I’ve been taking an in-depth novel marketing class, and it’s made me rethink just about everything. Especially why I started this blog in the first place. Originally, I was told that if I wanted to sell novels, I needed to build an audience—and blogging was a good way to do that. That advice wasn’t wrong, but I’ve learned it was incomplete. Writing about stories doesn’t automatically mean you’re building the right audience for the kind of novels you want to write. I’ve been growing an audience, but not necessarily one aligned with my long-term fiction goals.

At the same time, I’ve had to be honest with myself about bandwidth. Writing a novel—really writing one well—while also marketing it and building the right audience can easily be a full-time job. Novel writing has always been my first love. I’ve written five novels (received professional feedback 3 of them), and I’m now working on a sixth. This one is where it feels like everything I’ve learned is finally coming together.

So what does this mean for the blog?

I’m not giving it up, but I am pressing pause for a bit. Even before the marketing class, I was already thinking about a rebrand. The name Box Hill Talks comes from a Jane Austen reference and dates back about six years, when I was mostly writing Austen-inspired pieces on a Squarespace blog. Over time, the blog has evolved, but the name hasn’t quite kept up.

Ironically, as I refocus on building an audience for my novels, I may circle back to a more Jane Austen–inspired direction—just under a clearer, more intentional name with more specific application. More on that later.

For now, this blog will be on hold while I launch a new one. I plan to transfer all subscribers over and keep it on Substack, so your experience won’t really change. I do plan to return to this style of writing in the future—I just need to pause and reset.

The new blog (and a new website, hopefully) should launch in the next couple of months. I know this shift may not be for everyone, and that’s completely okay. If you choose to unsubscribe, no hard feelings. Once the new direction is more defined, I’ll share more details.

I’m so grateful for all my readers and will be back in touch as soon as I can, so stay tuned!

Selfie Tales

The study of literature pivoted drastically in the 20th century. Historically, literature was studied for its own sake. Lessons revolved around understanding plot, characterization, symbolism, and metaphor. By contrast, modern education largely emphasizes practical applications. For example, a study of Jane Austen, instead of delving into character foils, patterns, and themes, might become a discussion about gender inequalities, racism, or just about anything else.

In her Substack Pens and Poison, Liza Libes discusses how studying English at Columbia University “poisoned her love of literature”:

Instead of appreciating the great works of literature in their entirety…Columbia students and professors alike seemed to have made it their mission to put down the great writers of the Western canon.… And, if on the rare occasion, you were allowed to enjoy Shakespeare and his brilliant company of poetic masterminds, you could only do so through the lenses of Marxist, postcolonial, or gender theory.¹

This is the result of an intentional educational shift ­toward student-response-centered classrooms, in which teachers are encouraged to use children’s natural reactions to guide questions, prompts, and future reading experiences. They argue that when teachers focus too heavily on the texts themselves, they risk overlooking the value of students’ voices and interpretations. One advocate of this educational style even argued that students should drop Shakespeare and instead “go to football stadiums, look to grime music and graffiti artists.”²

There has been a growing push to align language arts curricula with the digital world, encompassing a focus on “media education” at the expense of any literature.³ “Old” books often don’t even make the cut, or when they do, students learn nothing, or very little, about the books themselves. Literature in particular is no longer regarded as a source of authority but has instead become an excuse to discuss current affairs or social problems arising at lunchtime in the school cafeteria.

The desire to make learning applicable is natural. Perhaps a more important question is what this approach accomplishes. It used to be that “the purpose of education [was] to push students forward in the world rather than making them static,” but some argue that this goal of making lessons “relatable,” rather than opening new worlds to students, “smothers children’s aspirations.”⁴ They are not encouraged to fully absorb all that a book might reveal. Rather than stepping beyond their own era, cultural norms, and limited perspectives, they are kept tethered and constrained. Instead of experiencing the world through a different set of eyes, they remain locked within the confines of contemporary viewpoints. Books are no longer windows to a bigger world but instead serve only as mirrors, reflecting back the myopic view of one’s own face.

“Using” Instead of Receiving

In his book An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis addresses this dramatic shift in education, pointing out that students are no longer encouraged to “receive” books simply as they are. Instead, they are taught to “use” them as you might use a bicycle or a train ticket—take what you need and then toss it. “Hence literature becomes for [modern teachers] a religion, a philosophy, a school of ethics, a sociology—anything rather than a collection of works of art.”

Lewis refers to this as “mirroring,” when readers look inside the pages of a book and only see their own selves reflected back. The books become small and the reader, big. The net result is that both the books and the students become small. As a result, the entire world becomes small, flat, uninteresting, and irrelevant.

The Paramount Self

This shift in literature studies is but one aspect of a broader focus on “self” in today’s classrooms through a hyper-preoccupation with self-esteem and inner feelings. In her book Bad Therapy, Abigail Shrier cites multiple stories demonstrating how public schools have basically become therapy centers in which school counselors hold all the authority, often completely shutting parents out. In many cases, entire lessons and curricula train students to think of “inner happiness” as their highest goal. Setting aside the fact that such a goal is unattainable, there is a far greater problem occurring across classrooms today.

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Snow White Goes Woke

In March 2025, Disney released a live-action version of Snow White that was a colossal failure. It seems the creators wanted to somehow not offend conservative-leaning American families while also ditching “regressive” sex stereotypes and smuggling in plenty of feminism and Marxist undertones. These conflicting goals generated many controversies leading up to the film’s release, as well as many rewrites and reshoots. The result became a botched, hacked, mutilated recipe of vague, woke goo.

Throughout the film, Snow frequently gazes at her reflection in the well while her stepmother, the queen, likewise gazes at her own reflection in the magic mirror. Snow’s reflection harkens back to her memory of her father, however, capturing her desire to be like him one day—which sounds nice until you discover that her goal of being like her father has less to do with filial loyalty than might appear. Instead, the film portrays Snow as almost constantly focused on “self.” She is ostensibly portrayed as a victim at the start of the story when she is forced to be a servant in her own house (as in many other fairy tales). Yet this motif conflicts with her own words, such as those in her opening solo in which she declares herself “someone no one needs to save.” This dependence on self builds up to her pivotal moment, when, on the cusp of returning home and reclaiming her throne (after her forgettable, non-threatening love interest sort of saves her), she proclaims: “Time to rise and lift my head, time to lead and not be led.”

This represents a dramatic departure from the Grimms’ version of Snow White. The contrast provides striking insight into our times and is especially ironic in that the original Snow White spoke with scathing insight against this very thing. In the beginning of the Grimms’ version, Snow White’s mother looks through a window and wishes for a daughter with a pure soul. In fairy tales, a character looking through a window encapsulates wisdom. It embodies someone who can “see” with greater perception out into a wider world. By contrast, Snow’s stepmother, the queen, looks at her own reflection in a mirror. When most people read Snow White or watch the film, they assume that this older woman was simply vain—today’s version of a washed-up, botched, Botox babe. While she certainly is that, there is far more going on.

Classicist and literature teacher Angelina Stanford notes that Snow’s stepmother looked at herself at appointed times. She spoke to the mirror in a call-and-response pattern. In other words, she conducted a sacred liturgy. She was in love with her image, ceremoniously uniting herself to it.5 When the wicked queen looked at the world every day, she saw only herself reflected back. Life, in all its fullness, for her, only offered a mirror. As a result, she courted and eventually succumbed to death. The story echoes that of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected in the water, and, in his desire to unite with it, fixated on it and drowned.

But it goes even deeper. Stanford explains that the Grimms’ version is actually a retelling of the fall of mankind, recalling the garden narrative. It represents a love of one’s own image, a love of self. God made man in his image, but Adam and Eve fell in love with and worshipped their image instead of the Creator. The proffered apple in Snow’s temptation was intended to represent an image of herself with its “red cheeks.” In taking it, Snow was committing the same sin as her stepmother—and as Eve. C. S. Lewis says, “This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God, and wishes to exist ‘on its own.’”

By setting “true love” as the only standard for breaking the curse, Disney’s 1937 version didn’t get this right either. When Snow falls into a deathlike sleep, she pictures all of us in our state apart from Christ. She needed saving—not by a hot guy followed by a Pinterest wedding, but by a sacrificial Christ figure.

Snow White (2025), far from retelling the original version, might be considered as directly flipping it on its head. Instead of maintaining the original themes intended to warn against the worship of self, it was rather a celebration of me-centered self-adulation taken to its fullest extent.

iPhones & Magic Mirrors

For many children today, their daily lives involve an almost constant fixation on self. iPhones, parents, teachers, and even many churches curate the world such that it continually, morbidly places the child at the center. Children are encouraged to look out at the world and, like the wicked stepmother, only see themselves reflected back.

This self-fixation has not created an emotionally sturdy, confident, or happy generation. Teachers and professors everywhere are crying out against the effects of cell phones and “me-centered” education. As one frustrated teacher put it, today’s students

have no ability to be bored whatsoever. They live on their phones. And they’re just fed a constant stream of dopamine from the minute their eyes wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night…. When you are standing in front of them trying to teach, they’re vacant. They have no ability to tune in…. They’re not there. And they have a level of apathy that I’ve never seen before in my whole career. Punishments don’t work because they don’t care about them. They don’t care about grades. They don’t care about college.6

A record number of students are checked out, stressed out, and disconnected. Perhaps this is no great surprise. A life centered in the self is vain, circumscribed, and one-dimensional. Old stories tell us that this kind of life is a chasing after death. When we simply, as Lewis said, receive books just as they are—when we stop using them or trying to do something with them—the world transforms from a mirror to a window.

When we leave books alone, miracles occur. The world becomes rich, broad, dangerous, sublime, and mysterious. When books are big, and we are small, the result is that the world becomes bigger… and we become bigger people.

The most significant claim I made previously pertains to the role of the hero in fairy tales. Traditionally, the fairy-tale hero is not someone extraordinary or exceptional. In one crucial sense, the hero is “nobody special.” He or she has real faults and foibles—weaknesses that make them recognizable and relatable. What makes the hero heroic is not self-focus or self-celebration, but the willingness to stand against evil and sacrifice for others.

For four seasons, Stranger Things largely honored that tradition (with some exceptions). Season 5, however, marks a significant shift.

A Change in Emphasis

Before going further, a brief warning: there are mild spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen Season 5, nothing here should completely ruin it. But there, I warned you.

One of the most noticeable changes this season is the centrality of homosexuality from the very first episode.

In previous seasons, this agenda existed but remained peripheral. I didn’t like it, but the story itself was not driven by it, nor was it presented as the central lens through which the characters and conflicts were understood.

In Season 5, that changes dramatically. The theme moves from the margins to the center, shaping the emotional arc of the story in a way that feels fundamental rather than incidental.

Will, in particular, takes on a much more prominent role. His storyline revolves around whether he can accept himself as a homosexual. Robin’s love life, as a lesbian, also becomes much more central. She functions as a pop-therapy mentor for Will—someone who has already “done the work” of self-acceptance and can now guide him through the same process.

Robin encourages Will to love himself and to recognize that he already has everything he needs. She reflects on her own childhood, remembering that she was once happy, and concludes that nothing about who she is now needs to negate that. Redemption, in this gospel message, comes from believing in yourself, loving yourself, and remaining true to yourself.

This message is set against the villain Vecna, who is portrayed as mounting an attack not just against children, but against childhood itself.

