“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.
“After the K-shaped Recovery” – Here is Andy Crouch from the 2021 Praxis Redemptive Imagination Summit: “To begin, consider a simple thought, counter-intuitive in one sense and almost indisputable in another sense: In all likelihood, in the history of the 2020s, Covid-19 will be a footnote. When our great-grandchildren think about the 2020s, they will probably remember the pandemic just as little as we—until last March—remembered the Spanish Flu when we thought about the 1920s. Pandemics and other natural disasters are rarely history-shaping events by themselves. Instead, natural disasters accelerate and intensify cultural realities and trends. This is why we wrote last year that the lasting ‘ice age,’ the long-term effects of Covid-19, would be more about economy than epidemiology. The little ice age would not so much be the twelve to eighteen months of pandemic ‘winter’ itself, but the dislocation and social change that would be left behind. Today we see three major dislocations, not caused by the pandemic but accelerated by it, that will shape the horizon of redemptive action in the next decade.”
“New Louvre Director to Resurrect Plans for Long-Debated Byzantine and Coptic Art Department” – Alex Greenberger in ARTnews: “In one of her first moves as the newly appointed president of the Louvre, Laurence des Cars plans to formally launch a department devoted to Byzantine and Coptic art at the Paris museum. If that department comes to fruition, it would signify a break with the Louvre’s current president, Jean-Luc Martinez, who had deemed its formation unnecessary, and a willingness to expand the ways the museum presents religious art. ‘It is a magnificent collection that deserves a department in its own right,’ des Cars said in an interview with the French radio station France Inter. In 2014, Martinez called the department ‘not an emergency.’ At the time, the Louvre owned 10,000 Coptic objects and 1,000 Byzantine artworks, according to a report by the French Roman Catholic newspaper La Croix. At the time, just 750 of those 11,000 works were on display, and it has historically been difficult to view them together in one designated space.”
“Hundreds gather at historic Tulsa church’s prayer wall” – Peter Smith at APNews: “Hundreds gathered Monday for an interfaith service dedicating a prayer wall outside historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood on the centennial of the first day of one of the deadliest racist massacres in the nation. National civil rights leaders, including the Revs. Jesse Jackson and William Barber, joined multiple local faith leaders offering prayers and remarks outside the church that was under construction and largely destroyed when a white mob descended on the prosperous Black neighborhood in 1921, burning, killing, looting and leveling a 35-square-block area. Estimates of the death toll range from dozens to 300.”
“New dark matter map reveals cosmic mystery” – From Pallab Ghosh at BBC News: “An international team of researchers has created the largest and most detailed map of the distribution of so-called dark matter in the Universe. The results are a surprise because they show that it is slightly smoother and more spread out than the current best theories predict. The observation appears to stray from Einstein’s theory of general relativity – posing a conundrum for researchers. The results have been published by the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration. Dark Matter is an invisible substance that permeates space. It accounts for 80% of the matter in the Universe. Astronomers were able to work out where it was because it distorts light from distant stars. The greater the distortion, the greater the concentration of dark matter. Dr Niall Jeffrey, of École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, who pieced the map together, said that the result posed a ‘real problem’ for physics.”
“Terrence Malick and the Christian Story” – In research for something entirely different I came across this 2016 article by David Roark at RogerEbert.com on the film-making of Terrence Malick: “Wherever one lands on the polarizing style of Terrence Malick, no one would deny the spiritual gravitas of his work—cinema obsessed with and overwhelmed by the mystical and the metaphysical. As much as has been said and written about Malick, there still remains debate and confusion around the spirituality of his films. In attempting to mine meaning from his work, folks continue to land all over the map, seeing him as everything from a pantheist to an agnostic. The sense of mystery is compounded because Malick is an artist before he is a theologian or philosopher, and because he hasn’t given an interview about his own films since 1979. All that said, I believe Malick’s cinema is not vaguely or ambivalently religious or spiritual but is, in fact, distinctly and explicitly Christian.”
“Christian pastor in Laos will avoid jail if he promises not to preach for a year” – This puts perspective on the problems I face after preaching certain sermons. “A Christian pastor, held in police detention in the Southeast Asian country of Laos for a year, has been spared jail after he was made to sign documents swearing not to preach until 2022. A court convicted Sithon Thippavong, 35, in April of “disrupting unity” and “creating disorder” after he was found to have held church services in Savannakhet province without government permission. The church leader, who started his ministry among villagers in southern Savannakhet in 2011, was arrested on 15th March, 2020.”
Music: Solar., “Lost in My Mind”
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