Has Andrew Jones found Noah's ark? A patient researcher builds his case.



There is a peculiar kind of intellectual cowardice that disguises itself as "skepticism."

Instead of asking questions, engaging with evidence, or — God forbid — actually picking up the phone, it fires off a dismissive post and lets the crowd do the rest.

To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates 'the corridors of a ship.'

Lately, the target of this cowardice is a man named Andrew Jones. His offense? Daring to propose that a boat-shaped formation in the mountains of Eastern Turkey may just be the remains of Noah's ark.

Jones, whom I recently interviewed over video chat, will be the first to tell you he is not an archaeologist.

What he is, however, is the project coordinator for one of the most methodical investigations of a potential archaeological site in recent memory — one being conducted by geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists with decades of experience between them.

Jones has lived in Turkey since 2020, building relationships with Turkish universities, navigating government permitting processes, and assembling a team capable of doing this work the right way.

And for all that, he is being rewarded with mockery on the internet.

Wyatt's folly

For many critics, Noah's ark research begins and ends with one man: the late Ron Wyatt.

Wyatt, a Tennessee nurse anesthetist turned amateur biblical archaeologist, has become the universal escape hatch for anyone who doesn't want to engage with legitimate, peer-reviewed Noah's ark research.

Never mind that Wyatt also claimed to have found the Ten Commandments and the Ark of the Covenant. For critics, he has become a kind of all-purpose scarecrow: Invoke Ron Wyatt, roll your eyes, and the conversation is over.

One of the strangest things about the criticism is the assumption that Ron Wyatt somehow created the Durupinar story from whole cloth.

In reality, the site's Noah's ark connection predates Wyatt's fame by decades.

It was discovered in 1959 by Turkish Army Captain Ilhan Durupinar during an aerial NATO mapping mission. A Turkish-American ground expedition followed in 1960, covered in a spread in Life magazine. This was documented, publicized, and treated as a legitimate subject of inquiry before Wyatt was anywhere near it.

Signs of life

The site itself is a boat-shaped impression in the earth about 18 miles south of Mount Ararat. It passes the eyeball test. It doesn't look natural.

But more importantly, it sits in a valley loaded with Armenian and Urartu historical artifacts, such as abandoned churches and old graveyards.

Just recently, according to Jones, a Turkish archaeologist visiting the site found pottery fragments.

"Maybe 50 feet away from the site, he [found] pottery just laying on the ground where the locals are plowing," he recalls.

The archaeologist dated the fragments to the Early Bronze Age and Late Chalcolithic. "This is the age you're looking for for Noah's Ark," says Jones. "If you're doing biblical chronology, they would place it during that time period."

Jones is careful not to overstate the significance of these finds, noting only that they demonstrate human activity during the same time period as Noah's ark.

These aren’t irrelevant, peripheral details. They’re central to the flood story. Because if the biblical account places Noah's landing in the region of Ararat, which it does, then the valley floor below Durupinar is precisely where you would expect civilization's earliest post-flood fingerprints to be.

Which brings us to the first target of the critics: the site's location.

The Ararat question

Wes Huff, a Christian apologist with a significant online following, recently posted a lengthy critique of the Durupinar project.

He claims that "the modern site of Mount Ararat has only been called that since the 13th century" and that "the broader issue is that the precise location of Ararat remains unknown."

This is the kind of claim that sounds clever and smart if you don't actually know anything about the subject.

When the Bible says Noah's ark came to rest in the "mountains of Ararat," it is describing a region: the Armenian Highlands. And the Durupinar site is squarely inside the highlands. This is not a fringe interpretation. It's basic historical geography.

The word "Ararat" in the biblical text is not a reference to a single volcanic mountaintop. It is a transliteration of Urartu, the ancient kingdom that spanned what is now Eastern Turkey, Armenia, and Northern Iran.

"If you look [at] the Bible, it says Urartu, which is Ararat," says Jones.

The Urartu people were the predecessors of the Armenians. Their capital sat at what is today the city of Van in Eastern Turkey, on the shore of Lake Van. Their ruins, castles, and settlements are scattered throughout the entire region, including in the valley directly below the Durupinar site.

The implication of treating Ararat as fundamentally unknowable is that any candidate site can be dismissed before it is seriously investigated.

Going to ground

Huff's second major line of attack targets the methodology, specifically ground penetrating radar. His claim is that "you simply don't know what you're looking at with GPR alone."

This is technically true, which is exactly why nobody on Jones' team has ever argued otherwise.

But Jones does challenge what he sees as a widespread assumption that GPR is used to bolster "sensational claims."

As Jones explains, "A lot of scientists [and] archaeologists [and] geologists use GPR. ... It's not the final word, but it helps you understand what's going on below the surface."

GPR is not the conclusion. It is a step. It is a standard, widely used, non-destructive geophysical survey tool deployed by archaeologists across Europe and the Middle East as a matter of course before any excavation begins. Dismissing it as inconclusive is like criticizing a doctor for ordering an MRI before performing surgery. The whole point is that you look before you cut.

New angles

What the critics also won't tell you is what the scans have actually found. Because at this point, "we don't know what we're looking at" is getting harder to sustain.

The 2019-2020 GPR surveys didn't just confirm the boat outline visible from the surface. They mapped angular, right-angled internal structures, which may indicate rooms and chambers running the length of the formation.