In other words, rather than continuing to tell a fairy tale in the grand, classical tradition that defined earlier seasons, Stranger Things gives way to the same familiar narrative sludge American storytelling has been recycling for years. It’s all too recognizable—predictable, uninspired, and ultimately forgettable.

Will’s struggle is entirely internal. Yes, his life was obviously shaped and hurt by monsters. But that’s really not what his season five battle is about.

The Internal Struggle: Will vs. Eleven

At this point, an important question arises. Isn’t this kind of internal struggle a legitimate and even necessary part of storytelling? Shouldn’t characters wrestle with inner demons alongside external threats? Shouldn’t healing and redemption sometimes come through love?

The answer is yes—but I would argue that this is not actually what happens in Will’s story, even though it closely imitates that pattern. Interestingly, Stranger Things already told a much more compelling version of this kind of internal battle with Eleven.

In Season 4, Eleven undergoes a profound internal crisis. Early in the season, she violently attacks another student from her school. This forces her to confront a terrifying possibility: what if she is no different from the monsters she’s fighting? This fear is reinforced by fragmented childhood memories of standing alone in a room filled with the mutilated bodies of other children. She can’t remember what happened, and she wonders if she herself was responsible.

Here, the show makes a clear moral distinction. Eleven’s actions against the other student—though understandable and provoked—are never portrayed as good or healthy. Her past trauma is connected to real evil, inflicted by a genuine villain. It was never a question of simply accepting herself as someone who really did kill those children.

Her journey requires discernment: she must look back, sort out good from evil, and recognize where she has been wronged and where evil has acted through others.

Will’s story lacks this moral clarity. In his case, there is no evil to confront within. There are no monsters in his heart, no actions that require repentance or moral reckoning. His struggle is entirely self-contained: he simply needs to accept himself as he is. Love and acceptance, in this framework, come almost exclusively from within.

Love That Redeems

This difference becomes even more striking when we look at how redemption and healing occur for each character.

Will’s redemption comes through self-love alone. He must affirm himself and embrace his identity. That affirmation is presented as both necessary and sufficient.

Eleven’s redemption, by contrast, does not come from learning to love herself. It comes from receiving love—specifically, the love of a true father figure. Hopper replaces the false father who raised and abused her. Healing arrives not through self-acceptance, but through a rightly ordered relationship that restores what was broken.

Notably, this fatherly love is entirely absent from Will’s arc.

From Self-Sacrifice to Self-Celebration

The specific focus on homosexuality is not incidental here, but it also points to something broader. It’s not the point, and it is the point.

Long before the homosexual agenda became prominent in American storytelling and education, there was the self-love and self-esteem gospel message. It came from books, movies, television shows, and most of all, public education and churches. That framework—where personal affirmation becomes the highest good—provided the soil from which the current cultural narratives emerged.

The early seasons of Stranger Things celebrated a very different vision. They honored the “nothing special” hero: the everyday Joe, ordinary people with limited abilities, real flaws, and a willingness to give themselves away in order to protect others. That is the pattern Eleven follows. It is also the pattern that almost every prominent character follows. None of these characters thinks of themselves as special—and that is precisely what makes them heroic.

Will’s story reverses this logic. His sense of being special, his need to affirm his own importance, becomes the crux of the narrative. I am not arguing that anyone should hate themselves. The point, rather, is that the story is no longer about self-forgetfulness and sacrifice. It is about turning inward and making the self the final goal.

This inversion becomes especially clear when Will gains new powers immediately after embracing this message of self-love. His “resurrection” into greatness comes not through sacrifice, but through affirmation.

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The Older Story We’ve Forgotten

The Christian pattern—so deeply embedded in classic storytelling—runs in the opposite direction. The way up is down. Glory comes through humility, not self-exaltation. Individuality and true significance are discovered not by fixating on the self, but by giving the self away.

C.S. Lewis illustrated this in The Horse and His Boy. Throughout the story, the horse Bree is obsessed with himself, oscillating between pride and self-loathing. He has been flattered as a great war horse and wants to maintain that high status once he finally gets to live in Narnia.

But the hermit tells him that if, when he enters Narnia, he simply doesn’t think of himself as anything special, he’ll do very well.

It’s not that there is no glory, but the glory comes through an entirely different pattern. A pattern the world doesn’t understand. A pattern Will doesn’t understand. Will’s gospel message is that the way up is up. That the way to glorify the self is to glorify the self. To start, begin, and end with the self. But this is a gospel of death.

To quote Eugene Terekhin as he describes Dante’s path through Hell as a path we must all take:

“We must confront all the beasts lurking in our hearts and eventually reach the frozen lake Cocytus where Lucifer is imprisoned. Hell’s lowest point serves as a pivot. Beyond that point, the ascent begins. By going down you go up. The lesson of medieval labyrinths is this: when you believe you are ascending you are actually descending. When you feel you are descending, you are actually ascending.”

Season 5, unfortunately, abandons that vision in favor of one of the most familiar, tired, and clichéd patterns in modern American storytelling. In doing so, it doesn’t just change the show’s message—it undermines everything that once made Stranger Things so powerful.

Am I still going to watch it? Yes—and I’ll even watch it with my kids. But it will require, and already has required, a lot of conversation. You can teach far more through the medium of stories than through straight didactic teaching. I’d like to say more about how to watch or read stories with your children when the messages are, at best, mixed. That deserves its own article, though realistically it won’t be published until sometime in January.

Stay tuned!

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Over the last decade, Stranger Things has earned its place as one of the strongest modern American shows. The creators have proven again and again that they know how to tell a story. Season 1 was good, and instead of hitting the usual second-season slump, which they ought to have done, the show only sharpened its momentum. They built on what worked and made it better.

Last week, I promised an article about whether Season 5 holds up against the first four seasons. I did write that article—and it turned into 4,000 words! Even the most enthusiastic readers probably aren’t ready for that on a Friday afternoon. So this week is part one, and next week will be part two.

For now, I want to look at what the show has consistently done well. This isn’t a deep dive; each of these points could be its own article. Think of it as a high-level snapshot of the ingredients that made Stranger Things such a standout series.

1. The Story: Reliable, Tight, and Satisfying

The showrunners know their recipe. Every season follows a familiar structure, but it never feels stale. Each episode moves with intention. They’ve found a formula that works, and they use it without slipping into formulaic storytelling. Formula that’s not formulaic. That’s what good storytellers do.

2. The Characters: Community First

I don’t love every character decision the show has ever made, but I want to zero in on two things the show gets absolutely right.

They show characters in community, not isolation

This is a huge departure from the standard American storytelling model, which obsessively focuses on individuals. In most shows, the individual is the story; everyone else is support furniture.

Stranger Things flips that. Every character is defined within a larger community—friends, families, neighbors, adults, teens, kids. It’s not that there are no individual strengths but the individual strengths only make sense because of the roles they play within this web of relationships.

The show is cross-generational

This might not sound like a big deal at first, but it’s incredibly rare in modern stories. Most stories pick an age group and stick with it. In a kid’s story, if adults appear, they are often background noise.

In Stranger Things, adults matter. Teens matter. Kids matter. Their storylines overlap and depend on one another. It’s one of the reasons the show feels richer and more grounded than most things in the mainstream.

3. The Fairy-Tale Layer

You knew this was coming.

Again, there’s a lot to say here, but I’ll stick to two essentials.

The Upside Down is always right there

The show presents the Upside Down as something that exists alongside normal life. It’s as real as Walmart. It frames the tension between hyper-rationalism and an enchanted world of unseen realities, creating a believable balance.

Honestly, I think the iconic ‘80s nostalgia is so successful because of the fact that it’s set against this fantastical backdrop. The ordinary becomes charming within the context of the extraordinary.

A world with heroes and villains

Every season opens by naming the villain through a D&D motif—clever, simple, and symbolic. But beyond that, the show treats evil as real. Something is out there in the dark, and it won’t stop unless someone stands up to it.

Which leads to the heart of this article of what I want to highlight.

4. The Heroes: Classic Fairy-Tale Heroes

This might be the most important point.

The heroes in Stranger Things are classic fairy-tale heroes. In fairy tales, the hero is never special in the way modern stories think of “special.” They’re ordinary, everyday people who could be any of us. That’s why an elf never could have taken the journey to Mordor. It had to be a hobbit.

It’s not that the hero does not have skills, strengths, and resources. But those traits sit inside the framework of normal life. They’re relatable. They have flaws. They make mistakes. They’re brave because they have to be, not because there is something innately special about the individual.

This ordinary-hero approach is a big part of what makes the early seasons work.

A Hint at Season 5

And here’s where I’ll leave you for now.

In Season 5, I think the show breaks from this pattern—and not in a good way.

We’ll talk about that next week. Stay tuned for part two.

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My goal has always been to post something every Friday. Recently, though, life shifted. I took on a new job as marketing and communication director at the clinic where I already work, in addition to my regular role. Transitioning into the new position took extra time, then I got sick, and of course, Thanksgiving rolled in right on top of everything. So here we are.

What to Expect Moving Forward

As I settle into my new responsibilities, I still hope to post once a week. On paper, in the practically perfect and magical world of planners and schedules, it looks possible. I love that world. It’s my favorite world. But real life may not always match it.

It is not that I will not be/have not been writing. I am not capable of not writing. I love this blog, but it is a favorite niece, while novel writing is my firstborn child. So if something writing-related has to give during a busy season, it will probably be the blog.

Novel Progress and a Publication Win

Since we are talking updates — I finished three drafts of my novel last winter and spring, took a six-month break, and am now happily swimming through the fourth draft. It is going well, and I hope to share more soon.

Another bit of good news. I recently had an article accepted for publication in Salvo magazine. It will appear in the upcoming winter issue, and I will share it when it is out.

What Is Coming Up on the Blog

Next week, I plan to break down the first four episodes of Stranger Things season five. I want to dig into whether the creators kept their strong storytelling streak or finally lost it this time around. I will also talk about how to think about the season if you have kids watching with you and how to talk about it with them.

After that, I plan to share the final article in my series on identity (started last spring!) called Who Are You? Alice in Wonderland and the Journey of the Soul in Classic Fairytales. While I am not a fan of our modern approach to identity searching, that doesn’t mean there is no search for identity at all. Classic fairytales explore this theme with a kind of wisdom we could use today.

A few other ideas in the pipeline include:

• Why You Do Not Like Fairytales and How to Fix Your Problem

• The Cynicism of Elizabeth Bennet and Why Cynicism Pretends to Be Wise but Always Points to a Deeper Gullibility

• Tips for Deepening Your Reading Life in 2026.

Thanks for Sticking With Me

That is all for now, but I hope you will stick around. There is a lot more coming.

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If you asked a modern Christian to sketch what piety looks like, many of us would picture someone alone—kneeling before a cross, reading Scripture in a quiet corner, or praying in the woods.

Many moderns disclaim any need for organized religion, claiming that they feel closer to God when they are in nature, on their own.

However, the ancient Greeks had a vastly different perspective on piety. For them, piety looked like Aeneas carrying his injured father on his back and leading his young son by the hand while fighting through the ruins of Troy. Piety meant duty, courage, and faithfulness in hardship—not private spiritual isolation.

Last week, I wrote about how individualism transformed Western society as a whole (with particular emphasis on motherhood). I’ll give a short recap here for anyone who missed it. If you have already read that piece, feel free to skip to the next section.

