If you have time for just one article about the current pandemic, make it this one by Andy Crouch. Published yesterday and aimed at Christian leaders, “Love in the Time of Coronavirus” is thorough, practical, and rich with Christian hope  – which is always hard-won, but never disappoints (Romans 5:5).

Here’s what the article covers:

1. What is happening? An overview of the most important things for Christian leaders, anywhere in the United States, to know about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. 
    
2. What should we communicate? A list of the most helpful messages others can hear from us — and the most harmful messages as well. 
    
3. What decisions should we make? Recommendations for decisions about large gatherings, medium-size gatherings for Christian worship, and small groups meeting in households. 
    
4. What can we hope for? A few reflections on the genuine possibility that our decisions in the next few weeks could reshape the practice of Christian faith in our nation and, God being merciful, lead to a revival of the church of Jesus Christ in America.

Read "Love in the Time of Coronavirus" over at Medium. We also recommend today's edition of Matthew Lee Anderson's The Path Before Us – "On Living in a Pandemic Age" – for wisdom from C.S. Lewis and Augustine.  

For now, we'll let this snippet from Andy Crouch's article have the final word:

In the history of the church, over and over it has been local “households,” extended-family-size outposts of the Kingdom of God, that have been able to most effectively mobilize care of the vulnerable in their midst, and to reach out and care for the vulnerable around them.

In this time when large gatherings have shaped our imagination of what “church” is and means, and even more so when media and celebrity have colonized all of our imaginations and made us think that true influence and value is somewhere else, we have a window of opportunity to rebuild the foundation of all real love and care — a circle of people, related to one another as brother and sister, who know and are known, love and are loved, and who move out in service to the world.

We’ve all heard the story of the misinformed, gullible parent who willfully puts their children at risk by refusing to have them vaccinated. But what actually bothers people about vaccines and vaccinations? And how can these concerns be culturally and socially understood?

In her book Anti/Vax, Penn State College of Medicine professor Bernice Hausman sets out to reframe the controversy by taking vaccine dissent seriously. Her book traces how the narrative of the misinformed anti-vaxxer got established in the media and subsequently places a critical eye on that narrative.

“The project required taking a neutral stance on the issue in order to understand vaccine dissent in a context where it makes sense rather than representing it as an anti-science nonsense,” Hausman explains in the talk linked below.

Her research shows that vaccine dissent is profoundly varied, not always reactionary, and often rooted in profound existential questions: "Can we control nature? Is disease prevention the same as health? Can I dissent? Whom can I trust?" Zombie films and fiction also play a big part.

Watch or listen to Bernice Hausman talk about the vaccine controversy. For more, read her op-ed from last year entitled "Stop telling anti-vaxxers they're insane for questioning vaccines" or check out the book.

We’re living in an age of progress, right? This is a baseline assumption for many of us, but New York Times columnist Ross Douthat suggests that we’re actually living in an age of decadence.

He’s not talking about chocolate covered strawberries and sex; that’s just surface-level decadence. The deeper meaning of the word, Douthat says, has more to do with stagnation, decay, and exhaustion, all happening “at a high level of material prosperity and technological development.” Decadence is always a result of previous success – and that explains a lot:

A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that makes the same movies over and over again might be. A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A crime-ridden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a peaceable, aging, childless society beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition.

Douthat’s new book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success is full of clarifying insight. Pick it up for (among other things) the best explanation I've seen for why movies are so exhausting these days.

You can read the core argument over at the Times (with the Fyre Festival and Uber marshaled as prime illustrations of decadence) or listen to an engaging discussion between Douthat and Al Mohler over at Thinking in Public.