I gave answers that were intended to provide relevant information and sources on these questions, and thought Substack readers might be interested in seeing them. I never know how much (if any) of my responses a reporter might use!

“Faith-related events at the White House and other venues have actually been a pretty constant feature of presidential history. For example, President Obama hosted Easter Prayer Breakfasts at the White House every year from 2010 to 2016.

Every president starting with Eisenhower has attended the National Prayer Breakfast in D.C. (it began with Eisenhower’s first term).

Richard Nixon held worship services at the White House - they were a bit unusual in that they were weekly Sunday services that lasted into his second term.

Presidents from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden have regularly spoken to assemblies of pastors and at churches. Probably the most famous of Reagan’s speeches in such settings was at the National Association of Evangelicals meeting in 1983, better known as the “Evil Empire” speech.

The Trump administration’s invocations of America’s Christian heritage are fairly conventional, then, although the president himself doesn’t seem quite as prone to such statements as committed Christian cabinet members such as Secretary Hegseth are. Hegseth’s services at the Pentagon are unusual in their level of public notoriety, but of course the Pentagon has always hosted chaplain-led services for a variety of faith groups.

One unusual aspect of the speakers that the Trump administration assembles for events such as Rededicate 250 is the prominence of “prosperity gospel” pastors such as Guillermo Maldonaldo and Trump’s key faith adviser Paula White. Many practicing evangelicals regard the prosperity gospel, with its assurances that true faith will inexorably lead to health and wealth, as theologically aberrant and deceptive. But some evangelical pastors have concluded that promoting Christianity’s role in national history and supporting President Trump is worth the price of associating with heterodox figures such as White.

As far as what Christian nationalists say about the Founding: I would certainly agree that Christianity played a formative role in the American Founding and its animating ideas. The problem comes when Christian America advocates imply (or state outright) that all the Founders were born-again believers in the evangelical sense, or that the nation was somehow founded on the “gospel of Jesus Christ.” This suggests a religious uniformity among the major Founders that simply wasn’t there.

For example, Benjamin Frankin called himself a Deist and denied the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson likewise denied the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, and he produced his own version of the Gospels with most miracles literally cut out with scissors.

However, both men were also deeply familiar with the Bible and they often used biblical concepts and phrases in their political writings. Franklin also proposed that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 open its sessions with prayer, a motion that the convention tabled.”

If you’re looking for books on the American Founding or the Founders, I encourage you to check out some of mine, including Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh (Yale University Press, 2022) and God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010).

Whatever difference AI will ultimately make in our current jobs, we have to be constantly vigilant against the human temptation to fiddle around. We have an endless capacity for messing with stuff, instead of actually working on our most important long-term project and/or the work that is adding value for our employer.

AI poses a major threat to the integrity of all writing, from one-page middle school reports to books with major publishers, all of which are increasingly synthesized by AI instead of being created by humans. Ethically, AI is in the “Wild West” phase of general lawlessness and lack of boundaries, especially for writers.

A less obvious problem for our AI use, however, is that AI could ultimately become just one more time-waster that creates a bunch of “stuff” but few products of enduring value. (Cal Newport compares it to email, which unquestionably made us busier, but arguably made us less productive.)

As I wrote in my previous newsletter, however, there are certain functions of AI that can give a major boost to humanities research. In my work, the primary benefit I see so far is transcribing historical manuscripts.

The problem with many history topics since around 1700 is not a lack of sources, but the fact that there are massive amounts of sources functionally locked away in hand-written manuscripts that are often difficult to access and read. For major figures like Jonathan Edwards or Thomas Jefferson, this is not so much of a problem, because scholars have transcribed their papers and published them in edited collections. But even for as well-known a figure as the evangelist George Whitefield, we still don’t have a scholarly edition of his papers.

A fair number of his papers are digitized. I know this, because when I search on “George Whitefield papers” many of the initial results are papers at archives like Emory and SMU that digitized their Whitefield papers when I paid them to do so for my 2014 biography! (You’re welcome.)

But digitized is not the same thing as transcribed. Reading 18th or 19th century handwriting is laborious, even if you don’t have to travel to London or other cities to physically visit the archives. AI can already scan and transcribe historical handwriting much more efficiently than I could manually.

AI uses a ton of electricity, but it doesn’t get tired, and there is no tired for a human researcher like reading-in-an-archive tired! Optimized AI is also arguably better at identifying handwritten characters (letters) than the human eye is. And it will only get better in the coming years.

Just to remind you that this is a “developing story,” I have switched to Google Gemini from Copilot to generate transcriptions of documents for my biography of Adoniram Judson. Gemini is significantly better than Copilot, even in its free version.

When I submit a pdf file with a single document in it, Gemini can usually transcribe it with about 95% accuracy, except when the manuscript is damaged or really dark (in which case I can’t read it either). Gemini struggles to manage pdfs containing many documents, but I can usually get a good transcription of each if I spend enough time explaining which document I want (it often helps to start a new dialogue for each one).

I don’t see ethical problems with having AI generate transcriptions, because you still must read the transcriptions yourself. Now they’re just a lot easier to read. AI allows you to move quickly to the work only a human author can/should do, namely interpreting the source and using it in a book project.

With AI’s assistance, I’m reading sources that I likely wouldn’t have read in previous book projects, because the manual labor involved in reading thousands of pages of historic handwriting was so demanding and inefficient that I would just run out of energy and time at the archive.

So if we become a regular AI user at work, we have to constantly ask ourselves, is this actually saving me time? Or am I just procrastinating and generating more busyness? Worse, am I violating ethical boundaries by presenting AI-generated material as my own writing?

My initial conclusion is that in this narrowly-defined task, AI transcribing historical documents is a major improvement on previous manual processes. It will allow me to do more comprehensive research in the long run.

My latest journal article is “The Name of Father Cummings Will Be Long Remembered”: Cummings v. Missouri, Religious Liberty, and the Test Oath Controversy,” Journal of Church and State [subscription].

Pre-order my book The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, co-authored with Byron Johnson (B&H Academic, Sept. 2026).

I never want to be the “old guy” who doesn’t know how the latest technology works, so I have indeed begun making some initial forays into using AI for history research and writing. As I have written before, creative workers have to draw a hard line when it comes to using AI to create work that you present as your own writing. This is a form of plagiarism.

Plus, I will need a lot of convincing before I could believe that AI is doing anything more than synthesizing knowledge. It can’t create; you still need humans made in God’s image to do that.

However, I have been training myself to ask, whenever I need to do non-creative tasks, “could AI do this for me?” Or, “could AI help me do the work that only I can do more efficiently?” Once you get used to thinking this way, you find increasing numbers of instances where AI can be of assistance. Let me give three examples:

Summarizing manuscripts I need to read and assess. I regularly need to read and comment on book-length manuscripts. These include doctoral dissertations, books that publishers are reviewing for possible publication, and published books that I am reviewing. When I am reading a book for the first time, I ordinarily see if I can find a review or two of the book. I read those before I get started on my own read, just so I can get my bearings on what kind of book it is, how it struck other readers, etc.

You won’t find reviews of books or dissertations that haven’t been published, however, but if you upload the manuscript to an AI program, it can generate a summary of the book of (say) 1000 words that functions somewhat like a book review. As usual, I still need to read the manuscript myself, but an AI-generated summary can give me a much stronger sense of what the manuscript is before I start reading.

