“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within the articles linked from this page, but I have read them myself in order to make me think more deeply.

“How I’m Talking to My Kids About the Derek Chauvin Verdict” – Esau McCaulley, assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, in The New York Times: “So we wade into the troubled waters. I let them all know that there is no escape from these issues. There is no place to hide. There is no world where they can live, learn, fall in and out of love, other than the one they inhabit. A basic teaching of Christianity is that humans are capable of profound and confounding evil. That is not a truth that exists only outside the students. It also exists within them. They must see the world for what it is. Then they must get about the work of living in a world that too often devalues Black and brown lives. There have been and will be times when that disregard will stun them to silence. In those moments, they may be able to lift only half-coherent prayers and laments to God.”

“My Dream, My Taste” – I hope you enjoy this short film by Emily Downe that explores the nature of what it means to be human and how we have become confused about that in our contemporary milieu. This film is based on an audio clip from episode 50 of The Sacred podcast with Professor Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Founder and Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. The film brings us into the world of a young girl who, in pursuit of her dreams, ends up detached from others and the world around her.

“The Great Unsettling: Simone Weil and the need for roots” – Paul Kingsnorth writes on the need for roots and the great unsettling we are experiencing in our world: “Though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting human cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they – always, without fail – worship and communicate with in some form. We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril….When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial.”

“Reconciliation Is Spiritual Formation: A framework for organizational practice” – David M. Bailey in Comment: “This past Christmas, my wife Joy and I hired my fourteen-year-old nephew to do some housecleaning and put up our Christmas tree. All was routine, when out of the blue, a loud crash reverberated through the walls. My nephew ran to the other room to see what it was before casually walking back out. Joy looked up and asked him, “What was it?” He answered nonchalantly, ‘Oh, something fell.’ ‘Well did you pick it up?’ Joy asked. ‘No,’ he responded, ‘I wasn’t the one that made it fall.’ When it comes to the issue of race in America, there are many people who see the evidence of something fallen and broken, and their response is to look at it, turn around, and say, ‘I’m not to blame, so I’m not going to take any responsibility for it.’ Others, upon awakening to the visible and less visible realities of inequity, quickly become overwhelmed. They recognize that the problems of race were created over a 350-year period before our government said, ‘It’s illegal to continue in this way.’ They can only respond with the question, ‘What in the world can I do?'”

“ISIS Executes Christian Businessman Kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai” – Jayson Casper at Christianity Today: “The Islamic State has claimed another Christian victim. And Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has won another martyr. ‘We are telling our kids that their grandfather is now a saint in the highest places of heaven,’ stated Peter Salama of his 62-year-old father, Nabil Habashi Salama, executed by the ISIS affiliate in north Sinai. ‘We are so joyful for him.’ The Salamas are known as one of the oldest Coptic families in Bir al-Abd on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Nabil was a jeweler, owning also mobile phone and clothing shops in the area. Peter said ISIS targeted his father for his share in building the city’s St. Mary Church.”

“Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church and What the Bible Has to Say” – Robert S. Smith reviews Preston Sprinkle’s new book Embodied at Themelios: “Of all the recent evangelical engagements with the questions raised by transgender experience, Preston Sprinkle’s Embodied is, arguably, the most comprehensive, penetrating and compelling. The book not only addresses the cultural, medical, psychological and social angles of the trans phenomenon, but also includes several chapters of incisive biblical exposition and valuable theological exploration (plus 43 pages of endnotes). Although not without the occasional inconsistency, Embodied is marked by a powerful commitment to biblical truth matched by an equally strong concern for real people. Accordingly, the work is set in a decidedly pastoral frame and is marked by a deeply compassionate tone throughout.”

Music: Leslie Odom, Jr., “Speak Now,” One Night in Miami: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack