“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.
“America Could Lose 10 Million Christians to Mass Deportation” – Andy Olsen in Christianity Today: “During his final Bible study before the government forced him to leave the United States, pastor Eduardo Martorano asked his congregants to take care of his library. The Venezuelan man had accumulated a formidable book collection during seminary in Michigan and his early days in ministry. He called it ‘a treasure.’ He had moved all that paper and ink across the country when Iglesia La Vid, a small Spanish-language congregation in Laredo, Texas, invited him to serve as its pastor in 2021. But on January 29, Martorano’s birthday, the pastor learned that the Trump administration had canceled Temporary Protected Status, or TPS—the immigration program that enabled him and his wife to live in the US and to lead a church—for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans. They had two months to self-remove, as immigration lawyers put it, or they could be deported.”
“The Fierce Urgency of Now” – Steve Porter in Conversatio: “The study and engagement of Christian spiritual formation is the most sacrificial thing we can do for others. If we are truly on the narrow path of Jesus, then we will increasingly deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him (Matt 16:24). The denial of and death to self is the only way to wholeheartedly perceive the needs of others above our own. And once we see others’ needs in that manner, we will be compelled by love to reach out to those in greatest need who we are best-positioned to help. In his book The Disappearance of Moral Knowledge, Dallas Willard describes ‘good persons’ as:
individuals who are intent upon advancing the various goods of human life with which they are effectively in contact, in a manner that respects the relative degrees of importance of those goods and the extent to which their actions can actually promote the existence and maintenance of those goods.
Willard goes on to write that the saint is ‘one who to a significant degree chooses to forego or to risk foregoing enjoyment of goods which it would not be wrong for them to enjoy, for the sake of advancing other goods, usually goods to be enjoyed by others, but sometimes abstract goods such as truth or justice or beauty.’ As usual, Willard’s words deserve some attention. For our purposes, he is saying that the truly good person is a person pervaded with agape love. Such persons stand ready to forego their own good to advance the good of others.”
“Can the Jesus of History Support the Christ of Faith?” – Ross Douthat in The New York Times: “The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, ‘We’re Still Not Done With Jesus,’ on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity. In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions. Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik’s work. But I will admit that I had been hoping — wishcasting? — that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on ‘rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,’ while taking for granted that ‘nothing happened quite as related.’ To be clear, I would not expect a non-Christian writer to simply embrace the thesis that events in the New Testament did mostly happen as related. But readers who look at the headline of Gopnik’s essay and its implicit questions — We aren’t done with Jesus? Why aren’t we? — deserve a fuller answer than you can get from just considering the range of perspectives he presents. They deserve an explanation of how the persistence of Christianity is connected not just to the Gospel story’s moral or mythopoetic power, but to the enduring plausibility of its historical claims even in the face of so many determined debunking efforts.”
“Kingsnorth’s Machine” – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “I see that Paul Kingsnorth is publishing in book form his thoughts on The Machine. His writings on this subject have, I think, received more attention than anything else he has written, and yet I have not found them especially interesting or helpful — and I love some of Kingsnorth’s earlier work. As I read him, he’s basically restating what I have called the SCT: the Standard Critique of Technology….“The Machine” is Kingsnorth’s term for what Neil Postman calls “Technopoly,” but I don’t think his actual views are significantly different than those of his predecessors. But I’ll probably read the book and hope to be surprised…My own view continues to be that we really don’t need more diagnoses of our situation. We know what afflicts us.”
“Tim Keller on Forgiveness” – John Inazu on his Substack, Some Assembly Required, from a few years back: “My past two newsletters have examined the topic of forgiveness. Two weeks ago, I wrote about forgiving friends and family who made pandemic choices different from our own. Some strong negative responses to these ideas prompted me to suggest last week that forgiveness may at times be “incomprehensible,” but that doesn’t make it impossible or unimportant. Forgiveness is challenging, and forgiveness matters personally and politically. I thought the topic merited one more engagement, so I reached out to my friend, Tim Keller. Tim founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and is the author of a number of bestselling books. In 2020, he and I co-edited Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference. Tim’s latest book, out just this month, is Forgive: Why Should I and How Can I? It explores the power of forgiveness and how we can practice it in our lives. Here are a few highlights from our conversation.”
“Contemplative Movies for Lent” – Blake Oliver and Jacob A. Davis at Anglican Compass: “The season of Lent is a time for contemplation. The Ash Wednesday service in the Book of Common Prayer calls us to observe the season ‘by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and alms-giving; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word’”’ (BCP 2019, pg. 544). In its call for self-examination and repentance, Lent reminds us that we are sinful and that we need salvation, which only God can provide through Jesus Christ. In reading and meditating on God’s holy Word, we acknowledge the resulting curse of our fall: that we are dust, and to dust we shall return (Genesis 3:19). It’s often hard to capture the essence of all this in a movie. Film is, after all, a visual art form, and contemplation is intrinsically inward and harder to portray in visual form. Plus, major studios also usually only greenlight ideas that will turn a huge profit. Contemplative films or dramas that wrestle with faith have often struggled at the box office. However, this is even more true when modern audiences have been geared to have even shorter attention spans. To the average audience, these long-form stories risk being considered the worst thing a film can be: boring. Still, some movies stand out for their ability to capture the difficulties of faith in a fallen world, the serious struggle against sin, and the need to remember our role in God’s kingdom. Each of these is worth watching during Lent (or anytime!).”
Music: Fernando Ortega, “Trisagion,” from Come Down, O Love Divine
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Matthew Erickson 