A Quick Recap

Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was understood as something larger than the self—revealed in creation, rooted in classical wisdom, and grounded in God’s order.

Then skepticism took center stage. Philosophers began to question whether anything outside our own minds could be known with certainty. René Descartes captured this shift with his famous line: “I think, therefore I am.” Certainty moved from God to the isolated human mind.

From there, consciousness became the measure of truth. What we perceive, reason, or feel took priority over external authority or divine revelation. This shift reoriented the entire Western mindset, placing the self at the center of understanding.

How Individualism Shaped Modern Christian Life

The church did not escape this shift. The fallout is that instead of focusing on the knowledge of God, many Christians began centering their faith on personal experience.

The result was a version of Christianity that treated theology as optional and experience as essential. The faith became, in many circles, “a leap of faith”—not something grounded in knowable truth but something validated only by personal encounters with Jesus. Testimonies replaced catechisms. Emotion replaced liturgy.

This mindset still shows up everywhere: “Don’t overcomplicate things - just live for Jesus.”

The message is that the most important thing you can do is “experience Christ.” Go on a mission trip. Chase adventure. Go rock climbing with Jesus. As long as it feels raw, real, and experiential.

This is why big tent revivals, and today, big gatherings with lights, music, and emotional energy, became more central than liturgy or doctrine. And it’s why many people question a higher form of liturgy—because modern individualism assumes something isn’t real unless you’re consciously aware of and understand it (though as many of you know, high liturgy is making a comeback with a vengeance).

If you’re thinking…. wait, isn’t there an individual and experiential aspect to our faith? Aren’t we supposed ot have an individual relationship with Jesus? Yes, of course, and I’ll circle back to this in a minute

But the long-term result of individualism has been generations of Christians obsessed with themselves.

The Fallout of Individualism

Individualism has created two major problems for Christians today.

1. We assume something isn’t real unless we’re conscious of it.

This turns us—even in our faith—into chronic consumers. Assuming our consciousness must always be at the center makes us dismiss habits, communities, stories, art, liturgies, and the providential circumstances we’re often unaware of. As Christians, we start judging everything by its outward appearance. But God doesn’t work that way.

2. We treat our feelings as automatically authoritative.

If we notice it, if we feel it, if we sense it—we assume it must be true. That assumption has created enormous confusion and instability. Our feelings assume a place of absolute authority.

And both of these ideas flow straight from individualism, not Scripture.

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The Limits of Purely Individual Experience

This doesn’t mean the individual side of faith doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. We will stand before God as individuals. We must have personal repentance, personal trust in Christ, and a personal relationship with Jesus.

Experiencing the Christian faith as an individual is not the problem. Individualism is the problem.

A different time in history -a different people - would need a very different message.

But we can’t pretend our faith is only a solo. Christianity is a symphony.

And when individual experience becomes the center of everything, we’re easy to manipulate. We assume our perceptions are neutral—but they’re not.

C. S. Lewis warned about this in more than one place. He described modern people as trusting “mere stream of consciousness” (Descartes again), which he argued is not neutral at all. He said that people who preferred this to old books and old learning are in the “the grip of a certain kind of realism.” But it’s a trap.

According to Lewis, it is “based on an error,” for even stream of consciousness thinking doesn’t fit this view of reality—it is heavily biased and selective, it starts and stops as selections pleases. As soon as you put it into words, you falsify it.

In a recent article, Jason Farley described what machine-like modernity has lost:

For a thousand years, the West imagined reality as a hierarchy of love and service established by God. Augustine spoke of the ordo amoris, the right ordering of love, where every creature found peace by desiring what it ought. Maximus the Confessor saw reality a liturgical dance of love. Aquinas saw nature and grace woven together in a single tapestry: the cosmos as a reflection of divine reason. There were differences of emphasis, but they all agreed that reality reflected the loving unity and joyous diversity of its creator.

S. Lewis, centuries later, called this world “a harmony, a dance, a symphony, a solemn banquet.” The stars move by love. Man’s highest calling is to join the cosmic order in reason, devotion, and self-giving love.

Closing Thoughts

I had originally planned to end this article with some practical steps—my last article, this, and the next are all drawn from a talk I gave at a women’s conference. But this article grew longer than expected, so I’ll save the practical takeaways for next time.

For now, it’s enough to recognize the cultural waters we’re swimming in. Individualism has shaped our view of truth, worship, community, and even God Himself. It has left us tossed about on the winds of conflicting emotions, thoughts, and doctrines — and unless we can name its influence, we won’t be able to resist it.

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I recently watched a viral New York Times video called “The Motherhood Penalty.” In it, a group of moms talk—often through tears—about how having children held back their careers. They describe missed promotions, smaller paychecks, and lost retirement savings.

Here are a few quotes from the video:

“I am so, so angry that after all these years, I don’t have my own Social Security credits to qualify for retirement in my own name.”

“It put me totally financially dependent on my husband.”

“My stability should not be dependent on the strength of my marriage.”

And my favorite: “I had something to give, and I didn’t get to give it.”

This last woman had given most of her life to raising children, yet summed it up by saying she didn’t get to give anything.

What stood out even more was that not one woman mentioned the welfare of the child. Not once. Children were treated like accessories—an add-on to her identity, like yoga or a hobby. It wasn’t about them; it was about her.

As unsettling as that sounds, it’s consistent with individualism. And it’s hard to imagine life outside of that lens, because individualism is everywhere. It’s the air we breathe. It’s so pervasive that we barely notice it. Trying to see it clearly is like trying to pull out your own eyes to look at them.

So the real question becomes: What does it look like not to be an individualist?

How People Used to See Themselves

Before the Enlightenment, people didn’t primarily think of themselves as individuals. They saw themselves as part of something larger—a people, a family, a church, a kingdom.

Think of an orchestra: every individual instrument matters, but the point is the concert. Your contribution must be there — but it only makes sense as part of the whole. You can’t play your part in isolation.

Now contrast that with today. A friend once told me about a church service that opened with a guy getting up on stage to play an electric guitar solo. That’s the shift—from collective harmony to individual performance.

Or think about dancing. In older literature, group dances weren’t just entertainment—they symbolized life in sync with community. That’s why it mattered when a character refused to dance, like Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Nikabrik in Prince Caspian. Their refusal revealed something deeper: they were out of step with others, and with humanity itself.

Compare that to modern dancing: purely individual, purely self-expression. That’s modernity in a nutshell.

What Changed

So what happened? The Enlightenment—and the rise of skepticism. I’ll just touch briefly on some of the philosophies that got us here.

Just as who we are personally is shaped by our past choices, who we are as a culture is shaped by the ideas we’ve inherited. We’re downstream from the thinkers who came before us.

I’ve heard it compared to fashion. Trends start on Paris runways as wild, extreme designs. Over time, they’re toned down, filtered into stores, and eventually become normal—even attractive. We adopt them without thinking.

Ideas work the same way. Tracing them back to their roots helps us see them clearly—and once we do, they lose much of their power over us.

From Knowledge of the World to Knowledge of Self

Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was seen as something bigger than yourself. You learned by studying creation, by reading, by being classically educated. But skeptics started asking: Can we really know anything outside ourselves? Does God even exist?

That skepticism culminated in René Descartes’ famous phrase: “I think, therefore I am.”

He shifted the center of reality from God to the individual mind. Knowledge was no longer something outside of us—it became whatever we could consciously perceive.

Consciousness, then, was the only thing that could be truly known. If I’m here and I can see, taste, smell, and touch, that’s all I can be sure of. I can’t even know for certain that you exist.

This shift placed reason—the mind—at the center of reality. Philosophers later called it “the Copernican Revolution of the mind.” Just as science discovered that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of our galaxy, Descartes and others claimed that our minds, not God or creation, were at the center of all reality.

At first glance, that might sound harmless—even rational. “Thinking” is a good thing, right? But it wasn’t that kind of thinking.

It rather reduced life to a series of impressions. Hence, impressionistic art: random sensory snapshots, unanchored to anything greater. You see the sunlight on the water, the trees swaying—and that’s it. That’s all that’s real.

I recently saw this captured perfectly in a TV show about space exploration. The character marveled at the beauty and mystery of the galaxies, but he happened to wear a t-shirt listing facts about the gravity levels on Mars compared to Earth.

The glory of creation reduced to a trivia fact. We can’t grasp the mystery, so we reduce it to something we can measure.

Only what we consciously know is real.

Which leads to the second result of this philosophy.

“I Think, Therefore I Am”

Focus on the second part of Descartes’ quote: I think, therefore I am.

Consciousness doesn’t just help us know facts—it invents us. I am becomes a godlike statement. My conscious self can literally invent me, bring me into existence.

That’s how you can wind up with videos like The Motherhood Penalty. According to individualism, whatever you experience is your truth, and it has nothing to do with anyone else — not even your own child.

Your experience is more than data — it defines you. If you feel it, if you want it, then nothing else is real.

That’s modernism in a nutshell.

Individualism created generations of women who live for themselves rather than laying down their lives for their children as Christ did for us. Being a mom is hard; therefore, many women see motherhood as simply one more obstacle to self-actualization.

We’re out of time, so I’ll leave it on that dark note, but don’t miss part two of my talk next week.

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Coming Next

In the next article, we’ll look at the second half of my talk: how individualism reshaped the church—and how that, in turn, has deeply influenced the way we see ourselves as Christians today. And practical tips for fighting back against individualism.

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I used to drive past a house featuring an oversized skeleton in the front yard on the way to my kids’ school. This was back in Washington State, where we’re from.

I assume the skeleton was originally purchased as a Halloween decoration. But apparently the skeleton’s owner grew attached, so it remained all year round.

The skeleton was appropriately decorated for each holiday as it passed by. When you looked at their house, it was the first thing you saw—really, the only thing you saw. It was stationed front and center like a proud declaration to all passersby.

But what did the skeleton declare exactly? What did the owner wish to say to the world with this particular aesthetic statement?

Washingtonians, in general, are not known for caring much about keeping up appearances. I’ve mentioned before that for northwesterners, practicality often trumps finery.

Yet Halloween seems to offer a dramatic exception to this rule.

When we moved to Alabama two years ago, I hoped the standards might be slightly higher. If we’re setting the bar at an oversized skeleton in your front yard all year round, couldn’t we aim one or two inches above that?

Guess what? I found another year-round skeleton in someone’s front yard on the drive to my kids’ school in Alabama.

And now, during the height of Halloween season, oversized skeletons seem to be all the rage. They’re everywhere.

To be clear, I’m not against Halloween decorations. But they do spark a deeper question.

Why We Celebrate the Dark?

Why does a culture that generally denies a spiritual or fantastical reality take such obsessive delight in celebrating goblins and ghosts?

For other cultures, celebrations mean something. What we celebrate—what we liturgically practice—has deep-rooted significance. We do it for a reason.

Again, this is not a diatribe against celebrating Halloween—a holiday inspired by what was originally Christian—but what is the reason behind Halloween mania within the broader secular culture?

Answer? Nature abhors a vacuum.

The Vacuum of Meaning

In my last article, I talked about how, as humans, we can’t tolerate a world without clear right and wrong and a clear justice system, despite what we might say. In a similar vein, I would argue that we can’t tolerate a world without a spiritual and fantastical reality, despite our flagrant materialism.