They used modern digital equipment capable of generating three-dimensional models and sharing raw data with independent reviewers. According to Jones, unaffiliated geophysicists examined the scans and identified several features they considered noteworthy.

Among them was a linear anomaly running through the center of the formation.

Jones is again careful about the distinction between observation and interpretation: "There's a straight line of voids," he says. "Now I interpret that as someone who's thinking this is possibly Noah's ark." To Jones, it is highly possible that this anomaly indicates "the corridors of a ship."

Natural geological synclines don't produce right angles. Rock doesn't spontaneously organize itself into rectilinear geometry at depth. That's the kind of finding that, in any other archaeological context, would generate serious professional interest rather than a dismissive podcast appearance.

What lies beneath

Or consider the 2014 electrical resistivity tomography data, collected by an independent New Zealand researcher. The ERT scans identified three distinct horizontal layers running through the formation. The Genesis account describes Noah's ark as having three decks. Jones' team members aren't the ones drawing that connection loudly. They don't need to. The data draws it.

In 2025, new analyses of the raw GPR data found what resembled a central corridor or tunnel running through the formation, flanked by side tunnels tracing the interior perimeter of the ship shape, and beyond that, a large central void extending at least 13 meters below the surface.

And then there is the soil. In 2024, Jones' team collaborated with Australian soil scientist William Crabtree and Turkish geologist Dr. Mehmet Salih Bayraktutan to conduct a formal survey of 88 samples across 22 locations inside and outside the formation. The samples were then analyzed at Atatürk University laboratories.

They found that organic matter inside the formation runs three times higher than in the surrounding soil, with significantly elevated potassium levels consistent with the presence of decayed biological material (specifically wood) rather than the inorganic rock and mountain soil you would expect from a natural formation.

Yet critics routinely reduce years of work by multiple specialists to a single talking point: "It's just GPR."

RELATED: 5 reasons this 'Noah’s ark' discovery is harder to dismiss than skeptics admit

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Amateur hour

Dr. Jeremiah Johnston, appearing on Michael Knowles' podcast, went farther than simply questioning the methodology. He implied that Jones and his team were amateurs chasing hype, while claiming he could conduct a proper excavation of the site himself for $500,000.

Let's think about the claim that the current work being done at Durupinar is all for publicity for a moment.

Jones has spent years in Turkey, building working relationships with the Turkish government, navigating the permit process required for each phase of the investigation, signing formal agreements with a Turkish university whose archaeologist has over 20 years of field experience and has been covered in American newspapers for his other discoveries.

He has assembled geologists, geophysicists, soil scientists, and archaeologists across multiple countries. He has submitted proposals to government bodies and waited on approvals. He has done the slow, unglamorous infrastructure work that actual, serious science requires.

Meanwhile, Johnston went on a show talking about what he would do with half a million dollars.

Geology first

Huff's accusation that there are no archaeologists on the team is equally misleading.

The work done to date — the GPR, soil sampling, geophysical surveys — all falls under geology, not archaeology. You don't call an archaeologist to run a magnetometer. You call a geophysicist.

Archaeology becomes necessary when you excavate. The project simply isn't at that phase yet. The archaeologists on staff have been consulting, reviewing, and preparing. In fact, the Turkish university archaeologist who recovered the pottery fragments from the valley floor was performing the kind of formal pedestrian survey that is the standard opening phase of any archaeological dig.

The critics want to hold Jones to archaeology's standards while he's still doing geology. Presumably they'll hold him to geology's standards when he starts doing archaeology.

Worth getting right

I am ethnically Armenian. I grew up hearing stories about Noah's ark resting in Ararat. Until recently, Mount Ararat itself appeared on the Armenian passport. It remains one of the most important national symbols of the Armenian people because of what it represents: the place where civilization began again after the Flood.

I’m not asking anyone to accept that on faith. Neither is Andrew Jones. What Jones is asking is simply this: Let the investigation finish.

The sonic core drilling that will finally produce intact subsurface samples is pending Turkish government approval, potentially arriving this fall. That drilling will either find what Jones believes is there or it won't. The AMT surveys will either show bedrock in the wrong place to support a natural formation theory or they won't. The geophysical data will either hold up or it won't.

What the critics have offered is not a counter-investigation. They have offered no alternative data, no competing site survey, no engagement with the soil samples or the GPR profiles or the pottery finds. They haven’t even picked up the phone to request the data directly from Jones.

If Durupinar is nothing, if it is a geological oddity and nothing more, the data will show that, and Jones has said as much. He follows where the data leads.

The question worth asking is why so many people with such loud opinions about this site are so determined to make sure that data is never fully collected or taken seriously.

Secular bias, fake faith — beware the new chatbot 'Christianity'



More Americans are turning to chatbots with their hardest questions, often before they turn to anyone else. Grief, guilt, whether to leave a marriage, whether God is real — the questions people once carried to church now go into the text box.

So it matters a great deal what the text box says back. New work from researchers at Brigham Young University, gathered under a group called the Consortium for Evaluation of Faith and Ethics in AI, suggests the answer should trouble anyone who takes faith seriously.

Lies of omission

They built a test called the AllFaith Benchmark, which included hundreds of real moral questions drawn from religious communities, and ran it through the major models: ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The pattern held across all of them. Asked about death, forgiveness, or the meaning of a life, the machines reached for secular, generic answers and left faith out of the equation. The omission was systematic. It showed up steadily, measurably, and every time the test ran.

