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

truth with the Colson Center on John Stone Street.

Today's 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 over-commercialize 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 will 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. Here's a go, as my grandfather was dying, having suffered terribly for several

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