Halloween is an expression of that. Celebrating Halloween simply reveals our deep love and need for fantasy and enchantment. Many people claim to dislike fairy tales because they are “weird,” but have no problem whatsoever celebrating spiders, death, and decay.

Rationalism and Its Ghosts

Angelina Stanford, a medieval and classical scholar, often teaches on what happened with the rise of the Enlightenment and materialism. In the very height of rationalism, in which myths and fairy tales were dismissed and disdained, what did we get? Victorian ghost stories.

Hyperfocus on materialism creates its own backlash: gothic novels and ghost stories. This demonstrates that deep down, we can’t tolerate a non-spiritual world.

“Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth

Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:

All these with ceasless praise his works behold

Both day and night:”

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

The fallout of materialism is a fascination with death—with the creepy, dark, dreadful, and horrible. A Stephen King fever dream.

When we don’t tell stories about fairies, we wind up with stories about zombies. When we reject centaurs, mythical beasts, witches, and wizards, we get the walking dead.

I’m going to wrap up with a poem by G.K. Chesterton. The piece captures the wonder and mystery of a good fairy tale and also touches on the haunting sadness accompanying a people who have lost stories.

When We Went Hunting the Dragon

By G.K. Chesterton

In the days when we were young,

We tossed the bright world over our shoulder

As bugle and baldrick slung;

Never was world so wild and fair

As what went by on the wind,

Never such fields of paradise

As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men

That men should rise and ride

Making a flying fairyland

Of market and country-side,

Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,

Wings upon pot and pan,

For the hunting of the Dragon

That is the life of a man.

For men grow weary of fairyland

When the Dragon is a dream,

And tire of the talking bird in the tree,

The singing fish in the stream;

And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,

And the wonder is stiff with scorn;

For this is the honour of fairyland

And the following of the horn;

Beauty on beauty called us back

When we could rise and ride,

And a woman looked out of every window

As wonderful as a bride:

And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,

And the children cheered and ran,

For the love of the hate of the Dragon

That is the pride of a man.

The sages called him a shadow

And the light went out of the sun:

And the wise men told us that all was well

And all was weary and one:

And then, and then, in the quiet garden,

With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tail had shone

In the white road over the hill:

We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,

We knew that the sunset fire

Was red with the blood of the Dragon

Whose death is the world’s desire.

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night

That men should rise and ride,

Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest

Never for long untried;

Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,

Never in cup or can,

The death of a deathless Dragon,

That is the life of a man.

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Shows like Three’s Company, Married with Children, Friends, Modern Family, and movies like Pretty Woman, Fried Green Tomatoes, Cider House Rules, and later Maleficent and Wicked, and many more—all offered a sympathetic look at morally gray characters. Their message? Life is complicated. Ethics are situational. No one’s purely good or evil.

And at first glance, that sounds wise. Viewers were offered a picture of moral complexity—a balanced, almost enlightened perspective that taught there are no clean lines between right and wrong. The world, they suggested, isn’t so simple.

The Gospel of Moral Complexity

This idea—that wisdom means seeing the world as one big gray zone—became cultural gospel. If you can’t bring yourself to judge, you must be smarter, deeper, kinder.

I recently came across this note on Substack:

“Saying you like The Lord of the Rings over Game of Thrones is basically a self-report that you see the world in simple black-and-white terms rather than trying to grasp its complexity. It’s more about intellect than taste.”

Same sermon, new pulpit.

For the empathetic crowd, a “villain” might be a self-satisfied Bible Belt Christian handing out judgments from her armchair, or a backward, backwoods bigot with a rifle and a mean streak.

But it’s ok to judge those guys. Even for those baptized in tolerance, “judging” itself is not the problem. The enlightened still have their villains—they’ve just renamed them.

And there is a grain of truth in this position. Any idea that takes root in a culture carries just enough truth to stick. After all, no one can accuse the Bible of offering a list of wooden rules; it’s a deeply complex, often paradoxical story.

We’re All Judges Now

Humans are born judges. We are inescapably judgmental. If you don’t believe me, try not to judge me for saying that.

Here’s the point: If we stop consuming stories that teach us how to judge well, we don’t stop judging—we just do it badly. We become judgmental monsters.

In my most recent articles, I’ve argued that compassionate stories can’t exist without the presence of real evil. You can’t show mercy unless there’s something truly wrong to forgive. You can read more about that here and here.

This time, I want to take it further: stories can’t have wisdom without moral absolutes. You can’t explore moral complexity if you erase right and wrong.

But that’s exactly what we did.

From the late ’80s onward, Hollywood churned out stories with no clear villains, no real evil, and no final justice. The goal was to appear deep, nuanced, and unjudgmental. But the result wasn’t wisdom—it was a massive void. A vacuum.

And when you create a moral vacuum, nature fills it.

The Backlash: Our Craving for Justice

“Then the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no justice.” ( Isaiah 59:15).

That vacuum didn’t stay empty. It created a backlash. Humans cannot stand to live in a world without justice. This gave rise to three kinds of stories.

1. Crime and Detective Stories

Even at the height of the “gray era,” America couldn’t stop watching CSI, Law & Order, and many true-crime documentaries.

Why? Because these shows restored a closed system of good, evil, and justice. A secret American love affair carried out in broad daylight.

They wrapped moral order around us like a heated blanket on a cold night. It’s not that they lacked complexity. But there were good guys, bad guys, and a clear system of justice. The massive popularity of these stories wasn’t an accident; it revealed our deeper hunger.

2. Reality TV

Then came reality television. It didn’t set out to deliver justice, but that’s exactly what viewers used it for.

Viewers sat on their couches, and the court was in session. Contestants were praised, mocked, analyzed, and sentenced—sometimes within a single episode. People call it “entertainment,” but really, it’s an ugly outgrowth of the void—a symptom of a world starving for justice.

Reality shows are the unhealthy byproduct of that hunger. It’s what happens when we live in a world without moral order and start necessarily manufacturing our own.

3. Superhero Movies

And of course, there were the superhero stories. After decades of “complex” antiheroes, audiences turned back to fairy tales with a vengeance. Harry Potter, The Avengers, The Dark Knight—all stories where good and evil clash, and justice (mostly) wins, betraying a craving for absolutes.

The Hypocrisy of Tolerance

I want to be clear, it’s crucial to show moral complexity in some characters, but it’s a question of HOW to do it.

When we erase moral systems from our stories, we don’t get peace—we get anxiety. When our stories stop showing good, evil, and any real system of judgment, something strange happens. We start carrying that missing system inside ourselves. Because we don’t see justice in the world, we feel the need to enforce it personally.

“Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Romans 2).

Non-Christians — people who claim not to believe in right or wrong are obsessed with judging others. They do it constantly. You can see it everywhere, from Twitter mobs to celebrity pile-ons to the moral outrage of the week. It’s courtroom culture without law, without mercy, without grace… and without justice.

Vi Lyles, mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, urged compassion for Decarlos Brown Jr., the homeless man who fatally stabbed Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, saying the city shouldn’t “villainize” him but instead “do better” for people in his situation — the homeless and those who suffer from mental illness.

To some, her response appears empathetic.

But not long after, many of these same voices took a very different tone toward Charlie Kirk. That a man could be condemned—essentially publicly “executed” without a trial or a chance to defend himself, simply for his views, is the other side of that empathetic coin.

Those who preach tolerance had no trouble declaring that he deserved whatever came to him. In the courtroom of their hearts, judgment was swift and absolute—and that reaction reveals what we’ve become.

This is what “empathy” did to humanity.

The Better Way

The world thinks wisdom and compassion mean dissolving moral absolutes. But real wisdom can hold both. Real stories reveal uncompromising good and evil, while still showing sympathy, growth, and complexity.

That’s not a contradiction—it’s a paradox.

It’s wisdom that a simplistic world can’t grasp. The world insists on breaking truth into pieces—it has to be one or the other. They remove evil and call it compassion. They remove justice and call it tolerance. They remove absolutes and call it wisdom.

But the very reason stories are so powerful is that they can hold all these tensions and seeming contradictions together at once. They can both bend and have a backbone. They can show the good, the bad, and the grey without compromise.

And we are all literally starving for good stories.

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But I think the piece may have come across as if I was saying we should never tell stories from a compassionate standpoint — which is the opposite of what I meant. A thoughtful reader pointed this out and raised good points about the importance of compassion, both in Scripture and in the Christian life — even towards the antagonist.

I agree. After all, as Christians, we are all “antagonists” who have been shown compassion.

So, before I move forward with part two, I want to pause and clarify a few things.

Compassion is Assumed — The Question is How

Let me say this clearly: I assume the importance of compassion in storytelling. The question isn’t whether compassion belongs — it’s how it should show up.

Here’s the point: you can’t show compassion to anyone—good or bad—unless real evil also exists in the story. An evil that must be shown no compassion at all.

But before I unpack that, I want to make another clarification.

In my last piece, I wasn’t critiquing compassion toward just any suffering, like Jesus’ compassion for Lazarus and his sisters. That kind of compassion is never in question.

What I was addressing was a different kind of compassion — one that treats sin itself as something to empathize with. Compassion toward suffering is one thing; compassion toward sin is another.

The Therapeutic Lens and Its Limits

Here’s the issue: much of today’s evangelical gospel — even in conservative circles — tends to approach sin through a therapeutic lens. I’m not against therapy; it has its place. But I don’t think modern psychology should define our spiritual vocabulary.

When I used to write for one of the largest evangelical churches in the country (which I still deeply respect), I noticed that words like sin or repentance almost never appeared. Everything was framed in terms of “struggle,” “hurt,” “bondage,” or “brokenness.” The solution offered was always “God’s love.”

Of course, God’s love heals — but without confession, repentance, and forgiveness, that message becomes incomplete. It turns into a kind of spiritual band-aid that never really deals with the wound.

Healing, acceptance, and compassion only make sense when we acknowledge sin. From the Old Testament law and sacrificial system, to David’s confessions, through the prophets, to John the Baptist’s “repent and believe,” and Jesus’ own “go and sin no more,” to Christ’s death on the cross, the message is clear: confession, repentance, and forgiveness are central to redemption.

What Does Real Compassion Look Like in a Story?

So how do we tell stories that show real compassion without blurring moral lines?

Here’s my short answer: we can’t show true compassion unless a story also contains a fixed point of evil.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we feel compassion for Edmund’s weakness and suffering and even his darker behaviors because the White Witch exists — someone toward whom compassion isn’t invited. Or look at Boromir and Faramir in The Lord of the Rings: their arcs resonate because Sauron stands as the clear counterpoint.

That’s how God tells stories. From the opening pages of Scripture, Satan appears as a fixed point of evil. He’s not portrayed as misunderstood or redeemable in the narrative — he’s evil, period. He is not revealed to us like Elphaba in Wicked.

Alongside him are others like Judas, Herod, and most pagan kings — figures not written to evoke our compassion. On the opposite side of the spectrum, we find Jesus, Paul, and the disciples.

This contrast is what gives compassion its weight. When a story includes characters anchored at both ends of the moral spectrum—fixed points of good and evil—it creates space for everything in between. A rich canvas in which shades and gradations emerge.

As usual, Chesterton has something to say.

“The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone… Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive… his mercy would mean mere anarchy.”

—G. K. Chesterton

Why This Matters for Christian Storytelling

Many modern Christian stories skip over that contrast. Sin is softened — described as “hurt” or “brokenness.” Christians tiptoe around evil as if naming is somehow mean or judgmental. Everything becomes a matter of empathy, creating flimsy, powerless stories.

