Memories stirred inspiration in me while I traveled to visit and support my 91-year-old mother this past November. As the plane descended, I could see my old neighborhoods below. And suddenly, as if I were watching a movie, I saw myself too—eight years old, walking to the bus stop near our home.

That bus stop was where I imagined the future.

Looking back, I’m surprised by how hopeful and optimistic my childhood imaginings were. I grew up in the shadow of the turbulent 1960s and the “malaise” era of the 1970s, a time Jimmy Carter famously described in a 1979 address to the nation. By any reasonable measure, it was not an era that made hope easy. And yet, I believed—without fully understanding why—that life and the world were going to get better, not worse.

When Ronald Reagan later came along, I was too young to think in terms of policy. What I registered from his message was something more human: hope. I had a sense that optimism was permissible again; it was not foolish or naïve to believe that the future could be better. This mattered to me not because I held a political disposition, but because I was searching for ideas that suggested my life—and our nation’s shared future—had promise and possibility.

That distinction matters. What I’m making here is not a political argument, but a philosophical one: ideas matter.

Richard Weaver captured this plainly in his book Ideas Have Consequences. Long before him, Victor Hugo observed that armies can be resisted—but ideas cannot. And still earlier, French writer Émile Souvestre said, “There is something more powerful than strength, than courage, than genius itself: it is the idea whose time has come.” Different thinkers, same insight.

History is ultimately not shaped by inventions, power, leaders, or culture. Those are expressions, not origins. What shapes the future—quietly, persistently, and often invisibly—are ideas.

And when ideas are hollow, so is the world they create.

I was struck recently by a line from the late writer, editor, and commentator Norman Podhoretz, spoken decades ago but uncannily relevant now:

Ideas, in my judgment, are the moving forces of history. I’m the opposite of a Marxist. I don’t think “It’s the economy, stupid,” that drives history, I think it’s ideas in the heads of men …

Norman Podhoretz

I had been reading Podhoretz after his recent death—not because I agree with him on everything, but because understanding how ideas spread, harden, and mobilize people matters if we want to understand how the world changes. Those who create enduring influence are leaders who understand the power of ideas: Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King Jr., Hannah Arendt. Different eras, different contexts, but each figure became a catalyst for a different world—in most cases, a better one.

Many of these figures are expressions of what John F. Kennedy called the “New Frontier.” The New Frontier wasn’t a policy platform first—it was an idea. An appeal to imagination, sacrifice, and shared purpose. 

His brother Robert Kennedy put words to what that kind of change really looks like. Speaking to students in South Africa in 1966, at the height of apartheid, he said this:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation” speech 

That wasn’t sentiment. It was history spoken in advance.

Today, we live in a world more connected than any generation before us. Screens give us unprecedented power to spread ideas. And yet those same screens often dilute truth into misinformation, outrage, and emotional manipulation—because the dominant incentive is not wisdom or formation, but attention and profit. Advertisers are the customers. We are the pool in which they fish.

This isn’t a technology problem at its core. It’s a meaning problem.

When money becomes the organizing principle of life—not as a tool, but as an identity—it hollows out individuals and cultures alike. It becomes easier to dehumanize, polarize, justify cruelty, and retreat into tribes. Not because people are evil, but because they are unformed.

And yet, despite all this, the desire remains. We don’t want to live this way. We want to be the ripple. We want lives that matter. We want communities where we can sit next to one another—at churches and schools, in neighborhoods and stadiums—and remember that we share something deeper than our economic, political, or even religious positions.

History suggests that kind of unity has only emerged in rare moments. And in every case, it has involved a deep commitment to something higher than the self. For me, that “something” has always been Jesus—not as a slogan or symbol, but as a person whose walk with God made him unusually free, courageous, and generative. 

Jesus went through many towns and villages. He taught in their synagogues. He preached the good news of the kingdom of God. He healed every disease and sickness. [36] Whenever crowds came to Him, He had compassion for them because they were so deeply distraught, malaised, and heart-broken. They seemed to Him like lost sheep without a shepherd. [37] Jesus understood what an awesome task was before Him, so He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. [38] Ask the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into His harvest field.”

Matthew 9:35-38 Voice

Jesus is and remains the only one who can produce this type of world.  He alone possessed, proclaimed, and passed on the most transformative idea in history. He formed people who outlived him, outlasted empires, and changed the world one relationship at a time.

Through all this upheaval, God’s message spread to new frontiers and attracted more and more people.

Acts 12:24 Voice

That is the vision I’m calling The Spiritual Frontier—and it’s what this newsletter is becoming.

Ambitious? Yes.
Unfashionable? Often.
Impossible? History says otherwise.

It has happened.
It can happen.
And it will happen—if enough of us refuse to be blinded by our lostness and choose instead to become ripples of hope.

Keep your eye on your inbox over the next several weeks as we launch The Spiritual Frontier. Let’s discover and spread the ideas that can change the world.