Online publications come and go all the time, fleeting flickers in the stream of culture. Still, it’s unfortunate to see a good one go away.

So here’s a tribute to Think Christian, which recently shuttered its doors due to budget cuts after some 14 years of nuanced exploration of grace surfacing in pop culture. Think Christian was a project of Reframe Ministries, the media ministry arm of the Christian Reformed Church, but it never felt like a house PR organ. Instead, it was an embodiment of the best of the Reformed intellectual tradition: thoughtful, curious, examining culture through a particular biblical lens and inviting anyone with a web connection to come have a look. It’s not the only casualty of the CRC’s ideological purge (someone else can speak to the muzzling of The Banner’s editorial voice), but Think Christian had an impressive run, so today I raise my morning coffee in commemoration.

The site’s bread and butter was short posts exploring a new pop culture offering and asking, “How does this show, movie, music, game, or piece of online culture interact with God’s story?” Unlike more dogmatic faith-and-culture websites, the question was never just “Is this good or bad?” or “Is it okay for Christians?” but how a cultural text is doing what it’s doing—how being the vital question for arts criticism.

Over the years we got explorations of Taylor Swift, A Tribe Called Quest, The Bear, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Squid Game, Bojack Horseman, Super Smash Bros., Kendrick Lamar, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and so much more. Over  the years the site inspired readers to discover new works of art or simply laugh out loud at a well-phrased question like “Do We Really Need Christian Lofi?”

The site’s driving force was producer-editor Josh Larsen, who nurtured a collective of writers and expanded the site into a video channel, a movie club, a podcast, a series of e-books, and on. (Fear not, you can still find his film criticism in his newsletter, on the podcast Filmspotting, and in his books.)

Some of my favorite posts on the site brought me back to familiar media with fresh eyes. In a perceptive piece on the mundane aesthetics of The Office, Bethany Keeley-Jonker considers  how the show uses the tedium of fluorescent cubicle life to help us notice how the sublime breaks into the everyday: Much of my life feels like an episode of The Office: full of difficult people, like me, being difficult and self-involved and toiling away at nothing particularly important. But God shows us over and over again that regular people in everyday places are exactly the ones he works through. We just have to listen for God’s voice, even if we’re in the mall food court.

It’s easy for me to forget, with my Spotify and Netflix queues loaded with stuff to check out, how hungry I have been in the past for thoughtful guides who can help make sense of the torrent of pop culture. There are folks out there starved for this kind of guidance. I’ve met them.  (They all seem to be Pedro the Lion fans for some reason.)  Their eyes light up at the possibility that they don’t need to choose between sacred and profane art, that they can use their spiritual tradition to discern what’s valuable and what’s not in mass culture. Think Christian’s tagline, “There’s no such thing as secular,” expresses the conviction that every square inch of culture and creation can be a place to listen for God’s activity.

What’s not hard to remember is how wearisome it can be to navigate the digital world solely through algorithms that are constantly pushing more content at us. In that context, a calm human voice can itself be an act of grace. “More than ever, Christians are tempted to let their ears grow dull, wearied by the constant barrage of different perspectives,” Chad Ashby writes in a piece on pop music. “However, Dietrich Bonhoeffer astutely notes, ‘He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either. . . We should listen with the ears of God that we may speak the word of God.’. . . Listening is a spiritual act.”

When institutions no longer support the arts or cultural engagement, it says something clear about what they value. Like Josh in his farewell post, I urge you to support the publications and guides who you appreciate.

Even thinking in terms of institutional publications feels countercultural in a world of independent influencers on YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and other platforms. Our dominant forms of distribution are always changing. I recently listened to a compelling exploration of how Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of vertical video contributed to his stunning victory in the New York City mayoral primary. In just the last few years, the influence of Twitter, whose text-based format encourages opinionating and argument, has waned in favor of video on TikTok and Instagram, which may encourage a bit more social generosity—at least that was the premise of the two journalists on this podcast. There’s still plenty of drek on TikTok and Instagram, but it struck me as a plausible possibility—and a worthy topic for a Think Christian post.

To which I say yes to tech innovation and new forms of expression, and yes to independent voices, and yes as well to collectives unified by a shared spirit, and yes—critically—to institutional support. We need them all.