#154: On What Extreme Weather Teaches Us
Don't miss the reminder.
What Below Zero Does
In the last two weeks we’ve experienced some sustained, brutal cold in the region in which I live. I know, I know: The folks in North Dakota have had it worse. No doubt! However, for a native-born Southerner like me, I still never quite get used to winters in which five degrees (and negative five) happen several times.
I can easily recall my mother mentioning during my childhood winters, “Better bundle up today. It’s going to be 30!” How quaint her words now seem to someone who longs for 30-degree days.
This winter has felt different. I’m not sure why. I haven’t done all of the historical comparisons to see how this winter so far compares to past winters. However, when I interact with everyone from church members to neighbors to strangers at the gas station, there seems to be a general agreement that 2025 feels different.
I think of how long it takes one to warm up after just spending 5 or 10 minutes outdoors. I think of how much I want to get my kids outside in the snow, but how we must limit their little bodies to prolonged exposure. I think of how painful dry skin can feel. I think of the folks in poorly insulated mobile homes, or worse. Let’s face it: severe cold (or heat) reminds us that we’re much closer to ants in the face of nature’s extremes.
This recent cold snap has gotten me thinking again about a widely discussed book from 2024, Harmut Rosa’s The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity, 2020). Rosa, a German sociologist and political scientist, has written at length about the nature of modernity and how it reveals human self-consciousness. More specifically, Rosa identifies the central feature of life that is distinctly modern: “The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable” (2).
Sounds right so far, doesn’t it? A vehicle with air conditioning and heat isn’t enough. We have sunroofs and heated seats. (I only recently discovered that my 2020 van has a heated steering wheel!) We have an array of inexpensive space heaters we can put in almost any room or office. We have the finest thermal clothing. We have an absurd number of special mugs, tumblers, or thermoses to keep our beverages at the optimal temperature. We have control over the weather. Well, not exactly.
Extreme heat or cold reminds us of the fact that no matter how much we bundle up, dress down, or even where we move in the country, extreme weather can find us.
Weather, of course, is only one manifestation of the kinds of things we try to overcome. Rosa notes that modern people encounter the world as a “point of aggressions,” a set of objects or circumstances to “know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit” (4).
We approach information this way. We approach land this way. We approach animal life this way. Increasingly, we approach human bodies this way.
We may be tempted to place the blame for our hubris on technology. But isn’t it equally true that there is a mindset that not only technology fosters, but that it is created to serve? That is to say, while our technologies do encourage a certain way of seeing the world, they do not entirely create that perspective. No, from the heart we too often see the world not as a gift, domain of responsibility, something mysterious, or simply big, but something to overcome.
Yet lately below zero weather has reminded me, “The world is bigger than me. And for now, I have to submit to what it gives the best way I know how.”
Dominion and Delight
One of the reasons some Christians will struggle with any kind of critique of this modern mindset toward the natural world is because of a particular understanding of Genesis 1:26-28. They see the work of image-bearing in God’s creation more akin to a sixteenth-century European explorer than a wise farmer, gardener, or shepherd. They see the world as their oyster, full of resources to be “tapped into.”
Now I’ll be the first to say that too often critics of this exploitative understanding of the creation mandate fail to account for how earth is our human home. When you’re figuring out how to make and keep a home, you do have a natural right to benefit from things God has set before you.
Whether it be animals, minerals, or waterways, you can’t have a vision of environmental stewardship that leaves humans in a position of scarcity and vulnerability, while being proud of the fact that all the native fish and wildlife are living high on the hog. There’s some sort of balance to be found.
Let’s return to Rosa. Why is the pursuit of controllability such an issue? Is it because of the possibility of environmental degradation? In Rosa’s mind, it’s actually something more basic—and I would say, spiritual:
Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.
The unexpected, eight-inch snow says to us, “Slow down, and submit.” It even says, “Behold!”
On a below-zero-degree day, my car takes twice as long to warm up—and sputters once I start driving. It says to me, “You might be able to get to your destination, but we’ll see. If you do, give thanks!”
The once-in-a-lifetime eclipse that reaches full totality says to me, “If you don’t use those special glasses, you may just damage your vision permanently. Now then, enjoy it while it lasts. Be in awe. You’ll probably never see this again.”
Amid the call to subdue and have dominion over the earth, we have another unavoidable task: to behold and submit. In fact, I don’t even think you have to turn to other parts of Scripture to get this. The very notion of Sabbath seems to point to this.
What does God do in modeling for us Sabbath rest? He creates in six days, then ceases on the seventh. Why? What for? It’s as though He says to all future humanity, “You all need to take time regularly to step back, take it all in, rest, and delight.”
The uncontrollability of the world points to the sovereignty of the Creator, but also the limits of human effort. Not only does ignoring limits demonstrate ignorance and pride on our part, but as Rosa implies, it may just cut us off from some of the deepest human longings and needs: “to feel touched, moved, alive.”
Even as extreme weather may be something to be avoided as a matter of prudence, the fact of it also reminds us that the world is an incredible, unpredictable, and awe-some place.
God is awesome. And the things He sends to us should fill us with awe, too, even if we still need to put on a heavy coat or a bit of sunscreen.
Let’s linger on Eastern Orthodoxy for another week. In Newsletter #152, I wrote briefly about the surprising growth (albeit less extensive than sometimes thought) in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Just this week over at The Public Discourse, Paul Siewers discusses the Orthodox Church and some geopolitical tensions that have had a direct bearing on its identity and mission. If you want to do a quick but deep dive on ecclesiology and politics, check it out.
