“I got this.” Recently, a medical student was seeing a patient on my schedule who was presenting with anxiety. The student reviewed her chart, knocked on the door, and entered the room with a warm smile. Fifteen minutes later, he was out and presenting her story to me. After glancing down at the chicken scratch on his folded sheet of paper, he looked at me with a confident expression that said it all: “I got this.” There were many patients this student had seen with me that day that had challenged if not confounded him. Unexplained fatigue in one, atypical chest pain in another, brittle diabetes in a third. As a result, we had wide-ranging discussions about how to approach uncertainty in clinical practice—thoughtful questioning, a focused exam, a logical differential diagnosis, and a sensible plan to move forward. But above all, we discussed how good…

Having grown up in a “mixed” family, if the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs are playing head-to-head, I will cheer for the Cardinals (my dad’s team), but other than that, it’s “Go Cubs Go,” thanks to my mother and my grandmother. I tried to hold it together when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, but I admit, I started crying when I called my mom after the last out. There were just too many great memories that came flooding back. I became especially emotional thinking about my grandma, whose great loves in this life were the Catholic Church, her family, and the Chicago Cubs!  A couple of months later, I read a story that has stuck with me ever since. It was of a man who had lost his dad to cancer. Before his dad was sick, both being true Cubs fans, they…

Even as the positive reviews poured in and word-of-mouth continued to spread like wildfire, I’m sure that many Christians were—and still are—skeptical of The Chosen. Admittedly, I was once one of them. The skepticism is understandable. For one thing, the independent, crowd-funded, multi-season series about the life of Christ is the first of its kind—a high-risk and experimental production. The series (though its producers encourage viewers to read the Gospels) is also loosely based on Scripture, relying mostly upon the imaginative creativity of its writers—an approach fraught with difficulties and dangers. But most importantly, the series seems, at first glance, like the kind of project geared toward the Christian film market—a market generally saturated with soft-focus sentimentality and formulaic morality tales.  But from the first episode onward, it’s clear that Dallas Jenkins and the whole cast and crew of…