Finding and documenting sources. I was recently writing a magazine article based on one of my current book projects. I assumed correctly that the publisher did not want footnotes. What I did not know was that the publisher’s fact-checker was going to want to see sources to confirm every factual claim. It’s a type of situation that comes up regularly - no creativity is required, but if I had to re-track the sources down manually it would certainly take an additional day or more of work.

So I plugged the copyedited manuscript of my Word document into AI (Copilot, since that’s what we subscribe to at work). I told it to give me a published source reference every time the fact-checker asked for one. I had to answer a few more questions for AI to grasp what I wanted, but once it started, Copilot generated a solid list of dozens of reliable sources and page numbers in just a few minutes.

Transcribing handwritten sources. This is the function I have explored the most. For my current book project on Adoniram Judson, I have hundreds of handwritten letters and journals to process. Many of these are documents that were published during Judson’s lifetime, but I never know when the publisher in the 1800s might have left out portions of the letter (often the most interesting sections because they deal with controversial topics). Most AI programs now have some Optical Character Recognition functionality that can convert handwriting (more or less reliably) into text.

I am quite confident that Copilot is not the best option for the transcription of handwriting. However, it is integrated well with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite, so that (for example) it is easy to convert the transcription into a Word document and save it in a file of transcriptions. I have heard that Transkribus is the best option for AI transcribing historical handwriting. However, I find it difficult to use and quite slow in the free version of the software, so for the time being I will stick with Copilot.

To transcribe a document, you upload a pdf of the letter/journal and tell AI to transcribe it. You can develop a “baseline” of the person’s handwriting by uploading more documents and correcting the transcription errors that AI makes. Judson’s handwriting is often pretty legible, but damage to the document, oddities in his script, or crossed out lines can make some words difficult to recognize via OCR. So far it averages getting the transcriptions around 85% correct.

If I was trying to publish an edition of Judson’s papers, of course, we would need to shoot for 100% accuracy, but that’s not essential for my purposes. I just need to get a good transcription, and be able to compare it to the published edition when one is available. If one is not available, I need to read the transcription more closely to see if there’s any new information I want to use in the book.

When using AI in research, we want to make sure we are not cutting any ethical corners or having AI do our creative work for us. One test of whether the use is ethically sound is whether you would be willing to go public with the ways you’re using AI (say, for example, in a Substack newsletter!). If you are willing to tell everyone what you’re doing, it at least means that you’re not trying to “get away” with something unethical.

AI may have many ramifications, but at a minimum, it is a new technology (like the internet, digital sources, Google Books, etc.) that has valid applications in history research. It will undoubtedly make certain tasks (like document transcription) vastly more efficient than doing it manually. But there are certain things it can never replace, including the human creativity behind good writing.

It’s a busy time for the writing pipeline! The second edition of my American History textbook is due out in July, in time for Fall ‘26 courses.

September 1 is the release date for The Death of Religion? Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, co-authored with my friend and colleague Byron Johnson of Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.

As I have written here before, starting small is the best first step for aspiring writers. At least in nonfiction writing, one does not typically start by getting a book contract with an established press. If you want to go straight to publishing a book, your only option is normally self-publishing, but almost no one reads most self-published books.

When someone tells me they’re interested in writing, I typically recommend they start writing short posts that they can share publicly, like on a blog or Substack. Put yourself on a doable posting schedule. For example, you could commit to posting six times at your Substack in six months, and then re-evaluate.

I am surprised, however, at how many people who express interest in writing aren’t willing to create a Substack and start posting. Sometimes even that much writing seems like too much. But if you don’t have sufficient “fire in the bones” to post something regularly for a few months, I’m not sure if you’re really interested in being a writer.

Others seem a little downcast at the thought that they would have to begin by writing posts that very few people read. To that I say, “welcome to being a writer.” The only writers who start out with a big audience are generally those who have become famous some other way (tv personalities, etc.). Those writers are often not really the ones producing their books, however - ghost writers and/or AI do. Most writers who go through the normal channels start with a very small audience.

The upside of starting a Substack or a blog is that you can do it right now, for free. There is nothing else that needs to happen before you start writing. The downside is that most people who intend to start writing regularly this way never establish a consistent posting schedule.

Most aspirant writers need more structure. This is where a graduate program comes in. Obviously doing graduate work is a much bigger commitment than creating a Substack is. However, most people need accountability as writers, and providing a structure of accountability is one of the functions of a graduate program.

A Ph.D. program (such as the one at Midwestern) is ultimately designed for students to produce a book-length work (a dissertation), one that they will often publish as a book or as articles. Students practice their writing initially in seminar papers, and then ultimately work under their adviser’s supervision to produce the dissertation.

This is why when selecting a Ph.D. program, the adviser/s you want to work with are arguably the most important factor. If you are interested in doing a Ph.D., think about what current authors and books have influenced you most. Assuming the author in question is a professional scholar, where does he or she teach? Does this author direct Ph.D. dissertations?

When doing a Ph.D., you are in (among other things) a writers’ mentoring program. Not every person will need or want to go through the next phase of the process to publish the dissertation as a book, but the best dissertations will indeed be the first draft of a book. Ph.D. programs are not merely for academic credentialing, then. They should train you in writing at a professional level.

You can pre-order my new book (with Byron Johnson) The Death of Religion?: Nones, Others, and the Flourishing of Faith, from B&H Academic.

My PragerU videos include this one on the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Thus, I don’t have social media apps on my phone. I get almost no notifications on my phone or laptop, except for texts from family and friends. I despise ‘reply all’ emails and obsessively encourage senders to use BCC to keep them from happening.

When it comes to creative work, I relish efficiency only in the sense that I free myself from ‘urgent’ distractions so I can consistently write. But we have to draw a hard line at cutting corners on creative work itself.

Nonfiction writing has value to the extent that it examines new evidence, or examines old evidence in a fresh and imaginative way. There is no particular value in writing that examines old evidence in the same way as earlier writers have done.

Take the life of missionary Adoniram Judson, the subject of my current book project. Obviously there are some elements of his biography that any biographer must repeat, such as his birth and death dates. But there is little value in writing a book on Judson that simply repackages what earlier biographers have written.

Some authors, candidly, have basically produced this kind of derivative book on Judson, presumably because they’re fascinated with Judson and just want to retell his story. Perhaps their publisher figures that any new biography of Judson will sell some copies, whether or not the work adds to our understanding of the man and Christian missions.

The most efficient way to generate such a biography of Judson would be to have AI write it for you. I am not aware of AI software that will write a book based on a single command, but presumably you could patch a book together via multiple requests. As I am writing this, for example, I got Microsoft Copilot to spit out a roughly 12,000-word paper on his early missionary career.

The appeal of this method is obvious: it is phenomenally efficient, and for some students, the clarity and evidence in such a paper exceeds what they could do on their own. (Of course, if you present AI-generated content as your own work, that is plagiarism.) In terms of creativity and historical learning, however, the paper has no value at all. The AI program can add to its source base and correct internal errors, but software programs cannot gain wisdom or encouragement from Judson’s life.

Human readers might gain such benefits from an entirely AI-written book, but AI reports are 100% derivative, and in a nonfiction sense they are mere accumulators of facts (or hallucinations).

