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New York Times, How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying:

How would you live if you knew when you were going to die?

When Ben Sasse announced last December that he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, he called it a death sentence, but he noted that he’d had one before the cancer too. We all do.

Sasse served the state of Nebraska in the U.S. Senate for eight years as a high-minded and, by his own account, sometimes ineffectual conservative. Then he quit politics to become the president of the University of Florida, pursuing a different model of civic reform.

Now he’s facing mortality.

For Sasse, the advance of his cancer has brought clarity, sharpening his focus on his wife and three children, and the God whom he expects to shortly meet.

At the same time, he’s doing a lot of talking. He’s running his own podcast, titled “Not Dead Yet,” and he’s doing interviews like this one about what life is like on the threshold of the undiscovered country. …

Ross Douthat: [T]ell me how you’re thinking about your relationship to [your kids] and your own family life in the shadow of death. … For the listener or viewer who … doesn’t believe in God and finds your cosmic optimism admirable but maybe thinks that you’re deluding yourself on the brink of actual finitude, what would you say to that person.

Washington Post: Awakening, by Matthew Schmitz (Co-Founder, Compact):

What explains the upsurge in Catholic converts, many of whom seem to be young? One factor, Julia Yost suggests below, is the importance of images for a generation raised on TikTok. If we’re becoming a postliterate society, it will be hard for a textual faith such as Protestantism to compete with the pomp and dumbshow of popery.

Washington Post: Why Catholic Converts Are Surging With an Unexpected Demographic, by Julia Yost (First Things):

[T]he recent wave of converts is best understood as a response to religious decline. In a secularizing world, becoming Catholic has a rebellious cachet.

Christianity Today: The Rebellious Act of Rolling Back the Stone, by Richard Mouw (Former President, Fuller Theological Seminary):

Mary Magdalene’s role in the Easter story certainly deserves an upgrade. Another time in the ancient past, the Lord searched for a woman in a garden. On that occasion, the woman and her husband hid from their Creator. Many Eves later, the risen Lord looked for a weeping woman in a garden, and he gently called her by name. Mother Eve had rejected God’s authority in response to the Serpent’s challenge to her to be her own god. On Easter morning, this daughter of Eve met her Lord in the garden and cried out to him through her tears: “Rabboni!” (teacher).