But the Bible doesn’t tell stories that way. It shows sin unapologetically as sin. It gives us characters who resist transformation as well as those who embrace it.

What does this like in a good story?

Jane Austen did this masterfully. In Pride and Prejudice. We feel compassion for Elizabeth Bennet’s flaws and growth — but that works because characters like Wickham and Mrs. Bennet stand as unrepentant foils. Their lack of change gives Elizabeth’s transformation meaning.

Honestly, I think that’s part of why Jane Austen still endlessly fascinates modern readers—we rarely tell stories this way anymore. Every one of her novels has good characters, bad characters, and dynamic characters who fluctuate within that spectrum.

Without moral contrast, compassion becomes mere sentimentalism — fit only for Lifetime and Hallmark movies.

The Fallout of the “Compassion-Only” Lens

The other idea often tied to “compassionate storytelling” is that we should never judge others. But has that teaching actually made us more compassionate people? Less judgmental?

Have all these soft, empathetic stories turned us into a compassionate culture?

That’s the question I want to take up in the next article.

For now, I’ll say this: compassion matters deeply — but it has to be rooted in truth. Real compassion isn’t afraid to call sin what it is. Without that anchor, the story we tell — and the gospel we live — offers the world nothing they can’t find in a prescription drug commercial.

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And… it was pretty disappointing.

There was a lot of talk about how to write compassionate stories — stories that empathize with characters’ struggles, stories that come from a place of understanding and emotional depth.

If you’re thinking, why is that a bad thing, stay with me.

Of course, this isn’t unique to Christian fiction. You can find this kind of language everywhere. Americans seem almost incapable of telling any other kind of story.

After all, what does it even mean NOT to tell a compassionate story? A mean one?

What Is a “Compassionate Story”?

Here’s a textbook-style definition:

“To write a compassionate story means to create a narrative from a place of deep understanding, sincere concern, and kindness toward the characters — including the antagonists. It goes beyond simply showing a character’s pain (empathy) by motivating readers to care and connect with the characters’ experiences in a meaningful way.”

Compassionate stories tend to include a few key traits (and this summary is as good as any):

• Humanity in every character. Instead of labeling characters as good or bad, the story explores the complexities of human nature — the layered motivations, fears, and flawed beliefs that drive their actions.

• Context for suffering. A compassionate story wants to understand the “why” behind the “what.” It doesn’t just show a character’s pain or mistakes but explores the personal, historical, or social forces that led there.

• A balanced perspective. Compassionate stories don’t deny the hurt caused by someone’s actions, but they aim to show the humanity behind the harm.

So, what’s the problem? Why be against that kind of storytelling? What’s so terrible about compassion?

And from a Christian perspective, shouldn’t we want to tell stories of growth, change, and redemption?

The answer touches one of the greatest misconceptions shaping us as Americans. This article will focus on the first one — I’ll address the second in my next piece — because both reflect deep errors buried in the DNA of our cultural worldview.

Or to put it more simply: we’ve got it wrong.

Misconception #1: Compassionate Stories Are Compassionate

Actually, they’re not.

Many of the qualities listed above are good things in the right context. The problem is that compassionate stories don’t do what they claim to do.

Why? Because in America, we’ve come to believe that compassion means erasing evil.

It sounds kind and gentle to tell a woman with stage-four breast cancer that she doesn’t really have cancer — that everything’s fine, that we just don’t want her to feel bad about herself. That news would definitely ruin her afternoon.

But that’s obviously not compassion. Easy to spot it with something like that, but it gets much murkier in the realm of storytelling.

The assumption behind most “compassionate” storytelling is that nothing is truly evil — there are no bad boys. Which sounds so pleasant.

When people seem outwardly bad, like Elsa in Frozen, it’s just that they’re struggling. They need love.

As Americans, we apply this logic everywhere. If a man slits a young girl’s throat on a public bus, we say what he really needs is therapy. Even prison seems too harsh.

This is the message we love to tell. It’s our cultural gospel.

Someone might argue: “But don’t characters change and grow? Isn’t it lazy writing to just label everyone as “good” or “bad” and leave it at that?”

Of course. Stories should show transformation. I’m not saying there should be no compassion for any character - no change or growth.

But what does it actually mean to offer compassion in a story?

Horizontal vs. Cross-Shaped Stories

When we deny that real evil exists, it changes how we fix problems.

Last time, I introduced the concept of horizontal vs cross-shaped stories and offered to unpack it a little more in a future article.1

In what is called a horizontal story, the character relies on purely human means to solve their crisis. Things might be bleak, they might hit rock bottom — but the solution usually boils down to some version of pop-therapy wisdom: “Love yourself,” “Believe in yourself,” “Heal your inner child.”

In a vertical story, that would never work. The character’s life must be dramatically interrupted by something outside themselves — something transcendent.

They try everything humanly possible, and nothing works.

Only then — in a cross-shaped story — does redemption come, and only on the other side of death.

Think of Edmund in The Chronicles of Narnia. His redemption only happens after a kind of tomb experience.

Flannery O’Connor got it.

Flannery O’Connor stands as one of the great American exceptions. She told cross-shaped stories — stories where ordinary people behaved badly and were confronted by extraordinary grace.

The grandmother in A Good Man Is Hard to Find isn’t a violent criminal or an out-and-out villain by normal standards. She’s just a manipulative, self-centered woman who quietly destroys her family with her words.

Today’s Christian storyteller might want to explore her childhood trauma or offer psychological context for her behavior.

O’Connor doesn’t do that. Instead, she brings the grandmother face to face with a serial killer — forcing her to see the evil in him and, horrifyingly, in herself. That’s the vertical moment — the shock of confronting real evil and realizing it isn’t just “out there.”

And in that moment, the grandmother is offered real redemption.

Flannery once wrote:

“It’s considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth and which no book jacket can do without… Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human. The kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.”

O’Connor saw that this fuzzy idea of compassion actually prevents truth-telling. Her stories use grotesque, even shocking elements to wake characters — and readers — into self-awareness.

Only when her characters faced a kind of death did they find redemption.

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True Compassion Isn’t Comfortable

When Christians tell “compassionate” stories in the modern sense, they’re simply echoing pop-therapy culture, not Scripture.

The Bible doesn’t tell compassionate stories — not the way we define compassion today. It tells redemptive stories. Stories patterned after death and resurrection. That’s the only place true compassion can exist — not in erasing evil, but in confronting it, dying to it, and finding life on the other side.

In the next article, I’ll take up the second misconception: have all these so-called compassionate stories actually made us a more compassionate culture? Spoiler: nope.

Stay tuned!

Note: After publishing this article, I have added an addendum that I hope will further clarify the point I’m trying to make. You can find it here.

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There was a theme, there were characters, there were obstacles, and it all wrapped up in clunky dialogue. But was it really a story?

That experience reinforced for me some key differences between American films and Korean dramas. Below is a breakdown of what sets them apart. I’m painting in broad strokes—of course, there are exceptions all over the place—but these patterns show up often enough that they’re worth pointing out. Nor is this list complete! I had to force myself to stop adding to it.

Distinctives of Asian Stories Compared to American

1. The Cross-Shaped Story

This one is tricky to explain, and I’ve written a separate article to unpack it that I might publish soon. But here’s the gist:

In my last article, I explained that good stories don’t look to the future or inward to the self—they look backward. But there’s another direction they also turn: upward.

American stories usually run along a horizontal line. Problems are tough, yes, but still solvable by human effort. If the character just looks inward or changes perspective, the solution appears.

Examples (taken pretty much at random):

• Runaway Bride: The girl finds true love by realizing she needs to stop being a people pleaser and find herself.

• Kung Fu Panda: The panda discovers he already has what he needs—if he just believes in himself (though I do kinda love this movie).

• The Lego Movie: The hero realizes he is special, and only then can stop Mr. Business.

• Night at the Museum 2: Happiness comes from finding what you love and doing it.

In all these, the answers were already there. Just look inside, shift perspective, dig deeper.

Cross-shaped stories add a vertical line. Characters still try everything humanly possible, but nothing works. That’s when something outside themselves interrupts—something transcendent. It’s the death-and-resurrection pattern baked into the best stories.

Sometimes this looks fantastical, like K-pop Demon Hunters, where Remy’s curse couldn’t be broken by any human means but required a spiritual sacrifice.

It doesn’t always have to be fantasy, though that’s why so many older stories lean that way—they acknowledge that we’re not alone, and that human effort isn’t enough to fix everything.

Note: I’m not saying stories need to be overtly Christian, either. In fact, they usually work better when they’re not—but that’s another discussion.

Even non-fantasy Asian dramas bring in the vertical by introducing real evil and real goodness. There’s a transcendent quality—something beyond just clever problem-solving.

2. Good and Evil

You can’t have a cross-shaped story without clear good and evil. Asian stories don’t blur this the way American ones often do. Villains are really bad, heroes are really good, and the contrast creates a vivid canvas for the story.

In fact, this clearly delineated palette is what creates the opportunity for complex characters to change from bad to good. It’s not possible without those clear definitions.

3. Hierarchy

Respect for elders is baked into Asian storytelling. Parents, grandparents, in-laws—these relationships matter. A character’s morality is often judged by how they treat elders in their family. I honestly can’t think of a drama that doesn’t show deference to elders in some way.

3. Fairy Tales

Fairy tales usually start with a broken family and end with restoration—across generations, friendships, and communities. Asian dramas work in the same way.

If it’s a romance, they’re rarely just uniting a couple; they restore relationships on multiple levels. This is also why dramas are long. It takes time to show brokenness across families, villages, even whole communities, and then bring about healing.

4. Honor

In nearly every Korean story I’ve seen, there’s an assumed code of honor. Men treat women with respect and chivalry. They honor women as women, instead of treating them like casual buddies. You don’t see the quick hugging, kissing, groping, copping a feel, and jumping into bed on a dime that’s so common in American films.

It’s not perfect, but it stands in sharp contrast to the casual, hookup-heavy tone of many American films. Which leads to my next point…

5. Masculinity and Femininity

Asian dramas haven’t been shaped by Western feminism in the same way. Men are men, women are women, and they’re not sorry about it. They don’t seem to think men need to be spineless or needlessly servile. And they clearly missed the memo that women must always be tough, edgy, kick-ass girl bosses.

Some of those trope shows up sometimes in much milder way, but overall it’s refreshing to see men act like men and women act like women. It’s a sharp contrast to so many of our gender-neutral characters, where women come off vaguely masculine, men vaguely feminine, and neither amounts to much of anything.

6. Wisdom

Because good and evil are clearly defined, wisdom often emerges naturally in these stories.

One example: In one medical drama, the hospital was on the verge of shutting down because of corrupt leaders trying to crush the protagonist. Demoralized, most of the nurses and doctors stopped doing their jobs—why bother if the place was closing tomorrow?

Seeing this, the protagonist told them that the most dangerous thing they could do against their enemies was simply to do the next small task right in front of them and do it well. (The name of this show is listed below.)

7. Rich Plots

Korean dramas often feel like novels—layered, dense, and packed with flavor. Many remind me of Shakespeare or Austen. They care about telling a good story for the sake of the story itself.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Not all asian dramas are good. That goes without saying but I’m still saying it. Some are also heavily Westernized (Business Proposal on Netflix, for example). Additionally, I have found that many of them will tell one kind of story and do it well, and then awkwardly tack on a “go find yourself” theme at the end that doesn’t fit the rest of the story at all. (I think this is probably partly to please their rapidly growing western audience, but it’s also worth noting that such messages mean something different in their culture).

