“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 these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“The Mirrorball Self: An excerpt from Superbloom“ – Nicholas Carr at New Cartographies: “It happened quickly. Twenty-five years ago, at the century’s turn, we still talked about “going online” the way we talked about going to the movies or going out to eat. It was an experience outside ordinary experience, a special event bounded in time and, as wifi networks were scarce, space. You logged on, then you logged off. Now we’re never not online. The climate of social media, a clammy hothouse through which blows, as the writer Patricia Lockwood says, ‘the blizzard of everything,’ is the general climate. The digital information flow, incessant and efflorescent, almost pornographic in its blurring of the intimate and the public, has invaded our consciousness and, even more so, subconsciousness. Social media is, to use the psychological jargon, a priming mechanism of unprecedented intensity. It keeps us in a permanent state of anticipation, awaiting the next stimulus, craving the next glance at the screen. However banal the revelations that come through our apps, they’re always novel and they usually tell us something about ourselves. We know that, behind the screen, our social life continues to unfold around the clock, with or without our active participation. People are looking at us and talking to us or about us. We’re being sized up — envied, celebrated, shamed, shunned. We exist today in the liminal space between the material and the mediated, present when absent, absent when present.”
“Where the Magic Doesn’t Happen: How technology can interfere with moral formation at school, church, and home” – Andy Crouch at After Babel: “It’s amazing how often modern people talk about magic. To be modern, almost by definition, is to live without putting much stock in a supernatural “beyond” to the world. And yet, nearly every time a new technology is introduced, its promoters reach back to the ancient idea of magic to capture its significance. It was true of Steve Jobs at the dawn of the smartphone—Apple’s advertising for many years was saturated with promises of a ‘magical’ experience. And now it is true of the next wave of tech. Sam Altmann of OpenAI opens a recent essay: ‘In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.’ Once you start looking for the technology-magic connection, you’ll find it nearly everywhere—especially in the promotion phase, before the technology actually arrives. Even more surprising is how often we still talk about a specific magical tradition: the practice of alchemy. For centuries, alchemists sought to transmute all metals into gold, to escape the conditions of mortality, and perhaps even to create new forms of life that would answer to our command—all summed up in the quest for the substance known as ‘the Philosopher’s Stone.'”
“Images of the Invisible God: How icons avoid idolatry” – Jeff Reimer in Commonweal: “What happens when we look at an image of a person’s face—a painting, a drawing, a photograph? What the mind registers at first glance is not the parts but the whole: the expression, the demeanor, the visage. Only after we have instantly taken in the whole, recognized the face as the face of a person—a subject who addresses us, and not just an object—do we take in the various parts, as our eyes move over curve of nose, bloom of lip, shade of cheek….Gazing in devotion at an icon involves this double movement—a glance, a disorientation, a second finding. The face in an icon demands that the viewer enter into its world on its terms; and its terms are submission, suffering, holiness. One must find oneself addressed. One must first be mastered by the image before one can enter into it.”
“An Idol of Autonomy: How the push for medical aid in dying distorts our understanding of life” – Leah Libresco Sargeant in The Dispatch: “I changed my mind about euthanasia in June 2015. Until then, I had favored making ‘death with dignity’ accessible so that people could avoid the hardest part of dying. I believed (and still do) that medicine often prioritizes length of life over quality of life. I did (and do) hate the framing of a ‘battle’ with a terminal illness that is eventually lost. I don’t like the suggestion that the patient has an obligation to pursue any treatment, no matter how harrowing, before eventually being bested by his or her body. But then I read Rachel Aviv’s ‘The Death Treatment,’ her feature on Belgium’s euthanasia regime for The New Yorker. Aviv told the story of a Belgian mother who had struggled on and off with depression for many years. When she switched doctors, her treatment goal became completing suicide, not avoiding it. She died without her family knowing she had chosen a date or having the opportunity to intervene. That story changed my mind.”
“Temptation, the Cross, the Trinity, Knowledge and the University” – Dallas Willard at Conversatio: “In 1993 Dallas began teaching an intensive two-week residential course for Fuller Theological Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry program. His task was to teach about spiritual life in a systematic way so that its full connection to the work of the minister was clear. These recordings of the 2002 course are from an unknown student. Though a bulk of the course was usually centered on the nature and practice of disciplines, the beginning of the course dealt with more theological themes like the nature of spiritual reality and the end of the course dealt with topics in spirituality like vocational issues.”
“The Uncommonly Good Fiction of 2024: John Wilson on novels you won’t find on other year-end lists (and some forthcoming gems)” – John Wilson at Prufrock: “You may well be satiated by accounts of the best novels of 2024, fiction to keep an eye an out for in 2025, and so on. But I can assure you that most of the titles I mention here will not be ones that turned up repeatedly on the widely circulated lists. That’s not because I perversely set out to be ‘different.’ I am, as you may already know, a firm believer in the irreducibility of taste. (But aren’t some books ‘objectively bad,’ others ‘objectively good’? Of course! That’s a subject for another day.) In every publishing season, there are excellent books that (for some reason or another) don’t get near as much attention as they should.”
Music: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, “Joy,” from Wild God
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Matthew Erickson 