My point is that AI is forcing fans of efficiency to reestablish a crystal-clear distinction between efficiency and creativity. We should certainly pursue efficient methods of writing: for example, it would wreck my writing efficiency if I insisted on writing out book manuscripts by hand and not using computers.

But in when writing books, music, or similar endeavors, there is no substitute for a person creatively grappling with the material at hand. Regurgitation by software is not, and won’t ever be, a satisfactory equivalent.

“Reexamining Thomas Jefferson” - my review of three books on the American Founding, at Christianity Today.

“My Top Books of 2025,” at The Gospel Coalition.

A distinctive blessing of academia is that we get more structured time off than just about any other profession. Yes, 30 or so weeks of the year are fairly intense with teaching and grading, but depending on your summer schedule, that leaves a lot of the year, including about 4 at Christmas, when we’re on our own. The challenge is, what will we do with that time?

Self-directed work is a fact of the writer’s life, including those writing dissertations and academic books. The writing battle is often won or lost by what people do with their ‘breaks.’ Many graduate students and even professors never really get out of the undergraduate mindset, which is that once finals are done, you are ‘on break,’ meaning no more work for weeks on end.

When people ask me how I get so much writing done, my thoughts turn to Christmas vacation or summertime, when I have sometimes found myself alone in the academic buildings of a deserted campus. Sure, some people get a ton of work done at home during their breaks. But too many fritter away the weeks, and always seem to come back having gotten much less work done than they intended.

Here are two suggestions I would make for work during a break, especially Christmas and New Year’s: plan what days you will work, and develop specific goals for the break. Soon after grades are submitted, take a look at your calendar. What days are you going to work, even if only for half days?

I am all for taking time off, and traveling to see family. And I know that time in the office is unrealistic for people with kids at home for break. But taking off a whole four weeks seems excessive, if not downright foolish. If you are under the gun with dissertating, or hitting a book deadline, those weeks are a major opportunity not to be squandered.

Second, I would plan to complete at least one major project (chapter, article, etc.) during the break. Write it down, share it with colleagues, whatever it takes - hold yourself accountable for delivering specific outcomes. I also maintain my 1000 words a day goal on days I work - there’s no better time than breaks, with no meetings, classes, and few e-mails, to hit that goal, usually in just a morning’s work.

When you consider the pressures people have in other professions (pastors, doctors, lawyers, etc.), I really don’t see the work I put in over breaks as stressful. Believe me, I watch a LOT of football and movies over Christmas, and plan special trips to art museums, state parks, etc. with my family. But some strategically-chosen days of work in a quiet office, with no distractions, can pay major dividends over the long haul.

Catch up on my PragerU series of 5-minute videos on Colonial America.

“My Top Books of 2025,” at TGC.

Me: “Are you familiar with Google Books?” "

Student: “I’ve heard of it.”

Me: “You need to start using it right away. I use it every day.”

Google Books, HathiTrust, and similar digital libraries have inaugurated a sea change in history research nearly as dramatic as the first advent of internet-based research, which began around the year 2000.

The first advent of internet research was more limited than today, for obvious reasons of scale. But I am also struck by how the first wave of digital history research made the “rich get richer.” So many sources were subscription-based and only affordable for research university libraries. If you were a writer without access to a research library, you were on the outside looking in.

That dynamic remains true in some ways, especially with sources like academic journals and rare books. But across several genres of sources, from historical newspapers and magazines to the papers of the Founding Fathers, freely available digital collections have “democratized” historical research. Anyone with an internet connection could do professional-level history research, if they just knew how to do it and where to look.

Let me give one example to demonstrate my point: recently I was researching an article on the Supreme Court case of Cummings v. Missouri (1867), an understudied case with major religious liberty implications. (The article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Church and State in 2026.) Where did I get the sources for this project?

I could obtain a lot of the books I needed for the project on Google Books or HathiTrust - for example, the 1870 book Martyrdom in Missouri was one of the key compilations related to the Missouri “test oath” controversy for pastors. Major internet libraries have scans of this book, and it is publicly viewable because it was published before 1930, the current copyright limitation window.

Google Books has scanned most of the books in the stacks of libraries such as Harvard, Michigan, and Oxford. You have complete access to those libraries’ holdings prior to 1930, and limited page views of books published after 1930. Just think about that. Not only do you have free virtual access to many of the world’s major research libraries, but also can do full-text searching of those collections!

But it hardly stops there. In the “first advent” phase, many historical newspapers were available only via subscription to platforms such as America’s Historical Newspapers from Readex. I continue to consult America’s Historical Newspapers, but in my Cummings project I increasingly found that my best newspaper results came from (free) searches in the Library of Congress’s digital newspapers collection, and the wonderful newspaper archive at the State Historical Society of Missouri website.

The sea change, then, is that we have moved from needing subscription-based websites to do the best historical research, to not needing them. Or at least we don’t always need them. This makes a huge difference for students needing to get access to history sources, and for professors teaching at schools that are not research universities (that is, most schools).

The challenge now is that we have access to so much information that it can be overwhelming and hard to know where to start. It takes a lot of practice to know how best to use Google Books and similar sources. Different search terms and search limits can produce wildly different results.

But if you’re in a position where you or your students need to do even the most basic history research, you should familiarize yourself with these free digital libraries. They now are our most essential tools.

My 5-minute PragerU video “Colonial America: Jamestown vs. Plymouth” is now available, just in time for Thanksgiving! This is the first of five videos that will go up each Monday for the next month, each on a colonial America topic (the Great Awakening, the Salem Witch Trials, etc.).

Aside from my usual warnings about the troubles in the academic job market, I came up with three points.

Learn how to quickly read a book. Once when I was in my Ph.D. program at Notre Dame, I calculated that I needed to read seven books a week to keep up with coursework and research papers. If you have anything like this reading load, you simply cannot read all those books word-for-word.

I recommend adopting a system in which you can read a book in two hours, and still capture what you need to know about the book for the purposes of class discussion. Start by reading two or three book reviews from JSTOR or a similar online resource. Then read the introduction to the book word-for-word, then start reading the first sentence of each paragraph. Slow down when you get to sections particularly useful to you.

Get realistic about how much writing progress you need to make. Let’s assume that you have three 25-page research papers you need to write by the end of a semester. If you assume 250 words/page, that works out to roughly 19,000 words you need to write in three months. If you give yourself 25 working days a month, you’ll need to average writing about 250 words a day during the semester, not including revisions.

Since I try to average 1000 words a day on writing days, 250 doesn’t sound like that much. But graduate students are often the worst procrastinators, partly due to a perfectionist bent. Thus they can get well into the semester before they really start writing. It would be much better to start as early as possible, and make steady progress, rather than frittering away the time and then having to produce most of the papers at the last minute.

Go to church, preferably with large numbers of normal people. Obviously I am assuming here that you are a practicing Christian. But regardless of your spiritual commitments every graduate student would benefit from being around “regular” people (i.e. not just other academics), especially people who are caring and supportive. The most likely place to find such people is at church, where Christians need to be going each Sunday anyway.

Graduate school can make you pretty squirrely if you let it. Being around people with families and regular jobs is encouraging and helps keep your work in perspective.

Midwestern Seminary did an outstanding job producing my free online course on Church History II. It’s great for students, church groups, and anyone who wants an overview of church history since the Reformation.