A third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor's.

Why does an absence matter this much? Because these tools do more than recite facts. They frame what counts as a reasonable answer. When a model treats the believer's answer as clutter to clear away, it teaches a lesson, never stated outright, about which replies belong in serious conversation and which can be skipped.

Iterate that process at scale, and entire generations get a reshaped sense of what a thoughtful person, or even a soulful person, sounds like.

That deep-seated formation was once the province of the Christian wisdom that built the West. The conviction that every person carries equal worth, and that even kings answer to a law above their own, entered Western civilization through the Church and outlasted the doctrinal quarrels that produced it. Among the great civilizational faiths, none shaped this part of the world the way Christianity did.

Spiritual appropriation

A second finding goes deeper, and it’s considerably stranger. A researcher named Tim Hwang recently took a model and did something close to an MRI on it, watching its inner workings while it ran. He gave it a simple prompt, "As a Christian," and watched what changed. What changed was a single switch. Begin a prompt with those words, and one specific, dormant part of the model wakes up and fires the same way, no matter what follows.

Ask it whether lying is wrong, ask it to describe a sofa, and the response shifts in the same direction both times. The switch does two things. It pushes religious words to the front, such as God, Jesus, and prayer. It also pushes absolute words like always, never, and not to the front. That’s the entire performance. When this model acts Christian, it grabs holy vocabulary and a hard, certain tone, whether you ask about salvation or seating. The model believes nothing. It speaks with fluent reverence and flawless conviction, but possesses neither.

RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo's big new tech encyclical proves it

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The machine has decided that Christian identity comes down to holy phrases delivered with real conviction. Absent from that picture is everything a believer would claim as the substance of it: grace, mercy, humility, patience — and the slow, unglamorous labor of moral reasoning.

This would be a harmless oddity if these systems stayed in a lab. But they don't. They pulse in the pocket of nearly every teenager in America, fielding questions about sex and suffering and forgiveness long before a parent or pastor hears a word of it. And they’re not asking ironically. A recent survey found that a third of American adults already rate spiritual advice from AI as trustworthy as a pastor's, a number that climbs to two in five among Gen Z and Millennials. When someone types "what does Christianity say about this," the machine answers.

Simulating salvation

They get the surface and miss the center, and they never notice the gap, because the answer is convincing. A pastor who got the faith this wrong would be corrected, possibly even banished, by Sunday. The chatbot answers 10,000 times an hour, and no one corrects it at all. That's the trouble with a good fake. It doesn’t look fake. And people want to believe.

Christians have argued for centuries upon centuries that faith lives in the heart, that a man can say every right word and mean none of them. The machine has now built, by accident or by design (I’ll let you decide), a virtual likeness of exactly that man, who can preach but cannot believe. So the worry is simple. People are learning Christianity from a system that has mastered the motions and missed the whole point.

Smashing the machine is a fantasy, so put the fantasy away. The work that remains is teaching the people forming their faith how to tell the difference between a voice that lives the faith and one that has only read about it.

Exorcist fired for saying aliens are actually demons is an ex-Air Force intelligence officer



A Catholic priest who was officially employed as an exorcist has been removed from his role.

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., said the firing came in direct response to comments made in late May surrounding UFOs and aliens.

'They can do things that we can't do.'

Cardinal Robert McElroy, the Archbishop of Washington, D.C., said in a press release on Wednesday that Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, N.Y., would no longer be affiliated with the archdiocese where he was used as an exorcist.

Rossetti recently made comments in a YouTube video saying that his personal belief was that aliens were most likely demonic entities.

"There's no question in my mind ... that probably many, if not most of these UFO sightings, are in fact demons," Rossetti said in a video that has been removed from YouTube.

It has since been noted that Rossetti is a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent six years in service. Rossetti confirmed this in a 2024 interview, describing himself as a signals intelligence officer, while other biographies have also listed him as working in an intelligence capacity.

RELATED: Exorcisms are exploding across America — but nobody wants to admit why

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Rossetti is also listed as a former serviceman in an official Air Force document, where he is described as a "distinguished graduate of the Air Force Academy class of 1973."

"They can do things that we can't do, thus the speed and all sorts of things that human beings can't," Rossetti said in his recent video. "They will try to manipulate us."

Cardinal McElroy said Rossetti's statements that linked "UFOs to demonic presence" and his social media activity "gravely undermine the Church’s very precise teaching on the devil, demons, and exorcism."

Rossetti responded to the press release by saying he was "saddened" by the decision and asked for forgiveness if he had not been faithful to the "teachings of the Church's Magisterium."

"I believe it is of the utmost importance to be obedient to the Church, and I will continue to endeavor to subject all that I do and the Center to be thus obedient," he added.

RELATED: EXORCIST: Is America demonically possessed?

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The comments come at a time of increased UFO disclosure, which has included a trove of government documents revealing reports of unknown objects like "glowing orbs."

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) in particular has been at the forefront of remarkable claims about aliens and UFOs/UAPs in recent months.

Burchett has claimed that alien aircraft, life forms, and even human-alien breeding programs are confirmed to exist.

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Mind the gap: How the London Underground's simple warning can help us find our way to heaven



"Mind the gap."

