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From Pitch to Published: TGC Writers’ Cohort (2026)

Winfree Brisley • Collin Hansen • Jared Kennedy • Ivan Mesa • Brett McCracken • Matt Smethurst • Andrew Spencer • Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra

I didn’t experience the school-age rite of passage by reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. So I had to borrow my more erudite wife’s copy from seventh grade advanced English. But as I plucked her 1990s paperback copy from our library shelves, I stumbled over the cover: “The Classic Bestseller About Censorship—More Important Now Than Ever Before.”

I’ll grant some exuberant marketing exaggeration. But a book about censorship? More important in the 1990s than any (by default, earlier) time? If I’d only read the CliffsNotes, maybe I’d nod along. This 1953 book is about a time when the government won’t need to censor books, because few will take any interest.

I fear it’s a book about today.

What’s been labeled artificial intelligence (AI) is neither artificial nor intelligent. It’s designed by us, and it feeds on us. Sometimes it preys on us, too. Nearly every day someone’s sharing with me another AI-generated viral case for why AI will change everything and why I better get on board before it’s too late. Before long it’s not hard to see that the boom case isn’t any different from the bust case. The doomers and the acclerationists are the same. If the accelerationists are right, then it doesn’t matter if for the moment I’m one step ahead of the last in the pack. Before long AI will catch up and eat me, too. When this is the positive case for AI, who needs a doomsday scenario?

I don’t doubt AI will change and even improve many things. You and I might even be cured from a deadly disease thanks to research advancements powered by AI. Fields from medicine to law to accounting to investing to marketing and just about everything in between will be disrupted. It’s not hard to see those changes looming. Indeed, they’re already happening, with CEOs scared to disclose how much money they’re saving through job cuts. Humans made with dignity in the image of God have a knack for eliminating the drudgery from their work.

But humans under the curse of sin also have a knack for confusing drudgery with dignity. And that’s the point Bradbury is making in his novel, far ahead of its time. Not only did Bradbury anticipate the technology of interactive screens for home entertainment. He also understood the underlying philosophy of technologies that promise deliverance but deliver servitude. The firefighters who start fires are delivering humanity from the plague of books with their pointless abstractions. Books make us think about war and love, and who wants to think about such difficult subjects when The White Clown is about to come on the screen? Books make us think about our stewardship for the next generation, and who wants to think about that when you can just get abortions and schedule C-sections and send your children away to storage?

Bradbury helps us see why the boom and bust cases for AI are the same. We’re told the many ways AI will save us from work so we can enjoy rest and recreation (usually today that means watching and creating interactive screens). That work includes writing, all the way from college entrance exams to marketing copy to personal emails to novels to legal briefs. But a world where no one’s writing means no one’s reading. AI is writing to be read by AI. The boom necessitates a bust. What begins as deliverance instead delivers servitude—a return to illiteracy.

Among many memorable scenes in Fahrenheit 451, Fireman Montag begins to question his fire-starting work in the case of a woman who refuses to leave her books before they burn down her house. Montag’s boss, Captain Beatty, appeals to her “common sense.” He shouts, “None of those books agree with each other. You’ve been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!”

She won’t move. She opens her hand and reveals a match. The firemen flee. “Her quietness a condemnation,” she starts the fire herself.

No matter what rest and recreation AI offers, we can’t give up on writing. Because when we give up on writing, we’ll have no need for reading. And when we stop reading, we’ll no longer be thinking about love and war and other big topics like how to make our world better for the next generation.

Literacy is the house I’ll burn down in.

COLLIN HANSEN

Editor in Chief

How Your Investing Could Change the World

Collin Hansen • Robin John

“Do any of us really want to be in the position where our retirement account grows in sync with the cancer ward?”

That’s the question posed by Robin John about tobacco, responsible for 100 million deaths in the last 100 years. Naturally, all of us would say no, we don’t want to benefit from other people dying. Yet as Robin points out in his new book, The Good Investor: How Your Work Can Confront Injustice, Love Your Neighbor, and Bring Healing to the World, many of us do hold mutual funds that invest in tobacco companies. We just don’t know it. Come to think of it, how much do we know about any of our investments, especially in long-term retirement accounts?

Robin John is the cofounder and CEO of Eventide, an asset management firm dedicated to honoring God and investing in companies that create compelling value for the common good. His vision for Eventide’s values-based investing shows how our work can benefit everyone and not just bolster the bottom line for a fortunate few.

I’d go so far as to say our world can be a much better place if investors—and employees of all kinds—will learn from his example and prioritize what really matters now and in eternity.

There’s a broader matter of culture change at work here, too. The movements of environmental, social, governance (ESG) and socially responsible investing (SRI) have concentrated capital behind left-wing causes and contributed to a progressive flip in corporate America. According to John, when he met with ESG/SRI investors around 15 years ago, they agreed with Christians not to fund pornography. Now that barrier has been crossed, and one of the largest “adult entertainment” companies changed its name to Ethical Capital. It’s the upside-down world of Romans 1.

Could Christian investors help turn that world right-side-up again?

“I think as individual investors, we could feel very small,” John told me. “But when we could partner together—it’s not just with Eventide, there are other faith-based investment firms. But when we partner together, I think we can bring about the cultural change that we’re hoping to see.”

You Have To Be Human

FREYA INDIA

Earlier this month I stormed through a pre-publication copy of India’s debut book, Girls, which will dominate the bestseller lists when it releases in May. Publicity has begun with a profile in the Times for the 26-year-old India, who grew up in Essex, studied in London, and now lives in Washington, D.C. We’re currently scheduling an interview for Gospelbound to release in May.

Some will already know India as a Gen Z contributor to Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel Substack. Last week she wrote an inspirational call to action, “You Have to Be Human,” about the feeling of hopelessness so much of us share at the dawn of AI. I can only imagine embarking on a writing career when AI is already eliminating entry-level jobs across industries, including mine. It didn’t exactly feel like a great time to start a journalism career 23 years ago with the internet eating away at the revenues of newspapers and magazines. Today seems even worse.

That’s why I love India’s counterintuitive proposal: “When so few seem interested in being a person, isn’t that the best time to be one? Maybe this is a moment for optimism. You just have to be human.”

India recognizes that AI didn’t start this push toward robotic sameness, the bland prose of generations raised under the algorithm’s unforgiving gaze. AI writing will be superior because many humans have already stopped trying. There’s too much at risk while searching as a young writer to find your voice when everything’s filmed, everything’s screenshot, everything lives forever online. Humans err. Humans grow. Humans change. Humans cringe at their earlier work. No computer could generate the rambling, bumbling wedding toast everyone remembers your brother giving at your wedding. Who will remember the tributes “written” for your nephew by AI? Go ahead—be human! Be memorable. India writes:

I don’t want to be harmless, I want to be human, I want to say things that bother people and move people and confuse people; I want to start sentences that can’t be autocompleted because even I don’t know where they’re going. I want to learn and offend and regret and grow. I want to be interesting, irritating, irreplaceable. I want to get things wrong and apologize and sometimes I want my opinions to be contradictory and incomplete because I am feeling my way through this world and I am not a machine with all the answers. I want to try and be seen trying, to be a person you can’t perfectly map out and make sense of, what good am I otherwise, what am I otherwise.

By the time my next book comes out in 2027, I expect it will need to carry a warning label on the cover: “Certified 100% Human.” Yes, it’ll contain errors. Yes, you’ll sometimes wonder what point I’m trying to make with esoteric allusions. But at least you’ll know it’s me, trying to connect with you, as we explore solutions to our human problems—together.