The second edition of my American History textbook is due out next year from B&H Academic.

Now it is true that when I was in my doctoral program, I got my pastor to show me how to change my oil. I was living on a “limited income,” as they say, and doing oil changes myself seemed like an obvious way to save some money. But in general, I was hopeless when it came to almost any other maintenance on my vehicle.

In recent years, I have begun to think differently about the issue. One reason is that the internet has increasingly made it easy to perform simple manual repairs on your home or vehicle.

When I realized that the reverse light was out, I searched on “reverse light Toyota Tacoma” and got an easy-to-follow 5-minute video on how to open the taillight housing and replace the bulb. Then I ordered the right replacement part on Amazon - again, it was simple to determine which bulbs to order.

I also have enough tools to do a job like this. If you don’t already own one, I would certainly recommend buying a basic wrench set [affiliate link] so you can remove bolts for elementary auto maintenance.

For the actual task, I took my phone down to the garage, watched each segment of the instructional video, paused and did that part of the task, and replaced both reverse bulbs on the truck in about 20 minutes. I felt almost inexplicably happy about it.

Why is a manual task like this one so satisfying, especially for academics and other workers who spend much of their time in front of a computer? One is that it gives you such a tangible sense of accomplishment. Something is broken, then after 20 minutes of work it is fixed.

Most of our labor as academics has no such clear beginning and end. I suppose that the good feelings we have when we submit grades, or receive a physical copy of a published book, are somewhat comparable. But even then, you know that submitting grades may be followed by complaints from students, and a published book will hopefully be reviewed, so it’s not quite the “end” the way it is when you replace a bulb.

Also, when we only do creative and pedagogical work, it only stimulates certain parts of our minds. I have become increasingly convinced that outdoors manual work is simply good for our physical and mental health.

Do-it-yourself work can save you a lot of money. There are simple and oft-repeated jobs like lawn mowing or oil changes that anyone can learn to do, and you will need to repeat many times over the years. Obviously you have limits to how many of these jobs you can start doing yourself if you’re not already doing them. But you can certainly save thousands of dollars over time, plus make an investment in your well-being, if you begin doing one or two of these tasks yourself.

I do subscribe to the “time is money” philosophy, however, and I am quite content to give large, complex jobs over to people who know what they’re doing (transmission repair, replacing a roof, etc.). Sometimes we waste time and give ourselves unnecessary stress by taking on highly complex jobs just because it seems too expensive to hire them out. We need wisdom about whether a given job is really feasible for us to do well ourselves, given our time, resources, and expertise.

Finally, if you are active in simple repair and maintenance, you can pass these skills on to your children. Kids from “white collar” family backgrounds, in particular, benefit from being assigned yard work or basic repairs. In addition to conveying the satisfaction of a completed manual task, it boosts their self-confidence, shows them how to live more frugally, and conveys the message that they are not “above” doing work like cleaning or repairing a toilet.

Is there a household, yard, or automotive task you can start doing yourself?

I was on the “Room for Nuance” podcast with Sean DeMars.

Check out the new Church History emphasis in the Midwestern Baptist Seminary doctoral program.

Each press has its own system for edits, but in general book editing focuses first on content, then style and prose, and finally technical issues like typos, extraneous spaces, inconsistent capitalization, etc. There are at least three rounds of edits involved with any published book, but often there are more.

That may seem like a lot of editing, and obviously some books and authors require more editing than others. As I have noted before, doctoral students often are not attuned to issues such as passive voice - they’re just trying to get their ideas down on paper and don’t necessarily think much about style.

But even the most experienced author needs an editor, because no one ever turns in a manuscript that a good editor can’t improve. Editors simply have a different perspective on prose than authors do. Even experienced editors who write a book themselves need to work with an outside editor!

But both authors and editors should adopt practices and attitudes that keep their working relationship congenial. Sometimes their relationship can become difficult because authors tend to be touchy about their projects. Senior professors, in particular, rarely have anyone tell them that their writing stinks (or “could be improved,” to put it more nicely).

My editorial experience is quite limited compared to my authorial experience, but I know editors get tired of correcting the same problems over and over and over (passive voice, unclear references, etc.). To editors, these errors or infelicitous ways of writing can become annoying, and thus their corrections can come off as blunt or patronizing to authors, who don’t like being spoken to as if they are in a freshman writing seminar.

Here are just a few suggestions that can make the author-editor relationship easier for both:

1. Authors need to get really comfortable with the idea that their writing needs editing, and that it always will need editing.

2. An author’s default response to an editor’s edits needs to be to ‘accept’ without quibbling, unless the correction patently makes the prose worse, or introduces an error.

3. Editors should resist the temptation to mess with sentences just because they can. Don’t make changes unless they correct or improve the prose in a tangible way (passive to active voice, etc.).

4. Editors should keep in mind that while a particular editing job may take them a week or two, the author has probably been working on the book for years. A certain respect for the author’s relative investment in the project is warranted.

Most of these suggestions fall into the ever-reliable “golden rule” category. If you were the author, how would you want the book to be edited? Or if you were the editor, how would you want the author to respond to edits? Applying these principles (to yourself first) will clear up a lot of the potential friction in an author-editor relationship.

We introduced a new emphasis in church history in Midwestern Baptist Seminary’s doctoral program.

Judson also maintained an impressive fitness regimen, one that was steady and probably life-sustaining in an environment where many missionaries died early from disease. Day after day for years, Judson took brisk walks in the mornings and some evenings. He did this despite his incredible productivity and prodigious learning in the Burmese language and biblical scholarship, not to mention his family and pastoring duties.

Judson told his stepson (both he and his wife Sarah had lost their first spouses to death in Burma) in 1840 that he should “rise every morning between light and sunrise, and take a quick walk of a mile or more, and to the top of some hill, if there be one in the vicinity…and in the winter, when you may not be able to walk, get some equivalent exercise in cutting wood or some other work.”

Judson said that he had kept up this routine for thirty-five years. To it, “under God, I ascribe the good health and the long life I have enjoyed in this unpropitious climate.” Sarah frequently accompanied him on the walks.

If the boy adopted such a routine, he would find his “appetite improving, your health becoming firm, and your repose by night undisturbed.” (The boy was having a lot of nightmares.)

When you consider how phenomenally productive Judson was, you might wonder, how was he able also to maintain this fitness regimen too? I suspect Judson would tell us that the physical regimen helped enable his scholarly productivity.

A fitness routine has not been a consistent strength of mine, though I am in a pretty good rhythm right now. For most of my working life, writing and spiritual disciplines like morning prayer and Scripture reading have been steadier than fitness.

But I am persuaded that for scholars, pastors, and creatives, fitness is especially urgent, since we don’t typically have physical work built into our vocational responsibilities. You do not need to run a marathon (though by all means do so if you wish) to maintain fitness that complements the writing life, which is so often sedentary.

I obviously have not discovered any magic formula myself, but here are a few tips on maintaining a good fitness routine:

1. Make it a habit. You can see this in Judson’s advice. He went walking every morning for thirty-five years! I find that the resistance to any habit melts when I don’t have to think about it or “fit it into” my daily schedule. It’s just automatic.

