Welcome to the Breakpoint podcast and our Q&A segment Ask the Colson Center.

I'm Shane Morris, host of the upstream podcast and one of the writers for Breakpoint.

I'm joined today by John Stone Street, president of the Colson Center and the voice of Breakpoint.

Today we're answering your questions.

These were sparked by Breakpoint commentaries, short courses, and the Colson Fellows

program. If you'd like to send us a question to answer here on the show, please send us an email

at Ask the Colson Center at colsoncenter.org. John, so many of our questions these days seem

like they're what should I do questions, not how should I think questions. And it really highlights for me the need

for, you know, practical guidance in our cultural moment. It reminded me how important, for one thing,

rituals and cultural expectations can be. Christians can give ourselves, I think, in this weird

space we find ourselves in permission to be, you know,

sad about the fact that we're making a lot of this up as we go along and that the institutions

and traditions and expectations that used to tell us how to behave and how to react and how to

live are largely gone or at least kind of broken into a lot of different pieces

and warring factions. And to some extent, what we're doing here, I think, on the podcast and at

the Colson Center more generally is helping Christians form new habits, new expectations that are

countercultural in a way tougher because, as so many books have noted, we are living

in a post-Christian time period. But it's interesting to see these questions flow in and to see

the extent to which we are being asked to coach people through, in many cases, just tough

situations at home, at work, at church. And our first question today is really especially fascinating to me, John,

because it is coming from someone who is less asking how to live as a Christian in this time and

place, but someone who heard our advice to Christians, specifically in this case Christian parents,

...