Our society is often kinder to differences and eccentricities than past eras, and our economy rewards extraordinary talent more richly than ever before. The problem is that as it’s grown easier to be remarkable and unusual, it’s arguably grown harder to be ordinary. To be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script, or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own. To follow a “little way” rather than a path of great ambition.

Human hearts need a profound, reality-altering announcement, not a sweet Christian moralism couched in alliterated, applicational “how to’s.” The Bible was never intended to be turned into Christianized Aesop’s Fables.