Olasky Books: Stories we live by from college to death

College years in theory exposed students to people from different backgrounds, but Neil Gross in What Happened to College? (Avid, 2026) shows that such interaction today is rare. Gross makes thoughtful recommendations, the last of which is most important: “Increase political diversity among the faculty.” Good ideas on paper—restore a core curriculum!—won’t matter unless what professors say in the classroom changes.

Professorial biases make it all the more important to consider the stories they and all of us unconsciously absorb. Tim and Michael Keller in The Stories We Live By (Zondervan, 2026) ask a key question: Are those stories pushing us to despair and loneliness rather than happiness and meaning?  The book arises from notes left by famed New York pastor Tim, who died in 2023: His son and successor Michael took it from there.

They note that young people are becoming more anxious as they’re told to be true to their hearts (which in practice often means submitting to the cultural cliches around us). Millions of children have absorbed the message of “Let it Go” in Disney’s Frozen, where Elsa sings, “No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free.”

The Kellers criticize the view that morals are just socially constructed and that being on “the right side of history” means moving away from religion. They invite us to examine what we believe and how a belief affects the way we live—and whether it moves us toward or away from God. 

In A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality (Yale, 2026), elderly Oxford literature professor Terry Eagleton despairs about “whatever unknown terrors lie ahead, knowing that you have no more choice in the matter than you have of flying.” Eagleton is a witty writer who makes the best case for trying to put on a happy face and stop thinking about tomorrow: He believes nothing comes next and when we “take the long plunge to oblivion” doesn’t much matter. He does not expect to utter last words like those of Steve Jobs: “Oh wow oh wow oh wow.”

Or maybe not, if I continue to learn from the Bible, church, and the John Piper books that Crossway is republishing. His Battling Unbelief (2026, orig. 2007) quotes an elderly Englishman, Charles Simeon, who died two centuries ago and seems wiser than Eagleton. Simeon said, “I have the sweetest peace,” and Piper writes, “The reason Simeon could die like that is because he had trained himself for 54 years to go to Scripture, to take hold of the promises of future grace.”

Piper notes the “crucial relationship between the backward look of gratitude to embrace past grace and the forward look of faith to embrace future grace. They are interwoven joys that strengthen each other…. God is supremely trustworthy in the future because of what he has done in the past.”

Others see it differently and suggest that we need to create for ourselves order in a disorderly world. The subtitle of Bruce Feiler’s A Time to Gather (Penguin, 2026) contains its thesis: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us. Feiler collects the stories of a hundred “ritual designers” who created “sacred space” and much besides. Feiler concludes, “Ritual may not be our last hope, but it may be our best hope.” I suspect not. Our man-made rituals seem like whistling past the graveyard to keep up our spirits, rather than staring at it without fear—if we know that Christ has conquered death.

Neil Gong deserves great respect for his up-close observation in Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (U. of Chicago, 2024). He gingerly proposes new and improved asylums and describes what the mentally ill have experienced since the 1990s: “Triaged rather than treated, sent to the streets rather than housed…. They might be ‘free,’ but was this better than the asylum model?”

Briefly noted

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine, published last year and now in paperback (Penguin), sounds the trumpet against AI. Jesus Among the Homeless by Wilma Faye Mathis (Wipf & Stock, 2023) reminds us of the least among us.

Jim Al-Khalili’s On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe Tick (Princeton, 2026) explains theories of time including “the block universe,” also known as eternalism. In that theory, “past, present and future are all equally real…. This is the view that Einstein himself espoused.” Al-Khalili claims that is “what the majority of physicists and philosophers still subscribe to today if pushed.” He mentions the fine-tuning of the world but ignores the implications of that.

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