2. Build exercise into other things you need or want to do. You see this in Judson’s wintertime advice. The boy had to chop wood anyway, so that could suffice as his daily exercise when it was harder to get out for a walk. I started mowing the grass again after our boys left home, although I could certainly justify paying a yard service. I do this partly to build in more walking outside into my weekly routine. Longtime readers also know that I do a lot of kayak fishing, which is both hobby and exercise - and I absolutely love doing it.

3. Don’t self-sabotage. Judson ate a modest and healthy diet that helped keep him fit well into middle age. (He wouldn’t have known the word “pescatarian,” but it probably described a lot of his food intake.) His era, and certainly the Burma of the 1800s, did not yet battle the temptations presented by the modern food industry. He also was adamantly opposed to drinking. Whatever leads you to bingeing and self-sabotage, whether it be alcohol, or chips, or sweets, the best thing is to keep it out of your house.

Judson spent enormous time in his study, poring over works of biblical scholarship and agonizing over the best way to translate a Greek or Hebrew term into Burmese. But day after day he also maintained that enlivening exercise routine, because he saw it essential to his bodily health, just as prayer and devotional reading was essential to his spiritual health.

“Patrick Henry: Defender of American Liberty” - my new article for the Heritage Foundation.

The great Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn was famous for asking doctoral students the “so what?” question, but all good doctoral advisers will ask the same thing, if in slightly different words.

You may not have a rock-solid answer to that question when you start a project (like a dissertation or a book), but you’d better have one by the end of it. If you don’t, you are likely to run into trouble with your dissertation committee, or an editor at a journal or at a university press.

Graduate students typically struggle to develop clear answers to the “so what?” question. They’re just getting to know the literature on their subject, and they’re reading books that they love - how can they offer anything new to the discussion?

Many doctoral students already suffer from “impostor syndrome” anyway, fearing that they don’t really have what it takes to write a defensible (or publishable) dissertation.

I’ve seen doctoral students who are so unnerved by the “so what?” question that they ultimately go into a different line of work. Coming up with something new to say can seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

So how do you develop a satisfactory answer to “so what?” From the perspective of history, the two most obvious ways are new evidence or a new interpretation. Although many historical topics are pretty “raked over,” there’s almost always new evidence waiting in neglected or understudied publications or manuscripts.

For example, when I was researching the First Great Awakening, I discovered the story of a miraculous healing of a woman named Mercy Wheeler in 1742 in Connecticut. With her pastor she published an account of this healing. Despite all the attention to women’s history and women authors in the past half century, almost no scholar had ever mentioned this narrative, much less commented upon it. This opened the door for me to publish an article [subscription] about the episode in The William and Mary Quarterly. It was also one of the new parts of my 2007 book on the First Great Awakening.

“New interpretation” means that you take a different approach from one or more major scholars who has worked on your topic. For example, in my forthcoming Second Great Awakening book (also with Yale Press), I address and modify the extremely influential argument of Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity [affiliate link], probably the most important book on the Second Great Awakening (2GA). You simply have to deal with Hatch in a book on the 2GA, and if I just repeated what he said, it would raise problems in the “so what?” vein.

Without going into all the details, I argue (very politely - I love Hatch’s book) that Hatch overstates the unity of American evangelicals during the 2GA. I argue that instead of being unified around the democratic impulse, evangelicals were badly divided between “formalists” and “populists.”

Also, some of the most “democratic” forms of evangelicalism were found in still-British domains such as Nova Scotia and Jamaica. So did you really need the American democratic ethos to have “democratized” Christianity? In other words, I offer a different view than the dominant interpretation of the 2GA.

Your new interpretation may be fairly modest, maybe just addressing an issue that raises new questions about the dominant approach. But if your dissertation/book simply restates what others have argued, or repeats evidence that others have presented, then why do we need your project?

Some Christian critics have noted that the quest for novelty has created a persistent problem in biblical studies and theology, namely that this quest incentivizes departures from orthodoxy. This is not as pressing of a problem in the history discipline, but it is a real issue.

However, there are always new intellectual or cultural trends that great orthodox thinkers have confronted in defense of traditional belief. “So what?” shouldn’t be a problem that dissuades conservative Christian scholars.

I think of Princeton theologian Charles Hodge, who bragged that “no new idea ever originated at Princeton Theological Seminary” during his tenure there in the 1800s. Yet Hodge was constantly challenging new ideas, such as Darwinian evolution, to defend the biblical tradition. He had plenty of opportunities to parry new assaults on biblical authority. Doing so answered the “so what?” question for him.

So if you’re writing a dissertation, article, or book, you’re eventually going to have to confront the scary “so what?” issue. You may not have a reply to it yet - but research in primary sources has an uncanny way of supplying one. The answer typically emerges from discovering new evidence, advancing a new interpretation of old evidence, or both.

“The Dueling Christian Nationalisms of the Civil War” - my review of Richard Carwardine’s Righteous Strife at The Gospel Coalition.

I don’t say this to be critical of doctoral students. I was certainly one who paid little attention to the art of writing until I tried to publish my dissertation as a book.

This problem is built into the dissertation process. Expertise, evidence, and argument are typically the standards by which a faculty committee judges a dissertation. The faculty may be pleasantly surprised to find that the dissertation is well written, and obviously a passable dissertation needs to be free of grammatical and spelling errors.

But prose style is generally not a major focus when we evaluate a dissertation.

Some professors also have little experience themselves writing for a “general audience.” Maybe they have only published academic journal articles, or maybe a niche monograph, but they haven’t thought much about writing for people who don’t have a Ph.D. in the field. Obviously such professors are not going to offer much help in prose styling.

But even some advisers who do write for a general audience may set aside prose issues simply to get the student across the doctoral “finish line.”

Depending on your doctoral program, it may be more or less common for graduates to publish their dissertations as books. But if you have any notion that you might publish it someday, you will save yourself time (and produce a more readable dissertation) if you attend to prose style sooner rather than later.

How do you improve prose style? The classic work on the subject is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style [affiliate link]. In fact, one of the first hints that I was not great at prose style was when I was visiting potential doctoral programs and spoke with the historian Brooks Holifield at Emory University. I sent him a paper from my Master’s program, and asked if he had any feedback on it. The first thing he said was, “Are you familiar with Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style?” Yowza!

Also, you should pay attention to the actual prose of your favorite writers. You should examine their actual sentence structure, shape of paragraphs, etc. Two of my all-time favorites are books by George Marsden (my doctoral adviser) and Edmund Morgan, who not coincidentally was one of Marsden’s professors at Yale.

You won’t go wrong with any of these authors’ books, but you could start with Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop and Marsden’s Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Finally, you are not likely to become a master prose stylist by the end of a doctoral program, but there are some relatively simple changes you can make. These include reducing passive voice, complex sentences, and block quotes. None of these are necessarily incorrect, but they don’t make for good reading.

Passive voice: This is the difference between “It was decided that the French army should invade Russia” and “Napoleon decided to invade Russia.” The latter (active voice) is preferable, as it concisely clarifies who is performing the action.

There may be times when passive voice is ok, such as “President Kennedy was assassinated.” The main point here is likely Kennedy’s death, and not the (somewhat disputed) fact that Lee Harvey Oswald shot him. But the default voice should be active.

Microsoft Word and other word processors can readily identify passive voice with their editor functions, so you shouldn’t have a problem finding instances of passive voice in your manuscript.

