“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.
“Cosmic Connections: Resonating with the World Through Poetry – a conversation between Charles Taylor & Miroslav Volf” – In For the Life of the World Podcast of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: “Has modern humanity lost its connection to the world outside our heads? And can our experience of art and poetry help train us for a more elevated resonance with the cosmos? In today’s episode, theologian Miroslav Volf interviews philosopher Charles Taylor about his latest book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. In it he turns to poetry to help articulate the human experience of the cosmos we’re a part of. Together they discuss the modern Enlightenment view of our relation to the world and its shortcomings; modern disenchantment and the prospects of reenchantment through art and poetry; Annie Dillard and the readiness to experience the world and what it’s always offering; how to hold the horrors of natural life with the transcendent joys; Charles recites some of William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’; how to become fully arrested by beauty; and the value we find in human experience of the world.”
“Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson” – Karen Swallow Prior at The Acton Institute: “The best part of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is Genesis. I make this observation sincerely, intending no disparagement of Robinson’s insightful reading of the first book of the Bible. But it was a surprise and delight to pick up Reading Genesis, thumb through it for the first time, and discover that the last third of its 344 pages consists of the book of Genesis itself. What an appropriate, generous, and foreseeing inclusion. To be sure, most readers of Reading Genesis likely have copies of the Bible already, but it is lovely to have the text being discussed right there at one’s fingertips. Besides, given how wide Robinson’s audience is, some readers of the book may not have the Bible readily at hand. The inclusion of Genesis in the text is not only convenient; it’s generous from a publishing perspective, too, given the considerable costs of printing a book of any length, costs that include paper, ink, shipping weight, and so on. (Presumably, the version included is the King James, not only because of the literariness of the language, but also because copyright permission is not a factor.) What could be better than reading about Genesis with Genesis bound in the same volume? Well, one thing that could have been better is for Robinson to have more often and more consistently directed the reader to the specific passages of Genesis (chapter and verse) as she discussed them. Now, Reading Genesis isn’t intended to be a scholarly book (although Robinson is a scholar and writes like a scholar even when writing for a general audience), but Genesis is right there at the back of the book, after all.”
“Transform Your Prayer Life: 11 Essential Books on Prayer” – W. David O. Taylor at Word by Word featured in Logos: “While writing my book of prayers, Prayers for the Pilgrimage (IVP, 2024), I had plenty of opportunity to read and familiarize myself with a range of books both on prayer and of prayers, including:
- Saint Teresa’s Life of Prayer
- Andrew Murray’s The Ministry of Intercession
- Rainer Maria Rilke’s Prayers of a Young Poet
- John Baillie’s A Diary of Private Prayer
- Kayla Craig’s To Light Their Way
- Cláudio Carvalhaes’ Liturgies from Below
- William Barclay’s A Barclay Prayer Book
- Audrey Elledge and Elizabeth Moore’s Liturgies for Hope
In the list below, I offer you my top eleven books on and of prayer. While far from exhaustive or definitive, they are books that I have returned to repeatedly over the past few years. My hope is that they might serve as possible starters on the topic of prayer as well as encouragements to a renewed habit of prayer.”
“The Gulf and the Silence: Prayer vs Electricity” – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule: “Today was to be the day when my new series, The Sunday Pilgrimage, began. But the Earth had other ideas. On Friday, Storm Eowyn, apparently named after a character from Lord of the Rings, roared like an army of uruk-hai across Ireland. It brought down hundreds of trees, tore off a lot of roofs, and left 700,000 of us without electricity. Here in rural Galway the lights were out in the townlands for days. Many still are. Galway City lost its water supply. We lost all the things that happen when you press buttons without thinking about it. Silence came. We have a box of candles, matches, batteries and hurricane lamps stored for just this kind of occasion. Big bottles of water too, because our well runs on electricity. So do our solar panels, which switch off when the grid does. The stove that heats our front room is connected to a back boiler, so we can’t allow that to get too hot either when the grid is down. We’ve been talking about getting ourselves a generator for years, but we never get round to it. So much for self-sufficiency.”
“Pro-Life Laws Didn’t Kill These Women: When the media misrepresents maternal deaths, it can discourage other women from seeking the care they need” – Leah Libresco Sargeant in Commonplace: “After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, everyone, pro-life and pro-choice alike, waited with quiet dread for the first body to fall. Not the steady, rainfall-like pitter-patter of over 1,600 deaths per day of children in the womb. The first realbody. Not a puzzle of tiny limbs being reassembled in a products of conception lab, but a woman who had breathed and lived, and whose own heart would have kept on beating but for an abortion ban. The wait was longer than most of us, myself included, expected. In the days after Dobbs, trigger bans caused clinics to flicker closed—open—closed as injunctions and stays were hashed out in state courts. Abortion doctors called patients each morning to clarify whether abortion was legal today. Abortion funds committed to paying for women’s flights, hotels, and medical bills so that abortion would keep on happening, just somewhere else. There were odd attempts to conjure up victims. A JAMA paper pointed out that infant mortality went up compared to other states after Texas passed its heartbeat law. But this was because, as the paper pointed out, more children with congenital problems were being born in Texas. If they had been screened and aborted, as they might have been elsewhere, it would have counted as bettering infant health. Texas also had an increase in abandoned babies, some of whom have been found in time to be saved, while others died. Again, these deaths were reported as the fault of abortion laws. The implication is that when the children die earlier, in the privacy of a clinic, it’s liberation, but when they die publicly and visibly, it’s a tragedy. These two strains of reporting argued that abortion laws were obstructing the right kinds of deaths.”
“Trump’s First Week Sends Shudders Through Immigrant Churches and Ministries” – Andy Olsen in Christianity Today: “On the evening of January 20, Ángel and his wife relaxed on the bed in the room they rent from a family they know only a little. The woman looked at the same message on her phone she had been reading for what felt like forever: Your case was received, was all it ever said. Eight months ago, Ángel applied for a program that allowed Nicaraguans to enter the United States legally and work for a couple of years. The message from the American government did not change after Ángel came to Los Angeles on a tourist visa to rejoin his wife, who thanks to the program was already working as a hotel housekeeper. The message did not change despite promises from the business that had charged roughly $4,000 to ‘sponsor’ them for the program, or despite their later realization that the business was defrauding them and the US government. Ángel and his wife weren’t foolish to hope. The Biden administration designed the program, called humanitarian parole, for people like them—a way to flee the dangers of Nicaragua, where armed robbers had twice broken into their home, without violating America’s borders. Courts had upheld the program. And Ángel was the kind of immigrant Americans might welcome: an accountant who had worked for a consulting company helping Christian ministries overseas.”
Music: Jpk., “Proud (I Love You)“
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Matthew Erickson 
This is definitely a thought provoking list of resources.