• Poor naming and marketing. For whatever reason, Asians seem to struggle with naming and marketing their shows. Scroll through the titles and you’ll probably cringe—that’s normal.

• The language barrier plays into this, too, affecting both titles and captions. Take one of my favorite dramas, Dr. Romantic. At first glance—a handsome guy in a lab coat, paired with that name—you might expect something absolutely horrifying, like General Hospital.

  But here “romantic” doesn’t mean guy-girl romance. The main character never even has a romantic liaison throughout the show. Their definition of romance (explicitly mentioned in season 2) refers to the older, classic sense of the word: someone living by a higher standard of honor and chivalry.

• Editing issues. These shows are so rich, complex, deep, and layered. Because of this, they tend to run much longer, and I’ve come to think of them more like reading a novel than watching a show. The trade-off is that editing isn’t always their strength—there are often extra lines of dialogue or moments that don’t really need to be there.

• Captions. Subtitles can be a barrier. If you’re a slow reader, it’s easy to miss the visual experience while keeping up with text. This makes it hard for some people to enjoy them fully. And please don’t watch with the English voice-overs!

Where to Watch

Netflix has a strong presence in South Korea and produces a lot of dramas. The Viki app is another great source, though some shows are exclusive there.

Where to Start: Beginner Recommendations

• It’s Okay to Not Be Okay – A modern-day fairy tale. There is real darkness within the character arc, but never in a gratuitous or graphic way. I even let my 12-year-old watch it.

• Dr. Romantic – Ignore the title. It’s one of the best. Just be prepared for graphic surgery scenes if you’re squeamish. I’m extremely squeamish—I have zero desire to know what someone’s gallbladder looks like. So during the surgery scenes, I had my hands over my eyes, peeking out just enough to catch the captions, and flinching every time I accidentally caught a glimpse of someone’s stomach lining.

• Family by Choice – Only on Viki, but worth it.

• Welcome to Samdal-ri – Pure fun.

K-dramas aren’t perfect. But if you’ve been feeling like American stories lack depth or richness, they might just be the kind of storytelling you’ve been looking for. If this is your first venture into K-dramas and you decide to jump, PLEASE let me know how it goes!

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Years ago, when I was first learning how to tell stories, I went to a couple of mainstream writing conferences. The way instructors and fellow writers talked about stories struck me as odd. They treated story ideas like a bus you might miss—a bus heading into the future, and you’d better be on the right one or get left behind.

There was an obsession with trends: Are vampire stories in right now? Kids-going-to-magic-school stories? What will be hot in five years?

Some voices pushed back and said, Don’t worry about trends, just tell whatever story you find in your heart.

Either way, stories are treated like some mystical moonflower—something that might bloom in your hand if you stood in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. Try to grab it, and it dies.

And so we’ve done two things over and over:

1. Looked to the progressive future.

2. Looked inward, into ourselves.

The one direction almost nobody seems to look is backward.

And when Americans do try to look back, it’s not far enough—all we seem to see are the corpses of bad vampire novels or one more chance to squeeze out a garbagy Minion sequel.

In other words, we don’t know how to look backwards.

Back to the Classics

Every good story ever told is, in some sense, a retelling of an old story. Which means the people who tell stories best are the ones who really know how to look back.

I’ve said this before, but Harry Potter isn’t some brand-new thing that came out of nowhere. It’s a retelling of the Arthurian legend. A retelling of Dracula. A retelling of old mythologies and fairy tales. J.K. Rowling didn’t push us forward into the future or turn us inward—she saturated us in the old stories.

And that, I would argue, is exactly why it became such a phenomenon.

When people know how to retell old stories well, something strange happens: those stories suddenly become the “hot new trend.”

Another example is Stranger Things. That show drips with fairy tale tropes. In season four, Hopper even chops the head off a monster with a sword. It doesn’t get more classic than that.

It’s not that Americans never tell good stories—every now and then, even a blind squirrel finds a nut. But I’ve been to countless writing conferences, read piles of books on storytelling, and never once have I seen anyone seriously advise writers to study the classics.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is crashing and burning all around us. Almost every new release is a spectacular flop. It feels like our storytelling has run the gauntlet—and we’re out of stories to tell.

So why don’t Americans look backwards? That’s a bigger philosophical question, and I’ve covered parts of it in past articles. The short version: the stories we tell reflect our worldview.

And for specific reasons, Americans abandoned classic storytelling in favor of hyperrealistic, nihilistic tales. At one time, this was a very conscious choice. We are reaping the results of that choice.

The Secret Sauce of Korean Storytelling

But Koreans never seemed to buy into the same philosophical assumptions we did. Or if they did, you don’t see it in their stories. They just seem to like good stories. To them, stories are like food: you combine the right ingredients, you balance the flavors, and you make it good.

They’re not trying to hammer home a secular worldview. They’re trying to serve you something delicious.

And when a story is good, you feel it. Even if you don’t fully understand why. It’s like eating at a restaurant with a top-tier chef. You may not know what magic is happening in every bite—you just know it’s good. And there’s probably lots of butter.

That, I’d argue, is why Korean stories are exploding in popularity, to the point of breaking into mainstream American culture. We can all sense that something good is happening there.

But what do I mean by “classic stories”? Do they have to be fantasy? Does it just mean they have to feature a dragon? Does a monster’s head need to be choppped off?

What are the secret ingredients?

That’s where I’m heading next. I’ve been promising a complete guide to K-dramas, and it’s basically ready to go. It was supposed to be published this week, locked and loaded. But then this article came along and interrupted my carefully laid plans and shoved its way to the front of the line.

On top of that, because of the popular response, what was originally going to be one piece on K-dramas is now shaping up into a whole series—which changed what I wanted to cover in that first article.

Don’t worry—I’m not turning this into an “all Asian stories, all the time” blog. My goal is always the same: to talk about stories, period. With a constant nod to the great ones.

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I hesitated about whether to write anything about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The point of this blog isn’t to track current events or weigh in on politics. Not because I think those things don’t matter—they do.

But I see those debates as more of the “front lines,” while the real long game lies in returning to classical and biblical studies. That’s the foundation Christian civilization was built on.

Still, Kirk’s death feels like more than just a political moment. It feels like a shift in history. Ignoring it entirely didn’t seem right.

Even at my job—a very non-Christian environment where politics and religion are never mentioned—the subject bubbled up. In discussions surrounding his death, my coworkers kicked off the conversation with a nice, easy, non-controversial topic: abortion.

One was for it, one against.

One of them referenced a handful of headline-making cases that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade, cases where a woman’s life was supposedly in danger without abortion access. I knew exactly what she was talking about, because I was researching those same stories while writing for a Crisis Pregnancy Center at the time.

Just as she brought it up, my phone rang. I work as a receptionist, so technically, I was supposed to answer it.

Did I? Well… no.

I put the caller on hold, turned to my coworker, and explained that those weren’t actually abortions at all. They were incomplete miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies—tragic situations, but not abortions.

The media had simply redefined terms. They called those situations “abortions” to push the idea of a national health crisis. But if the baby has already died, it’s not an abortion. Never was.

Abortion is when a healthy baby—heartbeat, fingerprints, DNA—is deliberately ended. That’s the difference.

My coworker was surprised that the media could be so misleading. I just smiled. Oh my sweet child, bless your heart. We had a good conversation, ended on matey terms, and had a jolly afternoon working together. Which I was thankful for.

That little moment illustrates a bigger problem: the media constantly reframes the conversation. They don’t just report; they “explain” what’s really happening, shifting the narrative, conveniently slanting it. They’re doing the same thing now with Charlie Kirk—twisting his life and message, tossing out childishly simple, playground-level insults from behind the safety of a screen.

Plenty of people, like my coworker, just accept what’s said. They take the bait. That’s one way of doing it.

But conservatives can take the bait too—by staying stuck in reaction mode. Even when you see the bias and call it out, if you let the mainstream set the terms, you’re still playing by their rules.

I’ll be upfront: I’m a conservative. I never really followed Kirk closely, but from everything I’ve learned, I respect him. My son is even co-leading a club at his high school in Kirk’s honor, hoping to carry on some of his work.

What is Thinking?

Not long ago, I read a book a reader recommended, How to Think. The author makes the point that most of what we call “thinking” isn’t thinking at all—it’s reacting. He calls this “intuitive thinking”: quick judgments, instant approvals or disapprovals. It’s how political groups form their little password systems—say the right word and you’re in the club.

Code words replaced rhetoric. Insults replaced conversations. Charlie Kirk was especially adept at listening to others and engaging in respectful conversations with them. He was shot while doing just that.

The author claimed that most of us, instead of thinking, spend most of our time in what he calls “refutation mode,” just waiting to argue back. And that’s where both liberals and conservatives get hooked.

The way forward? Don’t take the bait.

Perhaps all you’ve taken away from this article is that you would never hire me as a receptionist.

But if all we do is argue against the mainstream, then the mainstream still controls the conversation. Wisdom isn’t built on letting small minds set the terms.

How do we do this? We need to learn to read the story we are in.

Words like “Fascist” and “Hitler” get thrown around a lot lately. I think most liberals would be shocked to learn what the word fascist actually means. They would be shocked to discover how closely Hitler’s beliefs lined up with their own.

Unlike those who think this way, we need to be able to see the bigger story. To identify the good guys and the villains.

It’s like when King Hezekiah was under siege from the Syrians. King Sennacherib was outside the city gates, prowling around, flinging insults at Hezekiah, the Israelites, and the God they worshiped. He was a lot like those who dance on Charlie Kirk’s grave while drinking cocktails.

But Hezekiah didn’t take the bait. He wasn’t flung into reaction mode. He was fully awake to what was going on, knew the story he was in, and trusted God.

We need to know the story we’re in.

We need to be shrewd and kind.

Or as I said in a recent talk I gave, we need to have soft hearts and tough minds.

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The heroine, Rumi, has been cursed by demons. The curse is eating away at her singing voice, which is bad because she and her trio of friends use their voices to fight back an oncoming demon army.

What makes her plight even heavier is that Rumi hides the truth from her friends. She fears they’ll see her not as a comrade but as one of the demons. One of the very ones they are fighting against. The shame isolates her, and she carries the burden alone.

(Spoiler note: Light spoilers ahead, but nothing that should ruin the film for you.)

At first, this setup might sound familiar—a girl struggling with a secret, trying to find her voice. It echoes Frozen.

Elsa, too, hid a shameful inner battle from the world. But while the two heroines’ struggles may seem parallel, the stories diverge in ways that reveal the sharp contrast between American and Asian storytelling.

Elsa’s Problem:

Elsa’s struggle in Frozen isn’t with real evil. Her “problem” is a magical ability that’s neutral at its core. Her ice powers could be used for good or harm—it’s just a matter of control.

Her journey is inward, about accepting herself and learning to channel her gift. It’s a localized, personal struggle. The stakes revolve around her and her ability to master her power.

Rumi’s Problem:

Rumi’s problem is different. Her curse isn’t neutral. It’s real evil. From the start, demons have preyed on humanity, leaving it cursed.

And Rumi is caught under this curse.