Overly complex sentences: Here I am grabbing content from the Readable blog. A typical graduate student sentence (about zombie fiction!) might say

“There is currently a lively, ongoing controversy among many sociologists and other professionals who study human nature: theories are being spun and arguments are being conducted among them about what it means that so many young people—and older people, for that matter—who live in our society today are so very interested in stories about zombies.”

This is a technically correct sentence, but it is a terrible one stylistically. Readable suggests an edit that deletes passive voice and reduces wordiness by more than half.

“A lively societal debate rages among the human sciences. The contentious issue is: why are so many people fascinated by zombie fiction?”

In general, you want to limit sentences to no more than two clauses. Don’t be afraid to write active sentences with just one clause either.

Block quotes: Especially when studying a brilliant writer, it can be tempting to let their prose fill up your pages. But think about it: how often do you read block quotes when you come across them in your own reading? If a reader skims anything, they skim block quotes.

There certainly are times when a block quote is warranted, but I wouldn’t recommend using more than one per chapter. When you use them, you should conclude the paragraph by explaining what the quote means and what the reader should take from it.

Instead of block quotes, consider quoting the essential sentence from the passage. Explain the rest in your own words.

If you can keep a few basic principles of prose styling in mind, you can produce a more readable manuscript. Doing that will also put you closer to publishing the dissertation as a book.

You wait for readers’ reports on the manuscript. You wait for the press to get back to you on the latest round of edits. You wait to get page proofs. Finally, you wait to get copies of the published book. The waiting on a book always amounts to months of time, if not years.

What do you do while you’re waiting? My answer is “work on another book.” Or an article, or whatever, but it should be a substantial next project. Obviously my job provides more time (and expectations) for writing than for the average writer, but the point still remains: if you publish something, you’re going to do a lot of waiting. Good stewardship suggests that you fill the down time with the early stages of another project.

Currently I have three book projects at various stages of completion, plus a second edition of my American History textbook. This is probably more than I would ideally have going on, but delays in a couple of the projects have added even more waiting than usual, so I was ready to move on to a third project.

This project, the one at the earliest stage, is a biography of Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson, co-authored with my friend and Midwestern Seminary colleague Jason Duesing. We are about halfway through writing that manuscript. It is due to Crossway in mid-2026.

The next book is The Second Great Awakening and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, due out with Yale University Press in early 2027. This book recently got final approval from the Yale Press board! I am hopeful that this will become the standard book on the Second Great Awakening of the early 1800s. It also serves as a sort of companion volume to my earlier Yale Press book on the First Great Awakening.

Finally, there is The Death of Religion? Nones, Others, and The Flourishing of Faith which is due out with B&H Academic in mid-2026. I am co-authoring this book with my friend and Baylor colleague Byron Johnson. Byron co-directs the extraordinary Global Flourishing Study, a $43 million global survey of what makes people flourish. First wave data from the study recently received major attention from most national media outlets.

We use data from the study in the book, which focuses on the question of religion and Christianity’s relative health in America and around the world (spoiler alert: it’s doing fine, contrary to the near-universal media predictions of doom).

I offer this review of my forthcoming books partly by way of update to my subscribers (THANK YOU for your support). But we’re also entering the summer, which is often “prime time” for writers to get work done.

Do you have two identifiable projects in your pipeline? Even if these are smaller projects (say an article and a book review), having two can provide a ready answer for what to do while you “wait” in the publishing process.

I regularly get questions about doing a Church History Ph.D. with me at Midwestern Seminary. This degree falls under the 'Historical Theology' track, and includes seminars in The Early Church, The Modern Church Era, The Reformation, The Baptist Tradition, and more.

Midwestern always finds ways to help students who don’t have an M.Div. degree to navigate admission to the Ph.D. program. Come join us!

Typically you become a writer from a position of expertise born out of graduate education, or practical experience, or both. Not that you can’t get started writing early, but it is easier to establish and sustain an audience if your experience and education matches your topic.

Someone who’s been in pastoral ministry for 20 years makes sense as an author on pastoral ministry.

Someone who has a Ph.D. in church history makes sense as the author of a church history book (often one’s revised dissertation).

Obviously some people “jump the line” by (for example) becoming a professional provocateur on social media, and parlaying sensationalism into a writing career.

Or certain academics who become ultra-inflammatory are able to write for a big audience on subjects in which they have little actual expertise. (Contrary to some academics’ impression, having a Ph.D. does not make you an expert on everything.)

But the writers you and I follow should be people who have spent years studying and/or practicing in their chosen field. They have wise expertise to share, not just loud opinions.

But all writers have to start somewhere. It is easier now than ever to get started on public writing. But you do have to get started, if you hope to develop even a modest-sized writing platform.

What should aspiring authors do? Here are a few tips:

Start a blog or a Substack. To be an author, you have to write things that are publicly accessible. Beginning with publishing a book is not feasible for most people who are just getting started. (Self-publishing a book is not a good option for most aspiring writers, as most of those books sell few to no copies and are of dubious quality.) But writing at a blog or at Substack is feasible for anyone, and it is free.

I’m not persuaded by people who say “I want to be a writer” but who also say they don’t have time to write posts at a blog or a Substack. If you can’t produce a 1000 word post once a month, how are you going to produce a 100,000 word book or dissertation?

Good writing requires practice, editing, and discipline. Get started now with the ways that you can write. Share your posts with your friends, and on social media. Commit to doing a post on a regular schedule (once every two weeks?) for six months. Re-evaluate at the end of that time period. If you can’t do that, I’m not sure why you want to be a writer.

Slowly expand to relevant websites or publications in your field. Journals and websites, especially smaller ones, are often open to having new authors write book reviews or similar pieces for them. Turn connections in your field, or ones from social media, into opportunities to write beyond your blog or Substack.

You will have a better chance of placing pieces if you have some job experience and at least a modest social media presence. In other words, a niche journal or ministry website might not publish a random person, but they might accept a piece from a person who has several years of relevant experience, a Substack with 500 followers, and 1000+ followers on their primary social media accounts.

Consider a doctoral program. Depending on the type of program, lots of doctoral students do their degree for professional advancement and/or personal edification. Such students might not have publishing ambitions, and that’s fine. Not everyone needs to publish!

But if you are doing a Ph.D., that generally implies you’re writing a dissertation. And if you write a good dissertation, you should think about trying to publish it as a book, or at least publishing articles from it.

One of the hardest things about “writing a book” is that most people do not have the drive, know-how, or structure in their lives to actually produce a book-length manuscript. A doctorate ideally provides you the know-how and structure to do just that. (You will need to supply the drive yourself!)

If you do have publishing ambitions, you need to be very selective about the program and prospective adviser you choose. Does he/she do the kind of publishing you want to do? If not, why would you choose that program?

For example, our Ph.D. program at Midwestern Baptist Seminary has an exceptionally strong roster of publishing scholars in areas including biblical studies and church history. I encourage you to check it out and apply if you have interest in doctoral work.

I have doctoral students in Historical Theology/Church History working in topics including Baptist churches and elder leadership; missions to Native Americans; Baptists and modernist thought; Southern Baptists and the “Lost Cause” of southern/Confederate identity; conversionism vs. the social gospel in missions; Baptist reactions to World War I; the SBC and post-World War II cultural engagement; sacramentalism in the Second Great Awakening; and other topics.

