What I Am Changing in 2026
And why you should give me money.
As 2026 dawns, I find myself incredibly grateful to my readers. In just over a year, my subscriber count has hit 1,800. While that number matters little in the big picture, it helps to know that I am genuinely serving people with my writing. To that end, I have tried my best to respond to any reader emails, comments, or messages. I have not been perfect, but I hope that I can continue to grow alongside you all over the coming years.
To do so, I intend to change how I do things on my Substack in 2026. First, I plan to write infrequent (around 2x per month) deep-dive articles. These articles will approximate my recent historical work on justification, my article on John Mark Comer, or on remarriage in the New Testament. These writings, I hope, add to your knowledge in ways that you cannot find elsewhere, or at least in a form that makes it enjoyable to find here.
Second, I plan to write a weekly reflection that is shorter, more accessible, and easy to share. For example, consider a recent article I wrote on why AI writing cannot compete with human writing.
Third, having experimented with YouTube over the past year or so, I finally feel that I understand my place in that ecosystem. I plan to release bi-monthly videos that either expand on my writing here or elsewhere. I will not have the time to dedicate much more to this space, but I am still convinced that the spoken word—especially semi-long-form speech (i.e., YouTube)—has a central place in the future of knowledge acquisition. It may be a key way to retain the attention of those who have stopped reading and who learn only via audio and video formats.
It is at least my contention that as a society, we have entered a post-literary world. Subcultures of reading will persist, as they always have, but in general, we no longer live in the 1980s where we could reasonably expect college students to know how to read a book. They can’t anymore. They can sound off the words on the page, but they cannot track a book’s coherent meaning across its argument anymore. My own experience as a professor verifies the now-abundant data on this point.
All of this to say, to be able to serve readers by retrieving past wisdom from real primary sources, I have finally monetized my Substack. I still plan to give away all my content for free, but have now opened it up for anyone who wants to support my work financially.
Why? Beyond the basic satisfaction of being paid for one’s own labour, I have few fixed costs that I have to pay in order to provide free content:
I maintain my own URL (minimal cost).
I purchase ancient and rare sources to provide value to readers (~$100 per month).
I hope to purchase audio equipment for my video/audio content, such as a Shure microphone, audio mixer, and other equipment (~$1,200).
In short, it costs me about $100 per month simply to produce free content as I have done, and it would cost me about $200 per month to provide written, audio, and video content. My hope is that Substack could be a place to help me break even on my fixed costs. I have no expectation that it will act as income in any real way. The economy of scale for that to happen seems out of reach. But maybe it could help me cover my costs?
To that end, would you commit to being a monthly or yearly paid subscriber? I will continue to give my writing away for free, since my mission is to read primary sources and show how they can change our lives.
But paid subscribers will get some content early (if I can figure out how to do so on Substack), be able to suggest topics for deep-dive articles, and receive free copies of future e-books I hope to produce. That said, these are not the exchange I am offering.
I simply want to ask you to subscribe to support my work and help me cover my fixed costs as I aim to help you retrieve past wisdom to transform your life today.