President Joe Biden is promising the world that “America is back,” but his effort to reclaim global leadership shouldn’t come at the expense of the country’s closest friends. At a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken sharply criticized Germany’s efforts to get more natural gas from Russia through a pipeline project known as Nord Stream 2.

“Everyone knows it is impossible to turn the eyeball around, such that the pupil can peer inside the skull.” So says the narrator of Stanislaw Lem’s 1974 short story, “The Mask,” in which a young woman struggles to describe the experience of realizing that, under her skin, she is a robot.

As a single person wandering through the world, it can be difficult to find someone who loves all the right things: parks, subways, bike lanes, human-scale buildings, high-density housing, debates over the ideal length of a city block. Even on a dating app, you can’t always tell from a profile who might be thinking, behind a smile, I hate cars.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, I dedicated my life to Jesus and became a Christian. As one of the few Asians at my school, outside Atlanta, I found refuge in local Korean churches, where I met like-minded friends.Week by week, our hangouts after church became less about finding comfort in our Korean American selves and more about finding our identity in Christ. A big part of forming a Christian identity when I was young was about waiting to have sex until marriage.