{"id":146585,"date":"2026-07-16T09:06:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T13:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=146585"},"modified":"2026-07-16T15:10:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T19:10:39","slug":"ct-ben-sasse-doesnt-doubt-gods-goodness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=146585","title":{"rendered":"(CT) Ben Sasse Doesn\u2019t Doubt God\u2019s Goodness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I&#8217;m pre-writing your obituary. I hope it does not have to get published immediately, but I did feel it would be interesting to have you speak to people from beyond the grave, if it does get published. So: Do you have anything you would like to say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the past few months, I had to make an interesting choice to go on this clinical trial that\u2019s pretty nasty. And you do a little bit of introspection: What\u2019s the point of extending life a couple of months? My girls are now 24 and 22, so they are launched and are doing well. And my wife is mindful of the truth that death is a wicked thief, but she is not despairing at all through this. So I really think that I made the choice to do this clinical trial and extend the few months of life because my boy\u2019s only 14. I want him to have a dad for a little bit longer and slap him upside the head and love on him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But it\u2019s really a function of the two great commands, trying to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And what does it look like to live well in this time? For me, these months have been largely about my son, Breck, but they\u2019re also more broadly about the challenge of what it means to raise kids in this time and place. We spend so much time talking about the jobs apocalypse in light of AI and the digital revolution. And that\u2019s an interesting question. I care about it a lot. But much more fundamental than just the paid-vocation piece, the jobs piece, is what does it mean to be human in this time when we\u2019ve got technological tools that are distorting reality in such fundamental ways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think we have a big, big collective action problem of what it means to raise kids in a world that will be this disrupted this frequently. People who are 25, 30, 35, 40, 45 years old are going to have their world upended again and again. What are the fundamental truths and roots that give life meaning and place meaning? I\u2019ve been reflecting about that a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>America works and thrives to the degree that people have thick local communities and places and small platoons and congregations to assemble for worship on Sunday morning and throughout the week. Right now, I think we\u2019re living through a period of institutional collapse, and we\u2019re going to need to go through a wave of Tocquevillian institution-building. We\u2019ve been mostly harvesting the consumer benefits of a technology revolution without acknowledging the production, vocational, and communal costs of burning all the districts where local community happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/2026\/06\/ben-sasse-cancer-diagnosis-faith\/\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p><blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\u201cI\u2019m better at thanking God for the gifts he gives us. And it makes me more aware of my childlike dependence upon him.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/BenSasse?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@BenSasse<\/a> spoke to CT from his hospital room as he underwent cancer treatment, discussing life, death, and our true hope in Christ.<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/YimbwA6InI\">https:\/\/t.co\/YimbwA6InI<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/CTmagazine\/status\/2077045284291379309?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">July 14, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m pre-writing your obituary. I hope it does not have to get published immediately, but I did feel it would be interesting to have you speak to people from beyond the grave, if it does get published. So: Do you<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=146585\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,438,178,104,151,108,618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-watch","category-death-burial-funerals","category-eschatology","category-health-medicine","category-politics-in-general","category-religion-culture","category-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=146585"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":146591,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146585\/revisions\/146591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=146585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=146585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=146585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}