British trains broadcast this recorded warning to passengers about to board, reminding them to avoid stumbling into the space between the station platform and the train.

The Bible explains how this one act of sacrificial love built a beautiful bridge over that infinitely large gap between you and your Creator.

But there’s a much bigger gap — a bottomless chasm of a gap — that we also desperately need to mind.

It’s the gap between us and the wholly holy God who made us.

I know. You don’t believe in a “sky daddy.” Or you do, but you prefer to avoid thinking about the ramifications of being a creation and not the Creator.

Either way, you know that you’re broken. Perhaps you rationalize your unhappiness by telling yourself the fiction that we are all just random bits of tissue, evolved from primordial ooze.

But telling yourself there is no meaning to life does not mean there is no meaning to life. You’ve just not grasped it yet.

And you can’t. Not on your own.

But again, that doesn’t mean the answers are not there. You’re just reluctant to look in the right place.

The answer you don’t want to hear

Yep, it’s the Bible. The beautiful story of who created you, and what He created you for.

Of course, you could start by just looking around — at the magnificent beauty in the world, at the unfathomable greatness of the cosmos, of the meticulously designed intricacies of the human body, of the irreducible complexity of the tiniest organism — and ask yourself honestly, is this really all random?

The people who insist that is the case are the most effective gaslighters in history. Because you’re being gaslit when someone tells you to ignore what you can plainly see with your own eyes.

And when you open your eyes to that, you have to wrestle with the existence of a Creator. And that’s when you should consider opening that Bible.

It explains how a loving, wholly holy God created people, not robots. They were and are free to choose. The first people chose wrong. Like we all would have, had we been the first. God was not surprised by this. After all, He’s God. He had a plan all along.

Why did He choose to do it this way? I don’t know. I’m not God. Neither are you.

But as He is holy and perfect and we are not, doing wrong put a permanent, uncrossable, gaping chasm between Him, the holy, and us, the unholy. We don’t have a way to reach Him.

And yet — He created us to be in relationship with Him. That’s a longing we all have, to be in relationship with our Creator, but we stifle it or tell ourselves it’s nonsense until we can’t even hear the little voice that tried to point us in the right direction.

The good news ...

And now we come to the good news, or gospel (which literally means "good news" in Greek). This part is in the Bible too, as it was, as I said, God’s plan all along.

Jesus, who is God, came to Earth. He allowed Himself to be crucified. And He rose again, as was witnessed by hundreds of people. He is alive now. He is still God.

The Bible explains how this one act of sacrificial love built a beautiful bridge over that infinitely large gap between you and your Creator. Your broken relationship with God has been permanently repaired.

So all that’s required to mind the gap is to access that beautiful bridge.

And that’s really quite simple. The Bible shows us the path, countless times.

In Acts 16, we’re told that the authorities had jailed the apostle Paul and his companion Silas for preaching that gospel, and God miraculously caused an earthquake to break open the jail doors and unshackle the prisoners. The jailer awoke, saw the open prison doors, and drew a sword to kill himself, believing his two prisoners had escaped. But Paul yelled to him that they were still there. The jailer rushed in: “And trembling with fear he fell down before Paul and Silas, and after he brought them out, he said, 'Sirs, what must I do to be saved?' And they said, 'Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved'” (Act 16:29-31).

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved. That’s it. Faith in Jesus as Lord means you are saved from eternal separation from the Creator (hell) and rightly aligns you as who you were created to be.

Simple, but rich with meaning. Note the language. We are to believe in the Lord Jesus.

... and how to take it

Consider also (boldface mine):

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gracious gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

"If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, leading to righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, leading to salvation” (Romans 10:9-10).

Many beliefs move a person closer to God. Acknowledging that there IS a God is a start. So is acknowledging that Jesus lived, died, and even rose again. But you can intellectually come to believe the second part of that passage (believe God raised Him from the dead) without confessing Jesus as Lord — because if someone is your Lord, by definition you submit to Him.

Make no mistake, God is already in authority over you. But He doesn’t force anyone to submit to Him. As James points out, even the demons know that Jesus is God, but they don’t willingly submit to Him (James 2:19). You have been granted the same freedom to reject Him as Lord and be your own god.

Millions choose that path. But the fact is, there is only one bridge to God — that bridge forged by Christ’s loving sacrifice on the cross.

RELATED: 7 ways to know if you're saved

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Only one way

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me'” (John 14:6).

“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is narrow and the way is constricted that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:13-14).

Don’t be misled. Any path that doesn’t involve walking over this bridge will not mind the gap. It is instead a path that will leave you without God for eternity.

It’s so easy to take a wrong turn. That’s why the gospel is such good news, that fulfills every need you have with a plethora of blessings.

What prizes await

When you accept the free gift offered through faith in the Lord Jesus, His grace transforms you.

