Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of a 40-day period in the church calendar known as Lent.

This time of preparation leading up to Holy Week and Resurrection Sunday is especially helpful

given the political, digital, and ideological distractions

of our moment. The very same cultural forces that tend to overcommercialize our Christmas

celebrations can make us just forget about Holy Week and Easter Sunday, not to mention that

these days point to the central events in all of human history. Ash Wednesday is an especially

helpful day that helps us remember.

Around the world, today, countless Christians will have the sign of the cross marked on their

foreheads, in ash, what's known as the imposition of ashes, and we'll hear the words, remember you

are dust, and to dust, you will return. That reminder, along with the various exercises and self-denial associated with

Lent, can give us the impression that the 40 days prior to Good Friday and Easter Sunday

should have a somewhat gloomy tone. That, however, would be to completely miss the point. During

Lent, we should confront our mortality, not only to be reminded of it, but also in order to better understand

why we no longer need fear it. Clearly ours is a culture that fears mortality going to absurd lengths

to dilute ourselves from thinking about it. Our attempts to avoid death once the stuff of science

fiction is now the stuff of best-selling works of transhumanism and futurism. What is, after all,

behind all of the attempts to upload consciousness into a computer or violate the natural limits

of human fertility, if not an outright rejection of our human mortality? And of course, it's not only

the tech luminaries that we love and follow who try to keep their mortality at bay,

we all do. Years ago, as my grandfather was dying, having suffered terribly for several months,

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