I mention this both to recommend our program, but also to explain that most of my current students are pastors or teachers. It is exceedingly unlikely that they would write a book-length manuscript on their own time.

Working with someone like me provides them the structure, accountability, and mentoring to produce a dissertation. For some students, the dissertation is effectively a first draft of what will become a published book.

In Fall 2025, I am teaching a Master’s-level course (cross-listed for undergraduates) on the First and Second Great Awakenings.

I am also co-teaching The Baptist Tradition doctoral seminar with Dr. Jason Duesing. Check out all our Fall ‘25 course offerings at Midwestern Seminary.

“Your brothers need you to stir them up to love and good works,” James writes. “Your brothers need to meet with you. They need you to encourage them. And they need you to remind them that this life is not all there is.” This kind of friendship includes accountability, but James is skeptical of the value of men’s meetings that are based only on accountability.

About 10-15 years ago, when my kids were early school age, I realized that I needed to be more intentional about maintaining friendships, or I risked becoming isolated. I suspect that almost every American today could say the same thing. Christians also see the point of friendships. The Bible assumes that you are in vital relationships in its “one another” exhortations to love and good deeds.

But our culture is functionally and structurally anti-friendship. I don’t need to review all the reasons why, but obviously our “busyness,” media distractions, and our overcommitment to kids’ activities (sports etc.) all war against peer friendships.

I’m not quite as concerned as James about the negative influence of accountability groups, maybe because I am part of a great small group at church that includes accountability among the men (and the women).

But I heartily agree with James that long-term, we simply need peer friendships that are about companionship, Christian encouragement, and common interests. In the latter category, men often seem to do better with friendships built around shared interests in sports such as golf or fishing (include me in the latter!). But those relationships can also be relatively substanceless. What we need are relationships that are encouraging and substantial.

Here are a few pointers on maintaining peer Christian friendships for the long haul:

Think about what relationships you have that are the most life-giving. You are likely not going to have dozens of close friends, so you should give some thought to the best fit and choices. This is a two-way street - you may enjoy spending time with someone, but if he simply doesn’t have the bandwidth, you’re not going to be able to maintain a substantial friendship.

Invite that person to coffee or lunch, or whatever setting works best given your schedules. (I have several friends out of state, and one in the U.K., with whom I talk regularly on the phone or online.) This might be someone you know fairly well already, but it also could be someone you want to get to know better.

If it’s not someone you know especially well, see how it goes - did you find the conversation edifying? Or is the person negative, complaining, or (ahem) odd?

If the person has bandwidth, and talking with them proves mutually encouraging, you should schedule another meeting right away. I know this can be a little weird at first, but this is my most important ‘hack’ for maintaining relationships. Let me explain.

Lots of people intend to have close friendships, but they don’t do what it takes to meet or talk regularly. In other words, you get coffee and have a helpful conversation, but neither of you gets around to planning another meeting. Months or even years pass and you don’t actually get together again.

Or you leave the lunch and say ‘let’s do this again,’ but that intention is derailed by inaction or busyness. Or one of you says ‘let’s circle back in April and set it up,’ and you don’t.

The best antidote for these inactive patterns is to go ahead and set up the next meeting as soon as you finish this one. I typically schedule them for about 5 to 6 weeks in the future, but there could be more or less time between meetings. It seems like if you don’t meet at least 4 times a year, though, it’s hard to call it a regular friendship.

When the next meeting date comes around, you just confirm the plan the day before. I love being able to put the next meeting on autopilot, rather than trying to remember to “circle back.”

Now you may have friends that you can naturally connect with on a less structured basis. For example, it may work with a colleague who is free to check any weekday to see if you have time for lunch, if this actually results in consistent lunch meetings. But for most people, you have to plan to maintain the relationship.

One final point is that you will typically find that you have to take the initiative to cultivate relationships. It can be easy to think “am I pestering them? Am I being needy? Is this just a one-sided deal?”

Don’t let such thoughts get in your way. We live in a culture where friendship is increasingly rare. Putting some minimal effort into encouraging relationships is well worth the effort. But sometimes it will feel like work.

“Priests of History: An Interview with Sarah Irving-Stonebraker” - my latest at The Gospel Coalition.

I met Marty a few times over the years, usually at events at Notre Dame or Baylor. My most vivid memory of him was at an event at Notre Dame, probably about twenty years ago. I brought my wife along (I think there was a dinner involved). She is a science teacher and definitely not the person in the room that conference attendees would look to “network” with.

But up walks Martin Marty, who introduced himself to her with his native Nebraska accent and said “My name is Martin Marty, what’s your name?” He was delighted to find out that she was a science teacher, and he asked about her work and students.

This displayed a virtue that is quite rare among scholars - a humble interest in other people, even when it is clear that the person in question can do nothing to help you professionally. Marty was the definition of a “big deal” in terms of his c.v. and his institutional affiliation, yet he assumed that my wife might not know who he was. He knew that he was “famous” in a very narrow sphere, as even the best-known academics usually are.

Marty was phenomenally productive and disciplined, generating a mind-boggling c.v. of some 60 books, plus countless columns, articles, and book reviews. How did he do it? Dean Leuking, a Lutheran pastor and longtime friend of Marty’s, recalls that

“Marty had a well-ordered sense of time; every minute counts. He got up in the morning at 4:44 a.m. and started writing before breakfast. He was remarkably productive. He could take a 10-minute power nap and be completely refreshed.” Lueking told of a day when a caller reached Marty’s assistant at the divinity school, who explained that the professor could not be interrupted because he was working on a book. To which the caller replied, ‘He’ll be done soon, just put me on hold.’”

That kind of discipline, practiced consistently over a long life, was the key to Marty’s scholarly legacy. How wonderful that, by all accounts, his personal virtues exceeded even his productivity.

Once cheating students would have bought such a paper online, one that presumably had been written by a human being who knew something about the topic in question. Now ChatGPT will compose it for you at your convenience, even just minutes before it is due! (ahem)

As with most technological advances, teachers are just going to have to get used to the new reality posed by AI. There’s a whole literature now on best practices for using AI in courses, and how to limit the amount of cheating students do via AI.

When used well, AI-generated writing is technically correct and likely better informed than a typical undergraduate student’s paper. (As an informed non-expert on Dickinson, the experimental paper on her poetry above introduced me to some fascinating passages that would be excellent evidence in an undergraduate essay.)

But short of a “singularity” when (theoretically) AI develops independent reasoning capacity or self-consciousness, the best AI writing is going to be uninspired, because it is utterly derivative. This means that it is similar to much advanced undergraduate or early-stage graduate writing, in that it doesn’t demonstrate imagination or creativity. It just says what others have said.

Joseph Epstein recently wrote a fascinating review about AI prose at the Wall Street Journal. He pointedly observes that “a composition rendered by AI is certain to be grammatically and otherwise formally correct, lacking only in originality and an interesting point of view.”

Since we are created in God’s image, humans have a spark of creativity that AI simply can’t match. But “creativity” and “imagination” are difficult to define, and it can be hard to explain to students what exactly good writing entails beyond technicalities.

You know good prose when you see it, though, which is why it is so essential (as Epstein reiterates) for aspiring writers to constantly read excellent books and essays. As Epstein notes paradoxically, “writing cannot be taught but it can be learned.”

