Christianity Today October 2, 2026 9 min signal 2026-10-02

Caring for life in an inhuman age

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

October 1, 2026

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Illustration by Elizabeth Kaye / Source Images: Unsplash

What do you see when you walk into a room? I see groceries and mail on the counter. My wife, Kristin, sees dirt on the floor. I’m a tidy person; she’s a clean person. Clutter bothers me; encrusted dirt and stains bother her.

At Kristin’s request, I recently learned to steam-mop our kitchen floor. First, I had to sweep it. Then I vacuumed it. That much I had done before, a good many times. Then I filled the steam mop’s water tank and made sure the pad was firmly fixed to the mophead. Our kitchen floor’s visible layer is what you might call vintage linoleum. Its design contains some light browns and yellows, and its colors have faded with the decades, so it’s not always easy to distinguish a cleanable stain from time’s enduring signature.

I did my best. Some stains required repeated passes, back-and-forth scrubbing, and more muscle than I expected. Our kitchen is not large, but the combined sweeping and vacuuming and steam mopping took almost an hour.

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I steam-mopped the kitchen floor in the morning. That evening, as I was helping Kristin prepare dinner, I noticed new stains on the floor. Crumbs and stray bits of plastic food wrappings had already begun to dot the landscape. A few clods of dirt tracked in by kids’ shoes had already been smooshed into flat brown blotches.

I’m sure I noticed these assaults on cleanliness more quickly because of the hour of work I had put in that morning. And these insults to the floor hurt me far more than they would have a day earlier. Having learned to steam-mop the floor and having done the job once, I am now newly bothered by dirt on it. My work of steam-mopping has changed my relationship not only with the floor but also with everything that could defile it.

Having maintained the floor, I feel a new sense of ownership. Having cared for the floor, I now care about it.

To speak of caring for an object like a floor is to use the word care metaphorically. To speak literally, to care is to cherish life in all its forms. To care is to nurture, to do what it takes to sustain life and help it flourish. We owe our most concrete duties of care to those who depend on us. When children are young, they depend almost entirely on their parents. When parents grow old, they depend increasingly on their children. The more directly someone else depends on you, the greater your duty to care for him or her.

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Because duties of care are rooted in nature, Scripture often presupposes the subject rather than foregrounding it. But sometimes the Bible uses the language of care explicitly. For instance, Paul reminds husbands that they naturally nourish and cherish their own bodies, as Christ does for the church, and so they must do for their wives (Eph. 5:29).

Paul also reminds the church in Ephesus that a believing widow should be cared for, first and foremost, by her family members, so the church can care for those who have no one else to care for them (1 Tim. 5:16). Speaking of the body of Christ, Paul writes that the members should “have the same care for one another” (1 Cor. 12:25, ESV). And Peter exhorts us to cast all our anxieties on God, “because he cares for you” (1 Pet. 5:7).

Care sees that life is not a machine but a miracle, something you cannot make or do. It’s something you can only understand in part, not exhaustively explain. By familiar metaphor we say you “have” life, but life is not anyone’s possession: You can neither summon nor control it. Though life is yours, life is beyond you—and beneath and around and above and through you. Though you can destroy life, you cannot create it. To try to control life is to degrade, diminish, and risk extinguishing it.

Care is the proper response to what you cannot make but can only help or harm. Care is the right way to handle what you cannot give or demand but only steward.

Care sees that every human life—regardless of ability, potential, or achievement—is good. The good that love sees in human life is basic, intrinsic, and metaphysical. Care takes the goodness of life as given, not contingent, as premise, not conclusion. The good that care sees in life does not depend on how moral someone is or how much enjoyment someone’s life affords. Care is love’s reflex. Care is affection and action that follow love’s affirmation: “It is good that you exist.” If life is good, then it deserves to be protected and promoted, conserved and sustained, helped to unfurl and thrive. Care is proper responsiveness to life’s goodness.

Care recognizes that accepting and appreciating are more basic to life than choosing and controlling. Life itself, whether human or any other form, is not a product we can make. Instead, it is only ever a gift we can receive. And it is more than the sum of its organic elements and processes. Christians know where that “more” comes from. Scripture teaches us God is the joyful giver of that “more”—that mystery, miracle, and gift. Life itself is an unmerited good. Care is the proper reception the gift demands, and it is the way we offer a right return on what we have received.

Today we often treat the goodness of life as contingent on achievement. For Socrates, the unexamined life was not worth living; in the values of the modern West, the unproductive life is not worth living.

Usually, people do not say so out loud, but occasionally they do. For instance, in a 2008 interview, the distinguished English philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock made the following recommendation regarding people suffering from dementia: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives—your family’s lives—and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.” She suggested, in consequence, that people with dementia should take their own lives and that the state should help.

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Similarly, addressing a tweet from someone who said she would be faced with “a real ethical dilemma” if she became pregnant with a baby who had Down syndrome, Richard Dawkins replied, “Abort it and try again.” While many would not say this as starkly or publicly, their actions prove their agreement. For instance, in Denmark in 2015, 98 percent of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome were aborted.

By contrast, care discerns and declares that the goodness of a human life does not depend on ability, potential, or achievement.

Imagine yourself caring, year after year, decade after decade, for someone who has profound intellectual disabilities. What makes that care worthwhile? Not anything you hope the one you’re caring for will one day achieve, accomplish, or experience.

Instead, care sees, rightly, that it is good this person is alive, and that his or her humanity itself bears dignity and deserves love. Care sees, rightly, that the costs of care are justified by the infinite worth of every human life, not by any potential future achievement. Care sees that every human life is good beyond price.

Care views every life as cause for celebration. Care sees every birth as cause for congratulations. Care’s first word over every human life, no matter how difficult or diminished, echoes God’s word over creation: “good,” even “very good” (Gen. 1:31).

Another way to say this is that care sees every human life as invaluable and inviolable. If it is not the case that every human life is invaluable, then the continuance of some human lives will depend on calculations of profit and loss. Some people will get to keep living only if others judge their lives as bringing sufficient gain. Who gets to make those calculations? Where do they set the bar? And who decides whose life gets audited?

Either human life is invaluable, or some other value sets itself above human life as the standard against which life is measured. What value would you set above and against life?

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If human life is invaluable, then it is inviolable. Another word for inviolable is sacred. Holy. Something not to be defaced or defiled. Something not to be disregarded or dismissed. Something not to be messed with on pain of great harm to the one who does the messing. Care both presupposes and promotes the twin convictions that human life is invaluable and inviolable.

Care also sees that the human body is good. Our bodies break and fail. They betray us, make messes of us, and stop working in maddeningly mysterious ways. Even when they more or less work properly, our bodies are a tangle of limits. Yet for all that, care sees that the human body is not a prison to be escaped or a boundary to be broken. Instead, care puts its money where another body’s mouth is.

It is one thing to say that it’s good for the body’s needs to be met, its hunger satisfied, its thirst quenched, its wounds dressed. It’s another to be the one to cook the food, offer the drink, and clean the wounds. It’s cheap for me to wish that your needs be met; it’s costly to meet them (James 2:16). Care makes up the difference.

Bobby Jamieson is visiting professor of biblical and theological studies at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City and the author of several books, including Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, Care: Cherishing Life in an Inhuman Age.

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