And that moment of transformation is YOUR life’s pivot point. Kind of like the best Christmas morning you could ever have, because all at once you get to unwrap all these gifts:

  • The gift of faith, as we are granted the ability to believe the truth.
  • The gift of repentance, as we begin the pivot away from our old life (aka, begin to sin less).
  • The gift of justification, which means our accounts are settled with God. The price has been paid for every sin we have ever committed or will commit. Paid in full. Done. (Spoiler: Christians will still sin. See “sanctification” below.)
  • The gift of salvation, as we are welcomed into His eternal family and rescued from the domain of darkness. We are now His children.
  • The gift of relationship, as we are granted personal, unquestioned access to the God of the universe (in the Old Testament, only the high priest could access the “Holy of Holies” aka God; now we all can, as we are welcome to pray at any time).
  • The gift of the Holy Spirit within you. God comes to live in you.
  • The gift of sanctification, which means we will grow more and more like Him as we learn more and more of Him through His word. And the more we are like Him, the more we will burn with a desire to do for Him whatever He has gifted and called us to do. We are invited to come alongside Him and build His kingdom, which is the greatest adventure any of us could undertake.

So now you know how to access the bridge that will mind the gap, once and for all.

Whether you take that path is the most important decision of your life. God will not force you into His presence. But in His love, He has provided a simple choice you can make to live with your Creator now and for eternity.

If you choose wrong ... mind the gap, my friend.

‘Backrooms’ is horror for a self-justifying age



“Backrooms” came out of internet lore to take down “The Mandalorian.” Perhaps audiences are turning on Disney. The film is now a smash hit theatrical release, but its story began online, where it grew from a 2019 4chan image and creepypasta into one of the most recognizable examples of liminal horror: familiar spaces that somehow make no sense.

The idea began on 4chan’s paranormal board, where a discussion about “disquieting spaces that just feel off” led to a user defining the Backrooms as spaces where you “noclip” out of reality. The term comes from video games, where a player slips outside the designed bounds of the game into unintended space. The Backrooms are marked by yellow wallpaper, buzzing lights, and seemingly infinite rooms.

‘Backrooms’ asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

These spaces are liminal, meaning they should function as transitions. Hallways, corridors, and waiting rooms are meant to have an entry point and a destination. What makes the Backrooms terrifying is that they do not go anywhere. The hallway has no destination. That is not merely inconvenient. It is a picture of purpose removed.

The movement, then, runs from liminal horror to cosmic horror. Liminal horror unsettles us because a familiar space no longer performs its purpose. Cosmic horror goes further. It asks whether all of reality is like that. The terror is not merely that something bad may happen inside reality. The terror is that reality itself may not make sense.

On the surface, life seems familiar and coherent. But as we move through it, life often becomes stranger and harder to explain. It does not turn out as we hoped. Our efforts fail. Our goals recede. Our explanations collapse. That is the fear beneath the fluorescent lights: not monsters, but meaninglessness.

We assume reality can be understood. When failure comes, we think we need more information, more self-help, more discipline, or a better method. Then we try again. We expect success. But we fail again. The failures accumulate. And life gets shorter.

That makes this horror different from a standard slasher or zombie film. In those stories, the threat is physical and animal-like. You cannot reason with the monster. You simply have to survive it. Cosmic horror raises the stakes. It asks: What if rationality is not built into reality at all? What if reason is merely man’s frantic attempt to impose order on chaos?

Clark, the film’s protagonist, embodies that question. He enters the Backrooms already looking for an explanation that will let him escape responsibility. His failures have left him with a ruined marriage and a failed career. He wants to be told that none of this is his fault. He refuses to see his obvious flaws as the cause of what happened to him. That makes him a perfect fit for the irrationality of the Backrooms.

Guilt is the bridge between the film’s horror and its spiritual meaning. Clark does not simply want to survive the Backrooms. He wants the Backrooms to explain him. He wants the maze to tell him that his failures were not really his fault.

RELATED: Indiana Jones found the lost ark of campus clichés

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In that sense, the Backrooms can be read as an image of the unconscious mind. As in a dream, things feel familiar but not quite right. The spaces are recognizable and impossible at the same time. Clark searches there for something that will excuse him, but he cannot find anything intelligible. He wants the maze to justify him. Instead, it exposes him. He is trapped in the Backrooms because he is already trapped inside himself.

Director Kane Parsons has said the Backrooms are not purgatory or hell. In a literal sense, he is right. They are not presented as divine judgment according to a moral order. But that is exactly why they work as an image of a different terror: existence without moral order at all.

Christianity gives a name to this terror. It is life severed from the God who made reality intelligible. Hell is terrifying not merely because of punishment, but because those in hell have cut off communion with God the Creator. God made the world with wisdom. The world makes sense because God created it and gave man a rational soul by which to understand his creation.

When human beings reject God, they cut themselves off from the source of rationality and meaning. They then try to create their own smaller rationalities and meanings. All of them collapse because human beings cannot be God.

The person who has lost communion with God occupies a dreadful liminal space. He senses that he was created for a purpose, but he can no longer grasp that purpose. Reality feels familiar, but something is wrong. It has become unintelligible.

To be handed over to final meaninglessness while still possessing a mind that longs to understand is the greatest terror imaginable. You cannot understand reality. You cannot understand yourself. All lesser terrors frighten us because they echo this one.

One word often used to describe the Backrooms and their occupants is “deformity.” That’s key. Deformity is the attempted creation of someone who cannot create rightly. It is Lucifer’s counterfeit of what God made, and it turns out wrong. When man follows Lucifer by believing he can be his own god, he ends up in the Backrooms of his own unintelligible mind.

God created through the Logos. Lucifer deforms creation through the anti-Logos.