Ted Gioia is always interesting, if not always correct. However, I fear he is far more correct than not in a recent article comparing Google to the East India Company. While he is obviously offering a creative comparison here, the similarities are telling and troubling.
But it’s hard to control the world without getting your hands dirty. Google learned that—and ditched the company’s originating vision of “Don’t Be Evil.”
So the East India Company turned into a military force—ready to use violence whenever necessary. Just two years after its founding, the East India Company launched an attack on a Portuguese ship and seized its cargo. This was a faster way to make money than just trading.
Let’s be honest, they were now no better than pirates, extracting profits without adding value. In this way, they resemble a search engine that steals news from journalists to sell ads or uses AI knockoffs to take revenues from human creators.
But the company’s managers would tell you they didn’t have a choice. If you wanted to control the high seas, you either attacked or got attacked. There was no other option.
This always happens, sooner or later, when greed is unrestrained. Fair competition is too slow. You make money faster when you totally destroy all enemies.
So the East India Company eventually controlled more than a quarter of a million soldiers—at some points it had twice as many combatants under its command as the Royal British Navy.
It fought wars. It started wars. It ran blockades. It conquered territories, and subjugated the populace. Sometimes it forgot trade entirely, and just imposed taxes on the people it had captured.
And when you’ve done all that, why worry about other ethical considerations? At an early stage, the company began trading slaves. It continued doing so for the next two hundred years.
But opium was especially profitable. Like today’s web platforms, the East India Company learned that it could exploit addiction—if the client was hooked, you could squeeze even more cash out of them.
I note that there are only two businesses that call their clients users—drug dealers and Internet businesses. The East India Company is a role model for both.
Read his entire article, “Google is Now the East India Company of the Internet.”
Fact checking works, if imperfectly, in traditional publishing because it’s conducted by a small set of people who share similar values and goals. They may have different views about any number of matters, but they hold a common belief in the standards of journalism, a belief that the accuracy of information is a public good. Even if you’ll never arrive at capital-t Truth, the ideal of Truth gives you a useful set of bearings. It leads you to the best possible decision, in advance of publication.
Take fact checking out of that intimate, human setting, turn it into an industrial program of outsourcing, crowdsourcing, or automation, and it falls apart. It becomes a parody of itself. The desire to “scale” fact checking, to mechanize the arbitration of truth, is just another example of the tragic misunderstanding that lies at the core of Silicon Valley’s entire, grandiose attempt to remake society in its own image: that human relations get better as they get more efficient. A community, we seem fated to learn over and over again, is not a network.
Nicholas Carr, “Truth Doesn’t Scale.”
In my own therapy experience, one of the things that was difficult to get over early on was the challenge of working with someone who didn’t share my religious convictions. My obsessive doubts center on fears that I’ve harmed people in the past, so I wanted to be sure that if I shared those doubts with someone and they turned out to be legitimate, that person would have the same moral compass as me and would tell me to act to rectify my negligence, rather than assuaging my fears by telling me it was “just OCD.” It turned out I was wrong on two accounts. First, that’s not how OCD good therapy works. You don’t get reassurance from your therapist about your fears; that makes you sicker. Instead, you learn to live with the uncertainty (ERP) or learn that the way you got to that doubt was flawed (ICBT). But more importantly, I was encouraged by a couple of Christian OCD therapists that any good therapist would be able to help me because they would respect my values and help me live consistent with my values.
But this brought on another doubt: what if my values are flawed and need to be corrected? If “good” therapists simply accept the value system of their clients and seek to help them live consistently with those values, wouldn’t that often mean “adjusting” or “treating” people just so they could live disordered, sinful, lives, detached from reality? Put differently, isn’t a “values-neutral” approach to therapy no different from a morally relativist approach? And if so, what are the consequences on our society?
O. Alan Noble, “Just be true to your values.”
Humans touch animal bodies every day. We digest their flesh. We clothe ourselves with their skins. We sleep on their feathers. We listen to music made by sliding animal hair across animal intestines. We swallow extracts from their organs and tissues as medicines and smear them on our faces and hair as cosmetics. Few of us ever see these animals alive, much less see them as they die. Few of us want to. Just the thought evokes a gut-rumble of disgust. . .
For Christians, re-enchanting meat begins with remembering that all food comes from a gracious and generous God. The first time an animal dies to support human life in the Bible, the animal is killed not by humans but by God. Adam and Eve had sinned and discovered their nakedness, so God replaced their feeble fig-leaf coverings with garments of animal skin. This minute act foreshadows the ram killed in Isaac’s place, the lambs killed at Passover, and all the doves, goats, and cattle killed in the ceremonial life of Hebrew people. For ancient Israelites, the fragrance of fire-seared meat was a daily reminder of mortality, sacrifice, and gratitude. Ultimately, God’s first animal sacrifice to cover Adam and Eve’s sin points to Jesus, the lamb of God, sacrificed to cover the sin of all humanity.
Christine Jeske, “Re-enchanting Meat.”
John Piper, Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God.
David Powlison, How Does Sanctification Work?
One portion of the presidential inauguration was one of those rare, great, national moments.
Regardless of what you think of Carrie Underwood, Donald Trump, or politics more generally, it’s worth your time to watch the full clip of what happened when Underwood sang “America the Beautiful.” Don’t fast forward. Feel the awkwardness when things go wrong and people get restless. Then feel the pride and civic serendipity when the room has to come together to make the song work.
WATCH: Carrie Underwood performs ‘America the Beautiful’ | Trump 2025 Inauguration