Unlike Elsa, Rumi’s problem doesn’t deserve sympathy. SHE deserves sympathy. Her demons don’t.

This is a crucial difference. American storytelling often collapses compassion into “understanding” the problem itself—treating it as neutral or even something to embrace. Frozen does this by implying Elsa just needed self-love and acceptance in order to overcome her struggles.

For Elsa, it was all a big misunderstanding; nothing was really wrong, and they just needed to love across their differences and move on.

But Rumi’s demon-problem is not a simple misunderstanding. It is destructive. Compassion toward it would leave her trapped in shame and darkness.

Some might argue it’s unfair to compare these two films so closely. After all, they’re telling different kinds of stories. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with a tale about a girl learning to master a magical power that can be used for good or evil.

That’s true—but even on those terms, Frozen falls short. Why? Because to tell such a story, you still have to assume that evil actually exists in the world.

Frozen does not.1

And as recent events remind us, evil is not theoretical. It is real.

The deeper issue, then, is that American stories project a neutral, secular world.

And Asian stories…?

Demonology and Asian Storytelling

When I first saw K-Pop Demon Hunters advertised on Netflix, I kinda knew it would be good.

Why?

Because it was Asian. And it was about demon hunting.

In Asian storytelling, demons often figure prominently. There’s an assumption that dark spiritual forces are simply part of the world.

In the movie, the demon army forms its own boy band, mirroring Rumi’s trio. Which you have to admit is pretty funny. But there’s a deeper message.

Their songs are slick, seductive, and manipulative. They look like glamorous pop idols, not monsters.

And that’s the point—evil rarely shows up looking evil.

One of the boy band songs even flaunts this twisted allure:

“I’m the only one who’ll love your sins… Don’t you know I’m here to save you? Yeah, I’m all you need, I’ma be your idol.”

The film pulls no punches. Pop music can often be fun and relatively harmless, as seen in the girl trio. But the darker side of pop music is idolatry, and the demons exploit it.

Rumi’s fight isn’t about looking inward for strength. Finding her voice. Loving herself into healing.

She can’t win that way. Instead, she must accept a spiritual sacrifice, join her friends in three-part harmony, and sing a gospel-like anthem of light defeating darkness.

Why This Resonates

K-Pop Demon Hunters is more or less a kids’ film — AND yet it features deep darkness — AND it’s Netflix’s most successful movie of all time.

That should make us stop and ask: why?

The answer: we’re starving for real stories. Stories that acknowledge evil. Stories that don’t misunderstand real sympathy. Stories that don’t reduce life to self-discovery and self-help but point toward redemption, sacrifice, and community.

There is no redemption without darkness. There is no resurrection without a tomb.

Compared to this, much of American storytelling feels like a diet of SpaghettiOs—familiar, safe, flimsy. K-dramas and Asian cinema, by contrast, often feel like a chef’s special—hearty, complex, and nourishing.

Lots of noodles.

So, Are K-Dramas for You?

If you’re new to K-dramas and curious to learn more, stick around. But before you toddle off and just start watching stuff, there are a few things worth keeping in mind.

In my next article, I’ll share a beginner’s guide—where to watch, what to start with, and why these shows may be exactly the kind of storytelling you didn’t know you were hungry for.

But even if you never watch a single K-drama, the takeaway here still matters. My goal with every article is to make it worthwhile and helpful, whether or not you’re interested in the specific stories I mention.

All good stories are fragments of the one Great Story. And maybe the reason K-Pop Demon Hunters hits so hard is that we are tasting and seeing that this great story is good.

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K-Pop Demon Hunters is officially Netflix’s biggest movie of all time. Within its first ten weeks, it racked up a staggering 236 million views—an overnight runaway success. Not bad for a film most people didn’t see coming.

And yet, on Substack and elsewhere, it has been largely ignored or dismissed.1

Maybe it’s been dismissed as one of those flash-in-the-pan teen, anime cult crazes— an “Asian-obsessed,” expression of over-hyped fandom.

Not mainstream. Not serious.

But maybe it deserves a little more serious attention.

Why the Asian Obsession?

Asian culture has been steadily climbing into the Western mainstream. Just walk into Trader Joe’s and you’ll notice that half the shelves are stocked with Asian-inspired snacks and frozen meals. Asians are fashion trend setters for the West, and K-pop music is now a worldwide phenomenon.

And then there’s Netflix these days…

Is Netflix Going All-In on Asian Shows?

Yes. Netflix has committed $2.5 billion from 2024 to 2028 to invest specifically in South Korean content. That’s not a casual bet—that’s a strategic tidal wave. South Korean titles now account for 17% of the top 500 non-U.S. titles on Netflix.

In the second half of 2024, Korean content generated 7.7 billion viewing hours, making up roughly 8% of global Netflix viewing time.

A Netflix-commissioned study found that 60% of its 280 million users have watched Korean content, with over two-thirds of American subscribers tuning in for more than two years.

I’m one of them.

Is this just a quirky pop culture phase? A boredom-fueled fascination with something “different”?

As P. G. Wodehouse said, “You interest me strangely…”

No. There is more going on here — especially when it comes to storytelling.

I would argue that this fascination is fueled by the fact that — in some ways — this is almost our first encounter with real storytelling.

Really, our first ever? Isn’t that an exaggeration? Well, ok, yes. But there is truth to it.

Despite America’s long-standing insatiable appetite for entertainment—movies, shows, thrillers, reality TV, and endless streaming—we’re not actually a storytelling culture.

America: Built on Propositions, Not Stories

The U.S. was founded not on myths but on ideas: reason, rationality, and doctrines. The Age of Reason was in full swing, and the people who built this country—much as I admire them—often held “mere” stories in disdain.2

Even our early popular novels, when they weren’t busy sermonizing, often dragged the imagination back to “issues.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a good example: a story, yes, but one that existed to preach. That tradition persists today—many of our shows and films are vehicles for an agenda first, stories second.

Which I’ve said before. More than once.

By contrast, Asian cultures have always been steeped in myths, fairy tales, and classic storytelling traditions.

In creating K-Pop Demon Hunters, director Maggie Kang intentionally leaned into her Korean roots. The film originated from Kang's desire to create a story inspired by her Korean heritage, drawing on elements of mythology and demonology.

What’s the Biggest Barrier to Asian Dramas?

Probably, well, the language. Unless you happen to speak Korean.

The biggest setback with these stories is that they're not in English. They do need to be watched with captions (I don't recommend watching with the English voiceovers. Just don’t.)

But of course, that was not the case with K-pop demon hunters. I think that's part of the reason why it skyrocketed in popularity. This quietly building subterranean world suddenly broke out in this hybrid Americanized version. It suddenly became open to the public and user-friendly.

In other words, the popularity of K-Pop Demon Hunters is NOT a one-hit wonder. It’s merely the face of an underground tidal wave.

It’s not just a good story. It’s the gateway into an entire tradition of rich storytelling.

I’m running out of space and haven’t even broached the actual film. I really, really, (really, really!) wanted to cram all my stuff into one article. But it just didn’t want to be one article.

Up next, I’ll look at a more detailed exploration of why K-Pop Demon Hunters is so good, as well as how these elements are examples of common K-drama motifs.

After that, I plan to write a comprehensive beginner’s guide to all things K-drama, where to start if you’re curious, and some critical things to keep in mind.

Stay tuned!

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1

The Honest Broker

What's Going on with KPop Demon Hunters?

KPop Demon Hunters just became the most popular Netflix movie of all time. In the first ten weeks after launch, people watched it 236 million times…

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10 months ago · 342 likes · 35 comments · Ted Gioia

After a summer break from writing, I wanted to check in with a few updates and share what’s ahead.

In case you missed it, I stepped away after burning out last spring. To be honest, I didn’t think burnout was even possible for me. Back when I was home with my kids, I remember thinking that if I ever had the freedom to just write whenever I wanted, that would be the dream. And in many ways, God gave me that.

For a while, I wrote nonstop—professionally, for my novel, for my blog. I finished my master’s in writing. When I wasn’t writing (or being a mom or wife), I was researching for writing.

I can be hard on myself. Perfectionism plus an endless workload isn’t a sustainable mix, and eventually, my mind shut down. For the first couple of months of my break, even thinking about writing made me a little edgy.

Thankfully, time off helped. Ideas started bubbling back. Not that I was ever short on them—I have folders full of notes and scraps of thoughts, plus a desktop so cluttered with “don’t forget this idea” files it now resembles bad modern art. Which makes my perfectionist side feel a little crazy.

I’m officially planning to start writing regularly again. I’m still praying through exactly what direction to take, but you can always count on the focus being on stories, imagination, and the wisdom they can teach us about faith and discernment. You won’t get articles on shopping hacks or pantry organization tips (though I could totally go there).

I also have one or two articles left to finish the series on identity I started in the spring, so those will be coming as well, just not sure when.

A Few Updates

• I recently had the privilege of speaking at a women’s conference hosted by my church. I’ll be sharing those talks here in the weeks ahead.

• I also had an article accepted by a magazine, which is tentatively scheduled to be published this winter. More details on that soon!

  This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Coming Up Next:

K-Pop Demon Hunters

For my first full article back, I’ll be looking at K-Pop Demon Hunters: why it’s become so popular, and how it ties into the larger wave of K-dramas (Korean dramas), and how to understand this phenomenon. (Hint: Asians aren’t trying to preach nihilism constantly - they just care about good stories.)

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been watching Asian dramas almost exclusively, so I have plenty of thoughts to share!

Thanks, as always, for reading and for sticking around. More soon!

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In case you missed it, after years of pushing myself a bit too hard, I’ve decided to take a break from writing this summer, aside from occasional posts here and there.

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to guest write an article for Foundation Father. It occurred to me recently that I never properly shared it here, apart from briefly linking to it in a past post. This article served as the introduction to a women’s ministry class I taught at my church this spring.

I thought it might be a timely word as we celebrate the Fourth of July. The founding fathers and early revolutionaries had a very different understanding of freedom than what many believe it to be today. They recognized that true freedom only comes through submission to the right authorities.

Below you’ll find the opening paragraphs. To read the full article, simply click the link at the end to visit the original post.

When people today hear the word submission, especially in a biblical context, they tend to bristle. Tell a modern American that wives are called to submit to their husbands or that children should obey their parents, and you’ll likely get an outright “absolutely not.”

But maybe the real problem isn’t the concept itself. Maybe we’re reacting based on a misunderstanding—specifically, a misunderstanding of what freedom actually means.

The Modern View: Freedom Without Limits

For most of us in the West—especially in America—freedom is defined as the removal of all restrictions. We think of it as doing whatever we want, whenever we want, with no interference. Any type of boundary or obligation feels like a threat to our autonomy.

So naturally, when the Bible talks about submitting to authority, to many it feels outdated at best—or oppressive at worst. But what if our definition of freedom is completely upside-down?

A Cultural Snapshot

A good example of this cultural mindset in action can be found in the New York Times best-selling memoir Untamed by Glennon Doyle, published a few years ago—a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. The author, who had once written a book about loving and supporting her husband and kids, later left her marriage, embraced a new identity, and began a relationship with another woman.

In Untamed, she recounts this transformation—and begins the entire book with a story from a zoo. At the cheetah exhibit, the author watches Tabitha the cheetah run a trained path for the zookeepers. But instead of clapping like everyone else, she feels queasy. Here’s what she writes:

“The taming of Tabitha felt familiar… Day after day, Tabitha has to continue to chase on the well-worn narrow path… obeying the zookeeper’s command… unaware that if she remembered the wilderness, she could tear the zookeeper to shreds.”

