Good morning and welcome to Denison Forum's daily article podcast. It's Thursday, January 8th, 2026. I'm Connor Jones, co-hosts of the Culture Brief podcast here at Denison Forum, filling in for Chris Elkins and narrating today's daily article, authored by our co-founder and CEO, Dr. Jim Denison.

I closed yesterday's daily article with Philip Ansi's quote, grace like water flows to the lowest part.

I had no idea at the time that his statement would be so

relevant to his personal life. I have followed Yancey's work for years and consider him one of the

most thoughtful and authentic writers in the evangelical world. It was therefore devastating to learn

yesterday that he had engaged in an affair with a married woman for eight years and is now

retiring from writing and speaking. In an emailed statement to Christianity today, an outlet for which

he has written for decades, he confessed the affair and added, I am now focused on rebuilding

trust and restoring my marriage of 55 years. Having disqualified myself from Christian ministry,

I am therefore retiring from writing, speaking, and social media. Instead, I need to spend my remaining years living up to

the words I have already written. I pray for God's grace and forgiveness, as well as yours, and for

healing in the lives of those I've wounded. His prayer highlights one side of the Christian life, the amazing

grace about which Yancey wrote so often. Tim Keller famously wrote in his book, The Reason for God,

belief in an Age of Skepticism, that the Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to

die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.

But Yancey's confession also points to a dangerous downside of evangelical faith, as many understand

it. Think of history as an hourglass laying on its side. The story begins with cosmos, expansive

beyond our imagining, and created by the God who pronounced it very good in Genesis

131. It narrows to the human race, then to one nation within that race, then to one surviving

part of that nation, then to one teenage girl and her newborn child. When this child grows

to adulthood, the story begins to expand again, to 12 disciples,

to 120 believers in an upper room, to 3,000 baptized souls, to a movement that expanded to

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