the scene as a new word or usage, the descriptivists see it as their responsibility to record that change. Descriptivists are the recorders and silent chroniclers of English language usage. If a new word is created, they must categorize it and record it, even if it is sus.

I’m firmly in the prescriptivist camp, a SNOOTy minority of Anglophiles. But I also lament the degradation of the English language and the loss of so much linguistic fodder with which to work. A culture with a small dictionary, ignorant of its literary past, is an impoverished culture. A culture that populates its dictionary with words taken from social media usage is a silly culture. I don’t want to be poor or silly when it comes to English usage.

So, enter the use of the word leadership. It is not a new word, but its usage has grown exponentially. It has grown to be a catch-all term for other terms that have decreased in usage. Take, for example, the use of *statesman* and *leader* over time. There is no doubt that a statesman is a leader, though a leader is not always a statesman. The Google Ngram chart for the use of these two words over the past 200 years shows that the use of leader has radically increased, and the use of statesman has decreased.

Have we had a rise in the number of leaders or a decrease in the number of statesmen since 1800? Certainly not. Something has happened on the linguistic level of English usage. The more specialized type of leader—the statesman—has been replaced by the more categorically general description of a statesman as a leader. And I won’t bore you with multiple Ngram charts. We can see this same type of chart tendency for all kinds of professions that display characteristics that we would call leadership.

A Linguistic Category Shift

So, there has been a linguistic category shift from specific to general. To show how this complicates things, let me give two examples. Take for example, the general category of “sandwich.” What is a sandwich? Merriam-Webster defines a sandwich as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between.” So, is a Rueben a sandwich? Yes, of course. Is a club a sandwich? Yes. Is a hamburger a sandwich? Well, yes, sort of. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Yes, according to the definition. But when you get down to order lunch, and order a sandwich, but you’re served a hot dog, you realize somewhere that the dictionary definition of a general category didn’t result in your lunchtime enjoyment. And the category doesn’t work the other way. If you order a hotdog and are served a ham sandwich, something has gone very wrong on an etymological level.

Now, let’s consider athletes. Merriam-Webster defines an athlete as “a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina.” Is a football player an athlete? Yes. Is a swimmer an athlete? Yes. Is a poker player an athlete? Well, they’re on ESPN. What about curling? What about your three-year-old who has learned to roll a ball across the floor? Is he an athlete like Steph Curry is an athlete?

Where This Leaves Us

Does this mean we should abandon all broad categories? Of course not. There is great value in using words that describe a broad range of subcategories. But if we use those words solely, without being specific, well then you may get a hot dog for lunch instead of a ham and Swiss croissant or go scrolling for your three-year-old’s top plays on Sports Center. And this is the problem we run into with how people use the word leadership these days.

Is the president a leader? Of course. Is a state congressman a leader? Yes. Is the chair of the local PTA a leader? Well, kinda. Is the alpha male in a pack of junior high school kids a leader? I suppose so. But these things are not all the same. It would be better to use the specific titles over the general category—president, congressman, chairman, lead bully. When we’re more specific, we don’t run into the problems of hotdogs instead of a Philly cheesesteak.

So, as a prescriptivist, I’d prefer not to use the term leader at all. I’d prefer to use a more specific category. But the descriptivists have won the day (for now), and we are left with using the term of the day to describe all kinds of chiefs among all kinds of tribes. It would be better to be specific. If you’re training politicians, don’t call it leadership training; call it, instead, statesman training. If you are training elders in a church, don’t call it leadership training; call it elder training. We can win back the English language. But it will take time and precision. Let’s start with how we use words like leadership.

Drawing on the old conundrum of trying to convince a fish of the reality of water, in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace said,

The capital t Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness, awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water,” “This is water.” It’s unimaginably hard to do this.

David Foster Wallace’s admonition to do the hard work of becoming aware of reality is the best way to introduce Ellul’s work. This was Ellul’s goal, though he isn’t as concise as Wallace.

At the heart of Ellul’s work is the concept of the technical society.2 Our modern reading eyes immediately think he is about to discuss how digital devices disrupt our lives. Maybe he’ll offer some best practices3 for doing a digital detox, we think. This is not primarily what he is saying, and he goes to great lengths to disabuse his readers of this notion. Ellul’s thesis is not primarily about machines as such but how our relationship with machines has changed how we think and how we act. He argues that the early thinking leading up to the Industrial Revolution was trying to figure out how to incorporate machines into the world of men. But then, this goal changed throughout the 1800s and into the twentieth century. Now, the goal is to figure out how to incorporate men into the world of machines. And we have been highly (economically speaking) successful at this second goal, all the while tearing our humanity down around our heads. This slight-blessing-major-curse facet of our global epistemology is what Ellul is describing in what he calls the technical/technological society.