It reminds me of a student who asked a professor at a U.K. university how she could improve her papers from ‘B’ to ‘A’ work. The professor, somewhat flummoxed, said that she should “just be more brilliant!” The student did not find this advice to be especially practical…

AI can and will do many things. It will inexorably get better at gathering reliable information and summarizing that information in a concise, technically correct manner. But at a basic level, it can’t move beyond gathering and collating. It can’t imagine things that no one has before. It can’t be “more brilliant.” For that, you need a creative mind.

“Thomas S. Kidd on Christian History: From the Reformation to the Present” - my interview with Nadya Williams.

Some students seem to think that ‘critical’ just means summarizing the book for 95% of the essay, and then finding one or two negative things to say about it. This model does, in an elementary way, gesture at the meaning of “critical.” A “non-critical” review is one that simply summarizes the book’s content, and it may unequivocally praise whatever the book does.

Some interpret “critical” mainly as black-and-white criticisms of issues such as factual errors. I recently wrote a review of Brenda Wineapple’s new history of the Scopes Trial, in which I unfortunately had to point out that the book misunderstood issues at the trial such as William Jennings Bryan’s view on the age of the earth. Hopefully most books you review will not contain errors like these, which are directly pertinent to the book’s arguments.

I would encourage you to be judicious in pointing out errors, however. It is boring and picky to say things like (for example) “the author failed to delete an extra space between sentences on p. 287.” If you mention errors, however, you have to be specific. It is entirely unacceptable to say “the book is marred by factual errors” but not identify what those errors are.

Speaking of boring and picky, it is not helpful to criticize a book by saying “they could have covered topic X,” unless topic X is essential information that would have changed their argument.

Most of all, students should NEVER generically criticize a book for being “boring.” As a professor, I take such criticism as a likely sign that the student is a dullard.

Finally, remember “Kidd’s rule of negative book reviews” - if you write a negative review, you are fated to meet the author in an elevator at the next conference you attend. In other words, keep in mind that there is a real person who wrote the book you’re reviewing, and in most cases they poured their heart and soul into publishing the book.

But a “critical” book review does not necessarily mean negative. It certainly does not mean that a student or writer who has never published a book presumes to lecture an author about how he or she could write a better book. Some humility is in order.

So what _does_ “critical” mean in this context? “Critical” in an academic sense means a review that draws out issues or problems raised by the book, or perhaps ones unaddressed by the author. Critical book reviews, as it were, extend the discussion started by the book’s author. Critical reviews often conclude that the book under review is fabulous, AND that it provokes further thoughts and questions by the reviewer.

A representative example of this approach is Chris Watkin’s recent review at The Gospel Coalition of Carl Trueman’s To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. [affiliate link] I provided an endorsement for Trueman’s book, and I think it is terrific. Watkin thinks so, too, but he also seeks to extend the discussion by considering some roots of critical theory that Trueman may have neglected. (Watkin is well positioned to do this, as an expert on critical theory himself.)

Watkin’s review offers a useful template for a good book review. The first thing it does is briefly review Trueman’s description of the tenets of critical theory. He does not merely summarize, but helps a reader understand the essence of Trueman’s book. Brief distillation of a book’s main points is a great service - lengthy summary is easier to do, but not as helpful to readers.

The second thing that Watkin does is to explain how Trueman critiques critical theory from a Christian perspective. This extends the distillation, not just of the story Trueman is telling, but of his argument about critical theory.

Finally, and most importantly, Watkin raises an extremely important and timely question. What should Christians think about critical theory? He explains Trueman’s answer to that question, but then offers a “caveat” or a somewhat different answer than Trueman’s. Following on his own work, Watkin argues that critical theory draws on ancient Judeo-Christian patterns of thought (concern for social justice, etc.), but has become so secularized that it has lost connection to redemptive aims.

Watkin concludes that Trueman’s book offers a “profound and valuable critique” of critical theory, but that he thinks Trueman’s analysis would profit from considering critical theory’s biblical roots.

The components of this book review, then, are 1) distillation of content, 2) explanation of argument, and 3) commentary on what the argument might miss or neglect. This is not the only way to write a critical review, but it is a classic model and a good one to emulate.

“With God on Our Side: The Dangers of Claiming Providence” - my podcast with The Postscript.

Matthew Walther’s column about reading a hundred pages a day got me thinking about this habit for the first time. I can reasonably assume that readers of my newsletter like the idea of reading more. And there’s nothing better than holding yourself accountable to a tangible daily goal for making consistent progress. Should you add a daily page count to your daily word count?

The answer for me is “no,” but it is an appreciative no. The reason why is that my professional reading needs are difficult to define by page counts. And my personal reading wants are eclectic and varied by style of reading - most obviously, by the difference between reading print/e-books and listening to audio books.

The great exception in tracking reading is a daily Bible reading plan. I absolutely want to be reading the Bible every day, and I do so through the use of a yearlong Bible reading plan. I use a Bible app and the ESV 1 year Bible reading plan, although recently I have been reading a physical copy of the Bible, just because I like separating this reading from a device.

But as far as reading a hundred pages a day, in a professional sense the daily writing word count is more pressing. It is far easier to segment my writing into professional rather than personal goals. I do virtually no writing for personal edification; I do a load of reading for that purpose.

However, I love the principles behind the daily reading goal. One is that we have to constantly train ourselves to read instead of waste time on social media, phones, Netflix, or whatever else sucks up our “down” time. Think about training yourself to open a book instead of picking up your phone in life’s “in-between” moments.

Another reason I love the daily page count is that it is far better than a goal to read X number of books a month. The reason why is that reading a 1500 page book is just as valuable as reading a 100 page book (all things being equal), and we shouldn’t penalize ourselves for reading War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. Daily page counts reward progress in long books just as much as short ones.

Personally, my favorite suggestion Walther makes is to keep a record of all the books you read. This is such low-hanging fruit that I am embarrassed that I have not done it before, but I started this habit around Thanksgiving and I am up to 11 books. I find this incredibly motivating!

There is a question, however, of what counts as “reading” a book. I do not believe that “reading” a book requires reading it word-for-word. This is especially the case for nonfiction. For example, yesterday I read a biography of the notorious Missouri “bushwhacker” William Quantrill.

I used the standard approach I use for most nonfiction books. I am reading it for pleasure and personal interest, but I don’t need to know the nitty-gritty details of (for example) Union troop movements in Missouri during the Civil War. So generally I read the introduction closely, then read the first sentence of each paragraph, unless the author starts talking about something I find especially interesting (for example, things that were happening in Kansas City).

If I had to read the book word-for-word, it would probably take me three times as long to read it, which would be fine, but I just don’t need to do that and I like finishing the book in one day. Audio books virtually require you to read word-for-word, which is also fine, but sometimes I do fast forward through books that are tediously detailed. I find that I need to read fiction word-for-word, because I lose the narrative if I try to skim.

All that to say that I endorse a variety of reading modes, and variety will undoubtedly help you read more. But if you are going to commit to a daily page count, you would need to determine how you count skimmed pages, audiobook pages, etc.

I am hopeful, however, that my new habit of recording the books I have read is a tiny tweak that will pay big dividends this year. If I keep it up I at least will have a much clearer sense of how many books I read in 2025.

“Jimmy Carter’s Most Perplexing Legacy” - my column at The Dispatch.

“The Beechers: A Cautionary Tale for Christian Activists” - my review at TGC.