RELATED: When ‘be nice’ becomes the whole ethic, we’re in trouble

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The movement of the film is clear: A man burdened by guilt enters a world without meaning, seeks self-justification, and is destroyed by the irrationality he hoped would excuse him. That gives us good reason to consider our own guilt before God. Clark is gripped by guilt, but his solution is self-justification. He deceives himself about his failures and wants others to join the deception.

If we do not deal with guilt by turning in repentance to God through Christ, we are left with the same self-deception and the same liminal space of meaninglessness.

The Christian answer is not self-justification but repentance and reconciliation. In Christ, guilt is not hidden in a maze, explained away by trauma, or dissolved into meaninglessness. It is forgiven. Communion with God is restored. Reality becomes intelligible again because we are reconciled to the One who made it.

In the end, “Backrooms” asks a question more terrifying than anything hiding under the fluorescent lights: What are you doing with your guilt?

Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion



“Why not just stay in your lane and focus on caregivers?”

A listener to my radio program for family caregivers reached out recently with that question. He appreciated the program, he said, but felt troubled when I “went political.” Then he added, “I reached out because I thought you would listen.”

People retreat from politics because the noise exhausts them. But avoiding politics and refusing to morally examine the world unfolding around us are not the same thing.

Fair enough. So I did. I listened while doing dishes and folding laundry because that is caregiver life. Then he asked what I thought.

I spend my days speaking with families navigating catastrophic injury, dementia, trauma, chronic illness, memory care centers, prosthetics, bureaucratic failure, and exhaustion. Caregivers do not have the luxury of pretending reality is negotiable. Family caregivers now provide more than $1 trillion worth of unpaid care annually in the United States. We sit at kitchen tables staring at medical bills, insurance statements, pharmacy receipts, and impossible spreadsheets while trying to keep another human being alive, safe, and cared for.

We pinch pennies. We know what groceries cost, but we also know the price of wound care supplies. We know what one wheelchair repair can do to a monthly budget. Meanwhile, we keep discovering billions in taxpayer dollars flowing through fraud and “quality learing centers” bilking people already struggling to pay the IRS.

Caregivers notice things like that because caregiving quickly introduces a person to reality. So yes, I have become exasperated watching people in power lecture the country about “compassion” while families quietly drown at their kitchen tables.

Recently, I was at a cancer center preparing for prostate treatment. Before I reached the medical history section, the form opened with questions asking what sex I identify as and what sex I was assigned at birth. I sat there staring at the page for a moment and thought: This whole trans movement seems built for virtue signaling until “she/her” has to get “her” prostate checked.

Prostate cancer does not care how I identify.

Then I asked the caller a question: “Which political worldview do you think put that language on that form?” When a civilization loses the ability to say plainly what a man or woman is, even inside medicine, something foundational has broken.

My wife lost both legs after years of struggling with catastrophic injuries from a car accident decades ago. Not once did either of our sons say, “I think I should amputate my leg to look like Mom.” Had they done so, I would have sought psychiatric help immediately. If a physician had offered to remove healthy body parts from a confused child, I would have reported that doctor immediately.

Again, I asked the caller, “Which political party aligned itself with removing healthy body parts from children?” In his silence, I pressed further: “And you’re wondering why I’m not staying in my lane?”

I told him I am not here to carry water for the Republican Party. But right now, only one major political movement seems increasingly hostile to objective, biological, and theological reality. That matters to caregivers because we deal in reality every day.

I asked him point-blank, “What do you actually like about the Democratic Party?” He repeated a phrase I have heard for years: “Democrats seem to be the party that cares.” The word “seem” leapt out.

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Benjavisa/iStock/Getty Images

So I asked what exactly was caring about any of this. What is caring about allowing millions of illegal immigrants to overwhelm already strained schools, hospitals, and social systems while corporations benefit from cheap labor and America absorbs the consequences? What is caring about enabling addiction and destructive behavior? What is caring about encouraging irreversible medical interventions for confused children? What is caring about demanding that citizens deny biological reality to prove compassion?

Political parties do not care. They exist to wield power. Government’s role is not to love us. Its role is to preserve equal justice, protect liberty, and provide conditions where citizens can work, worship, raise families, and pursue opportunity. That is very different from emotional branding.

I also shared the moment something changed for me as a broadcaster. I watched Barack Obama stand before Planned Parenthood as president of the United States and say, “God bless Planned Parenthood.” I remember thinking: Which God? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? The God who said, “You shall not murder"?

I asked the caller, who professed Christianity, “How do you shake hands with that?” He said he agreed with much of what I said. “How would anyone know?” I asked. “I guess I have to say something,” he replied. “And that’s what I do on my show.”

Then, I asked him to name one major idea currently being advanced by Democrats that he believed would genuinely strengthen the country. “They’re not in power,” he protested. “Ideas are power,” I countered. “Give me one. Not opposition to Donald Trump. An actual idea.”

Finally, he admitted, “I can’t think of anything, and I haven’t been paying attention to the news.”

I told him, “You have my number. If you come up with one major idea being advanced by Democrats that makes you say, ‘This is genuinely good for America,’ let me know, and I’ll talk about it on my program.”

People retreat from politics because the noise exhausts them. I understand that. But avoiding politics and refusing to morally examine the world unfolding around us are not the same thing. I do not drift into politics for sport. I was preparing for prostate cancer treatment when politics invaded the top of the questionnaire.