And do not confuse “society” with “culture” or “community.” He isn’t saying that there is now a super-motivated group of techno-optimists or transhumanists geeking out in a dischord channel or late-night posting on an anon account. He would be singularly discouraged by these groups and point to them as symptoms of the disease he is diagnosing. But he would also reassert that the technological society is a-cultural, affecting every culture and community.

So what does he mean? Simply put, Ellul is charting a major shift at the core of what it means to be human, a shift to organizing everything around effeciency and progress. He isn’t against efficiency as such. He is terrified of efficiency as the controlling epistemology at the core of human existence.

I’ll give two signs that this all-consuming efficiency mindset is in play. First, whenever you hear “best practices” brought up, you are in the realm of technical thinking. From processing email, to cooking a meal, to navigating friendships and interpersonal relationships of all sorts, everyone today is looking for the one best way to do a particular thing. What is the secret algorithm to happiness and ease in this one particular area? This creates one lie and two bluffs. The lie is that there is one best way to conduct every facet of our lives. The complexity of our world and the intricacy of each human, made in the image of God, much less the intricate humans in hundreds of different relationships, will not yield to an algorithmic reductionism promising maximum efficiency. You cannot apply an algorithm to much of what we call human existence. Then there is the first bluff that efficiency algorithms actually bestow efficiency. Have computers and digital technology actually made us more efficient? More economically productive, yes, but more efficient? No. We are, on the whole, doing more, faster, and at a much lower quality. The Internet is incredible. Look at its crowning achievement—Youtube and TikTok. And that leads to the second bluff, that the efficient life is the happy life. How are we doing with all of the saved time and higher standards of living? We’ve never seen a more depressed, medicated, and distracted generation of humans. Max efficiency most assuredly doesn’t produce quality or happiness.

The second sign of the technical society that I’ll note in passing is imagining the human as a machine. We are told we need to rewire our brains to solve our problems. We are constantly augmenting our bodies to enhance (numb?) the human experience—phones, connected watches, augmented reality goggles, Neuralink. The assumption behind this cyborg thinking is that the human is an outdated piece of tech that needs upgrading. Could we instead be a plant that needs the right environment to grow? And yet this human-as-machine is leading to a verifiable decrease in our standard of life. If we are told we are machines, we shouldn’t be surprised that we begin to feel like them—the ever-increasing demand for higher rates of productivity under the gaze of a technician, emotionless, incapable of a relationship beyond something that feels like a conversation between an AI chatbot.

Again, this all sounds very depressing, and some of it really is. Reality is like that sometimes. But it is not hopeless. Ellul is a better commentator on social-technical history than he is a theologian. There is great hope in the Christian faith, but more on that in another essay. And if you’re a leader and realize how the technical society is both marring you and making you, increasing ROI but gutting team culture and your employees’ job satisfaction, there is hope too.

For now, you just need to see that this water.

Dr. Brown was lecturing on some aspect of Christian ethics and how it related to pastoral ministry. I don’t remember the specifics, but I do remember the sudden jump. Suddenly, Dr. Brown was talking about the dangers of technology and immigration. This was in 2002, and these were not regular topics discussed in an ethics course in seminary. He said something like, “If you want to prepare for what is coming, you need to read The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul and Camp of the Saints3 by Jean Raspail.” These weren’t required texts for that class; they were just another one of those off-handed, unexpected, erudite comments we grew to expect from Dr. Brown. But I knew enough about Dr. Brown to buy any books he recommended, off-handed comment or not. It turns out, now twenty years after he made that comment, he was something that he’d be uncomfortable with me calling him—prophetic.

But before I leave my recollections of Dr. Brown behind, I need to relay one other important anecdote. Dr. Brown was an accomplished author by any standard. But by no means did he write as many books as he could have written. We, his students, often found ourselves listening to course lectures that were so uniquely profound that we knew we had better keep good notes because there was no other written source we could find material like what Dr. Brown was teaching us. This led one of us (I don’t remember who) to remark in class, “Dr. Brown, you need to write more books!” He stopped for a moment to answer, not because he had never considered the option but because it was something he had thought long about. He stretched out his arms wide, turned his palms to us as if he was giving a benediction, and said, “You are my books.”

I’ve thought about that comment for a long time with a sense of gratitude and burden. I was neither Dr. Brown’s favorite nor best student. But I knew the man with affection, and I know he cared about me, cared enough to teach me the best of what he knew in every lecture, in every personal conversation we had in his office cluttered with books, swords, and pictures of him on the side of a mountain. I’m grateful to have known Dr. Brown and grateful to have been one of his students. But I also feel the weight of being one of his “books.” It is the weight and responsibility to pass on what I’ve learned. That is a big part of why I picked up Ellul’s Technological Society. It is a big part of why I’ve read it repeatedly through the years. And it’s a big part of why I’m writing about him now. Dr. Brown said to understand what was coming, we needed to read Ellul. And Dr. Brown was right; what was coming is now here.