This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
I told all of you that the weeks from mid-August to mid-September would be kind of sporadic here, because my travel schedule right now is insane. But I think your patience will pay off, because I’ve been working on some huge projects—some I can tell you about now and some I’m not allowed to until just a little bit later.
I can now say that I am working on a new book, Hope Against Hope: Reclaiming Sanity and Meaning in an Age of Anxiety and Emptiness, with Nelson Books. I am really, really excited about this because it’s a lot of things that I’ve been wanting to say for a long, long time.
Like every other book I’ve written, it is grounded both in the conversations I’m having with people right now and what I see coming over the horizon, both in terms of challenges and possibilities. It’s about where I see the world heading and what we are called to do about it and through it, especially when the words Christian and hope seem to have lost their meanings. I have also signed a contract for another book, which I’m not allowed to talk about yet, but will as soon as I can.
Like everybody, I go through fallow and dry times. But looking back, I can see that all kinds of ideas were coming together under the surface during those times that I wasn’t aware of. Then those ideas tend to come erupting to the forefront seemingly all at the same time.
It’s exciting for me, but also frustrating, when I have so much I want to say and create and don’t know how to get it all done. That has all ramped up lately. It’s the good kind of frustration where I am in a “flow” of creativity and want to keep it going, rather than stop-start-stop-start.
In addition to my regular column and weekly essays, the podcast has grown beyond what I can handle in ways that are surprising to me. We celebrated over a million listens this month, and I’m kind of stunned.
I started that podcast (originally called Signposts, which I prefer, but I lost the argument) as a kind of side conversation, back in the ERLC days, building off of The Cross and the Jukebox show from even further back in the Southern Seminary days. I thought it would be a place where a few people could listen in on conversations I wanted to have. It’s expanded far beyond that—and I am having fun with it while also frenetically trying to keep up.
We have some interesting new avenues for the show on the way—including one that, if it works out, will cause me to jump up and down with excitement, and I mean that literally. So stay tuned on that.
Plus, we have some fun new projects planned in the Resources area that I also can’t talk about yet, and I am trying not to leak them out to you because they are going to be really, really fun for me.
A few years ago, Tim Dalrymple asked me to take the title of editor in chief here at CT, and I said I would for a little while until I could cultivate somebody who could do (and enjoy) the parts of that that I hate. I said to him, “I’m a writer, not a meet-er.” I thought the person I would cultivate would be a younger journalist who is a news journalist, which I am not, but who would need some seasoning in theology, ethics, and cultural analysis. And then God sent me Marvin Olasky.
For those of you who don’t know Marvin, he was the titanic editor of WORLD magazine for many years, and his blood type is ink. I would read WORLD every week back when it was in its golden age, and I would quite often open up an issue with a low whistle and comment, “I can’t believe he is courageous enough to take on that.”
I wouldn’t have known then how to describe it, but after seeing lots of hacks for whom truth is a brand rather than a way, I do now. He was, and is, someone who sees truth as an objective reality outside of us, not the sum total of opinions of whoever is on our “side” (whatever our “side” means for people who say that Jesus is Lord).
I finally convinced Marvin to take the EIC parts of this role so I can expand all this writing and speaking without collapsing. I was able to sell it to the powers-that-be at CT by noting that they could get the best of both of us if they let me have it this way.
It took a while (over a year and a half), but I was persistent, and they are now allowing me to hand the day-to-day to someone who has proven he can not only do it but can change the world (no pun intended) as he does. And I now have the title I want: editor at large and columnist, the language used for Philip Yancey during the days when his writing changed my life as a teenager.
The only thing that will change is that I will have the time and space to “create content” (to use a phrase I hate). That means that I will be able to write to you every week without wondering every Tuesday whether it is going to get done in time to send it, and we’ll be able, finally, to expand out the podcast offerings in ways some of you have been asking to happen. Jiminy Cricket is on my shoulder telling me not to give away some surprises that I’m excited to show you, since I don’t yet have permission to unveil them, so I will listen to him.
One of the passages of Scripture that’s been on my mind a lot the last decade is this one, from when King Jehoiakim burned the scroll on which Jeremiah had been dictating. I’m no Jeremiah, but I’ve known a Jehoiakim or two. And I identify less with the “weeping” side of Jeremiah than with his description of himself as having a fire in his bones (20:9) to express what he knows God has given him to say.
That’s why I always smile when I read the matter-of-fact way the Book of Jeremiah puts it: “Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire. And many similar words were added to them” (36:32, ESV throughout).
“And many similar words were added to them.” In a time when people are scared to say what they really think, I am firmly convinced that that’s what is needed from those who believe that this stuff really matters. And I do.
So, let’s do it—and bear with me as the scattershot appearance of my newsletter and the rerun or two of the podcast comes to an end, and I can whirl out the stuff I’ve been planning for y’all. This is the new phase I’ve been praying for, and I’m excited to get to be able to be both Moore and to the point!
Russell Moore is Editor-at-Large and Columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