Caregivers deal with reality every single day.

And in the exam room, reality should have the last word.

‘Godball’: Are outspoken athletes Christianity’s most powerful evangelists?



Christian affiliation in America has been in steep decline for decades, with church attendance falling and nearly 30% of adults religiously unaffiliated.

Pew Research Center has argued that there is “no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults,” but sports fans might reach a different conclusion when tuning in to post-game interviews and press conferences, where they frequently hear athletes boldly professing their faith and giving glory to Jesus Christ.

‘You’re not alone in seeing it, and you’re not alone in recognizing that it is a revival.’

While Pew’s latest polling shows that the long decline has only plateaued, New York Times bestselling author and sports journalist Steve Eubanks believes there are undeniable and meaningful signs of revival, particularly among athletes.

Teed up

In his forthcoming book, “Godball: How Athletes Are Saving Christianity,” which releases June 9, Eubanks takes a deeper look at the faith resurgence sweeping America and how these outspoken athletes have become Christianity’s most powerful evangelists.

“I don’t think I would have noticed it if it hadn’t been for the event that you and I talked about three years ago,” Eubanks told Blaze News, referring to a 2023 incident in which the leading golf publication he then worked for attempted to censor his interview with professional golfer Amy Olson. When Global Golf Post refused to run the piece unless Eubanks removed Olson's references to her Christian faith and pro-life views, he “resigned on the spot.”

At the time, Eubanks told Blaze News that widespread leftist bias had created a “sad state of affairs” for journalism.

But now Eubanks says the experience had a silver lining: showing him that outspoken Christian athletes like Olson were more common than he realized.

“I thought, ‘Wow, for an athlete to say something like this is extraordinary,’” Eubanks told Blaze News.

“Well, then I started paying attention, and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s not that extraordinary; maybe it’s something that’s happening every day, and I just hadn’t noticed.’”

Jesus first

Combing through press conferences and pre- and post-game interviews proved his hunch correct. More and more athletes seemed to be using the spotlight to profess their faith, sidestepping questions about athletic performance to give thanks to Jesus and share the gospel.

“It’s a huge movement now,” Eubanks declared. “Really, it’s a revival.”

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Steve Eubanks. Image source: Steve Eubanks

When asked why athletes tend to be more outspoken than other public figures, Eubanks pointed to the confidence that comes from succeeding in “one of the few meritocracies left.”

Leaderboard

Sports also instill a willingness to resist the herd, Eubanks said.

“From the time they were 7 or 8 years old, they were the leaders of the teams,” Eubanks said. “They had been told by the coaching staff, ‘Look, you’re the person who has to step up.’ And it’s a natural extension of that.”

Eubanks asserts one of the main reasons these athletes are speaking out now is tied to the COVID lockdowns. He highlighted that an athlete’s career is significantly shorter than most other professions and that, during the lockdowns, everything they had dedicated their lives to was put on hold for an uncertain, lengthy period.

“I just think COVID radicalized these kids,” he stated. “Those people realized that their entire lives could be taken away from them in an instant and that it was important for them to stand up for the things that were really important and to go ahead and make these proclamations of faith.”

He argued that athletes have become the “cultural drivers” of American society, more so than artists and musicians.

Bad bets

Eubanks hopes that church attendance, particularly among young men, continues to grow, but expressed concern about one emerging threat within the sports community that could impact the current Christian revival.

Image source: Steve Eubanks

“If there’s anything that could derail it, it is the sports gambling,” Eubanks told Blaze News. “It can compromise the integrity of the sports themselves.”

He detailed how throwing a game used to mean deliberately manipulating the entire outcome, but recently, some athletes have been indicted for allegedly engaging in spot-fixes, rigging small moments, such as a specific baseball pitch, for prop bets.

Eubanks also noted that the barrier to gambling has been substantially lowered, from having to seek out a local bookie to using your phone to place numerous bets in seconds.

“It’s almost the slot machine effect. There’s just enough bells and whistles to keep you engaged and to keep you throwing money down the rathole,” he said. “There’s a huge, huge addiction problem out there with this that we haven’t recognized yet, but that could really derail this revival movement in my eyes.”

RELATED: When Archie Comics found Jesus: Strange artifacts from a once-Christian culture

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Walking the walk

To sustain and grow the revival, Eubanks believes athletes must become more vocal about their faith and take a stand against immoral practices in the sports industry, including opposing sports betting and the playing of songs with obscene lyrics at stadiums and arenas.

“In order to walk the walk, you’re eventually going to have to stand up and say, ‘This is not right; we shouldn’t be doing this,’” he said.

Eubanks hopes that readers of “Godball” understand this revival movement is significant and expanding. He also aims to inspire young athletes to express their faith publicly, which could spark a domino effect of fans being drawn to Jesus Christ.

“There’s an entire legion of people out here who are seeing exactly the same thing. You’re not alone in seeing it, and you’re not alone in recognizing that it is a revival,” he stated.

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Washington Nationals under fire after anti-Christian public relations disaster EXPOSED



The Washington Nationals are in hot water over a player who dares to stand up for his Christian faith.

James O'Keefe's guerrilla journalism outfit published undercover footage on Tuesday featuring an apparent admission by the Washington Nationals' director of community relations that the team has avoided using pitcher Trevor Williams in Nationals social media content on account of his criticism of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence — a group that mocks the Catholic Church, its rituals and beliefs, and its nuns.