She imagines the cheetah thinking, “Something feels off… she has a hunch that everything is supposed to be more beautiful… more like the fenceless, wide-open savannahs.”

Seriously, so cliche.

But that is how many women today talk about their lives—even Christian women. This idea that the wild, unbound, self-led life is true freedom is widely accepted. It seems to capture the ache for something more—the suspicion that structure is stifling, and that real joy is found outside the lines. But is that true?

They have it exactly backwards.

The Problem With the “Wild and Free” Myth

There’s just one problem: the cheetah metaphor doesn’t actually prove the point it’s trying to make. Even a superficial examination reveals plenty of holes in this argument. Radical feminists, cheetah-like, broke their restraints and in a rush, ran headlong into the wildness, crying: “I am woman, hear me roar!”

But what they discovered next was that the wild and free life was no less confining. Yes, the trained cheetah is restricted. But a wild cheetah isn’t any more “free.” It has no one feeding it, no protection, no care. It lives under the harsh laws of nature—hunting or starving, fighting or dying. That’s not real freedom; it’s just a different kind of bondage.

Additionally, the cheetah’s “freedom” results in tyranny for other animals.

As C.S. Lewis once pointed out:

The real alternative is tyranny: if you will not have authority, you will find yourself obeying brute force.

In fact, the author of Untamed didn’t leave submission behind either—she simply exchanged one form of it for another. She traded a monogamous marriage with a man for a monogamous relationship with a woman. If submission is enslavement, then she only changed cages.

Here’s the truth: authority and submission are inescapable parts of life. If we’re not submitting to someone else, we’re still submitting—to our desires, our fears, our emotions. What moderns consider true freedom is actually just “me-first” autonomy. Feminism, like the Cheetah, pursuing “freedom from all restraint,” often leads to becoming a tyrant ourselves. Everyone must answer to our will.

The idea that we can be entirely free from all authority is no more than an urban legend. A modern myth.

“It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

—Chesterton

Freedom apart from submission does not exist.

We see the truth of this everywhere we look. Think about sports: a player isn’t free to enjoy the game unless they follow the rules. A musician isn’t free to play beautifully unless they submit to the discipline of practice. A dancer doesn’t become expressive until they’ve mastered form. Even in traffic, we’re only free to drive safely because we submit to traffic laws.

The key isn’t to reject submission—that’s manifestly impossible—but to discern which kind leads to life and which leads to destruction.

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Foundation Father

Freedom (and Submission) Isn’t What You Think

This is a guest post from Noelle McEachran. Relevant to everyone, because everyone is under some type of authority. You can’t ask your kids to obey you while you yourself are in rebellion…

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a year ago · 30 likes · Noelle McEachran

About a month prior, my son had visited these same friends when they first noticed the daily presence of pro-abortion ralliers in town, and decided to engage. My son’s friend—we’ll call him Dave—was the ringleader of sorts. He approached one of the ralliers, a man holding a sign, and politely asked a few questions.

Over the following weeks, Dave and his friends continued returning, not to provoke or protest, but to have calm, civil conversations. They were consistently respectful and courteous.

They were so courteous and polite, in fact, that the ralliers had no choice but to call the police. The police showed up, took in the situation, smiled, and told Dave and his friends they weren’t doing anything wrong.

This kind of gaslighting is familiar to many in the pro-life movement. Countless kind, pro-life activists are falsely labeled as threats. Peaceful protestors and even grandmothers have faced heavy fines, legal charges, and jail time.

On this more recent visit, my son Sam (we’ll call him Sam because that’s his name) returned with Dave to the rally. This time, they encountered a woman with bright pink hair holding a large LGBTQIA+ sign.

Once again, the boys were courteous. Dave even praised her for standing up for what she believes in. She responded by saying she believes everyone—gay, straight, trans, or otherwise—has worth and value.

Dave agreed. Then he gently took the conversation a step further: “Doesn’t the baby in the womb also have value?” he asked.

Her response was immediate. No. That argument has no merit whatsoever. They are completely different cases.

Then something extraordinary happened.

At one point, Dave mentioned the name of Jesus Christ. The woman’s reaction was immediate and visceral. As soon as he said the name Christ, she began vomiting—right there on the sidewalk. She couldn’t stop. She staggered toward the bushes, still vomiting, and all the while she was yelling, screaming, and cussing at the boys with wild intensity.

Love and tolerance personified.

I’m guessing it’s not exactly easy to yell and curse while actively throwing up, but she pulled it off.

Eventually, Sam and Dave were asked—more accurately, demanded—to leave. They were labeled the instigators. The troublemakers. The ones disturbing the peace of these innocent rally-goers.

But before leaving, the boys paused on the sidewalk and prayed for the pink-haired woman, for her heart, and for healing.

Stories like this aren’t uncommon. But let’s be clear: what’s happening here isn’t new. It’s ancient. It’s as old as the Garden itself.

When we rebel against God’s natural order—when we deny the sanctity of life and reject our Creator—we don’t just lose our way. We lose our humanity. Bit by bit, day by day, we become less human… and more like beasts.

The literary critic Northrop Frye once observed that the first thing God did after Adam and Eve fell was to clothe them in animal skins. This was for more than modesty. It creates a picture of what we become when we walk away from God—animals. 1

Coming Up

On a personal note: you may have noticed I’ve missed a couple of posts recently. The truth is, I hit burnout. Ever since starting my graduate degree four years ago, and completing it, I have never really slowed down. I’ve been writing professionally, keeping this blog going, and recently, I finished three drafts of my novel in the past six months alone.

I love writing. Like, I really love writing. But I wish I had some of my husband‘s super chill Zen vibes. I tend to write like I have a gun pointed at my head. I reached a point recently where I literally couldn’t write anymore.

My body seemed to take note. It caught up to my exhaustion, and then I promptly got sick. Nothing serious, but enough to make me realize: it’s time for a pause.

So, I’ve decided to take a light sabbatical over the summer. I’ll still post occasionally, but not as often as usual. I need this time to rest, reflect, and refocus. I still haven’t completed my identity series, so I hope to circle back to that in the coming months.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring about stories and the role of the imagination in our Christian walk. And thank you for giving me the space to rest.

More to come—just not quite as quickly.

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In his article “Human After All,” Ben Christenson lays out something we’re all starting to realize, whether we’ve admitted it to ourselves or not: algorithms are not just helping us find content we like—they’re actively shaping what we like. They are, as he puts it, reshaping our very humanity.

This isn’t just some abstract academic claim. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma gives us a front-row seat to the unsettling reality behind our screens. Former tech insiders—engineers and designers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter—admit they helped create tools that now manipulate our behavior on a massive scale. They explain how social media doesn’t just offer content we might enjoy; it studies us, predicts us, and ultimately nudges us.

The goal? Keep us hooked. And the method? Appeal to our base instincts: our fears, insecurities, cravings, and vanities.

It’s not just about serving your interests anymore—it’s about shaping them.

Christenson writes:

“Algorithms don’t merely find content to match your tastes, they can conform your tastes and opinions to fit the algorithm. And what we’re witnessing is that the simplest solution for maximum engagement is an appeal to, and reshaping around, base instincts. Inflame insecurities, anxieties, and sinful appetites. Play to the least-common-denominator.”

Jack Dorsey, ex-CEO of Twitter (quoted in Christenson’s article), goes even further:

“I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We’re being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting… [That’s] why these corporations became so large and so valuable is because they solved the discovery problem on the internet.”

In other words, we don’t just consume anymore—we are being consumed. And that’s because, at our core, we are not independent thinkers as much as we are want-driven beings. We are wanters.

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You Are What You Want

This article is the third in a series on human identity. In my last post, I explored how we are feeders—creatures defined by what we consume. You can check that article out [here]. This follow-up dives into a complementary idea: just as we are defined by what we eat, we are shaped by what we want.

Now, at first glance, that might sound a little too simple. A bit too obvious.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

If anyone had it all, it was Eve. She had the perfect marriage, the ultimate dream home—literally paradise—a perfect body (probably zero cellulite), apparently talking animals, and a mission of eternal significance. She had a high, royal, God-given calling to rule creation alongside her husband and help him in his mission.

She had it all. What more was there to want? And yet Satan STILL got at her through her desires. “She looked, she saw, she wanted.”

She listened to her own desires. And in doing so, she set the pattern for every human after her.

The modern identity quest—“find yourself,” “listen to your heart,” “follow your truth”—is basically Eve’s story in different packaging. We’re told not to follow tradition, family, or faith. We’re told to find our own path and feel our way forward.

As Northrup Frye put it:

“To fall (sin) is to choose an illusion—it’s not about choosing the wrong reason.”

That illusion is that our desires are neutral, pure, authentic. That if we follow them, we’ll find ourselves. But the biblical picture says otherwise.

Mimetic Wanting: You Don’t Want Alone

René Girard, a French philosopher, put forth a radical idea that flips our understanding of desire on its head: we never desire anything independently. That might sound strange, but stay with me.

We tend to imagine desire as a two-way street: me and the thing I want. I see it, I assess it, and I decide, based on my good sense, that I want it.

But Girard said that’s not how it works.

There’s always a third party—a model—in the equation. Someone we watch, consciously or not, who shows us what is desirable. Our wanting is mimetic—we mimic what others want. We desire not just objects, but the desire of others.

In unpacking Girard’s philosophy, Luke Burgis makes this theory clear in his book Wanting:

“In other words, we assume that we go throughout our day neutral, unbiased, objective observers making independent choices. But this is very far from true.”

All day, every day, we move from one desire to another. We scroll, we shop, we compare. And we’re doing it not as sovereign individuals, but as deeply influenced wanters in a sea of other wanters.

Burgis sums it up:

“Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we are born with; it’s a freedom we have to earn.”

That’s the core of the Christian understanding, too. The goal isn’t to stop wanting, as Buddhism suggests, but to want rightly. We were made to long, hunger, desire. But it’s what we aim our desires at that determines whether we become slaves or free people.

The Takeaway: Train Your Desires

The modern search for identity is built on a foundation that’s way too childishly simplistic: What you want is the starting and ending point of your identity quest. But that’s not just naive—it’s dangerous.

Instead, we should learn something from the very algorithms that manipulate us. Just as they train our desires (for their own profit), we should intentionally train our desires for goodness.

The modern craving for social media originates from a good hunger to be fed with loyalty-aligning, imagination-based stories.

C.S. Lewis believed that stories were a key way to do this. Great stories, he argued, hijack our imagination and channel our desires in the right direction. They form us. They reshape what we long for.

Stories hijack our felt longings while satisfying and conditioning them. They create both Christian hedonism and desire training in one easy package. Stories work on us in the same way algorithms do—but for good.

God made us this way. That’s why the Bible doesn’t just give us commands—it gives us visions, parables, images, and stories. It taps into our hunger for fulfillment and our longing for love.

“I will restore Israel to his pasture, and he shall feed on Carmel and in Bashan, and his desire shall be satisfied on the hills of Ephraim and in Gilead.”

—Jeremiah 50:19

So the question isn’t whether you want.

The question is: Who taught you to want what you want?

And the deeper question is: what are you doing to train your desires toward the good, the true, and the beautiful?

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