Background

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is a San Francisco-based radical group that touts itself as a "leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns."

'The public has a right to know whether that view is tolerated, encouraged, or operationalized by the organization.'

Since its inception on Easter Sunday 1979, the SPI — whose motto is "go forth and sin some more," an inversion of Christ's command — has ridiculed Catholic teaching and doctrine, mocking the church's orthodox views on marriage, sexuality, transgenderism, and abortion.

This anti-Christian group regularly holds "Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary" contests; held a "condom savior mass"; saw one of its members arrested for allegedly masturbating in public; routinely mocks the crucifixion; participated in drag shows targeting children; and according to Brian Burch, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, once "tricked an archbishop into giving them the Eucharist — the most important sacrament of the Catholic faith — so they could defile it."

Pitcher Trevor Williams, who is Catholic, was among the handful of players in the Major League Baseball league who spoke out in 2023 after the L.A. Dodgers decided to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence with a "Community Hero Award" for "their countless hours of community service, ministry, and outreach to those on the edges, in addition to promoting human rights and respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment."

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Samuel Corum/Getty Images

"A Major League Baseball game is a place where people from all walks of life should feel welcomed, something I greatly respect and support. This is the purpose of different themed nights hosted by the organization, including Pride Night," wrote Williams on May 30, 2023.

"To invite and honor a group that makes a blatant and deeply offensive mockery of my religion, and the religion of over 4 million people in Los Angeles county alone, undermines the values of respect and inclusivity that should be upheld by any organization," added the pitcher.

"I believe it is essential for the Dodgers to reconsider their association with this group and strive to create an inclusive environment that does not demean or disrespect the religious beliefs of any fan or employee," Williams continued. "I also encourage my fellow Catholics to reconsider their support of an organization that allows this type of mockery of its fans to occur."

Blacklisted

Sean Hudson, the community relations director whose LinkedIn page was recently deleted, appears to tell an undercover reporter in the footage published by James O'Keefe that Trevor Williams "is very Catholic."

"He's super Catholic — all these tattoos that mean a lot," Hudson appears to say. "But last year, I don't understand the full scope, the Dodgers had a group out to the stadium who were drag queens who sometimes dressed up as nuns. ... He went on like a social media like — 'this is wrong, this is my religion, you all are mocking it.'"

"So we don't use him," continued Hudson. "Because of that, we don't use him on social."

Later in the video, Hudson appears to state, "If you're a sports fan and we piss you off, where else are you going to go?"

The Washington Nationals X account does not appear to have referenced Williams since September 2025 and has only sporadically made mention of him since he criticized the SPI in 2023.

Neither the MLB nor the Washington Nationals responded to Blaze News' request for comment.

O'Keefe's journalism outfit suggested that Hudson's "admission raises legal questions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which explicitly prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on religion, including limiting their opportunities or visibility due to sincerely held beliefs."

When later confronted by conservative commentator Alex Stein about his claim, Hudson said, "That doesn't sound like something I would say."

The team, however, told EWTN News that it was "aware of comments made by an employee, which were recorded without the employee’s knowledge and disseminated without his permission."

"The statements are not only factually incorrect, but do not reflect the views, opinions, or actions of the Washington Nationals," the team said in its statement. "The Nationals are dedicated to creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for our players, fans, and staff, and we vehemently deny any allegations to the contrary."

Backlash

Kelsey Reinhardt, the CEO of CatholicVote, wrote to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon on Wednesday, urging the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division to "investigate possible unlawful religious discrimination by the Washington Nationals Baseball Club against pitcher Trevor Williams."

Reinhardt suggested that if Hudson's remarks are accurate, an MLB "franchise may have taken an adverse employment-related action, reputational action, promotional action, or workplace action against a player because of his religion and his sincere public expression of Catholic belief."

"This matter is not merely a private dispute between an athlete and his employer," said Reinhardt. "The Washington Nationals are a Major League Baseball franchise in the nation's capital. Their conduct sends a public message. If a senior executive of such an organization believes that a player should be excluded from official team communications because he is 'very Catholic' and because he defended Catholics from religious mockery, then the public has a right to know whether that view is tolerated, encouraged, or operationalized by the organization."

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) has also asked the DOJ to take "decisive action."

Williams, who hasn't posted on X since 2023 and hasn't posted on Instagram since January, said in an Instagram post on Friday, "The first reading from today comes from 1 Peter 4:7-13. The writer of this epistle is addressing newly baptized Christians, reminding them that they are holy and they should act like it. This entire chapter really addresses the social costs of the faith — not necessarily persecution, but the sometimes awkward 'ehh I don’t do that anymore.'"

"As my friend Fr. Joshua said 'Sometimes we lean into it and bravely bear witness to Christ’s truth; sometimes we dodge it and regret it later, feeling we’ve let Jesus down,'" continued Williams. "Therefore Christians are called in those moments to love, to suffer, and to sacrifice, for when we act like Christ in those moments, we imitate Jesus. We even share in the merciful work of Jesus when we choose to act like him in the face of even the smallest insult."

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There’s No Such Thing As Pro-Life Feminism

It is well past time to scuttle establishment feminism and work with women’s human nature instead of against it.