“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 Mental Health Crisis Ministers Struggle to Talk About” – Adam MacInnis in Christianity Today: “Nicholas Davis thanks God he’s still alive. That wasn’t his plan. He was a young man serving as senior pastor at a Presbyterian church in Southern California. And he was drowning in anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide. What started as a mundane case of overwork or maybe burnout became something much more dangerous. ‘It was a very busy season,’ Davis told Christianity Today, ‘kind of taking on too much and not realizing that I was in the midst of too much.’ He had never struggled with mental health growing up. In 2015, though, it just felt as if his mind was shutting down and his body was overwhelmed with an impossible weight. He barely slept for weeks. But it eventually subsided. Then, in 2019, life at the Presbyterian Church in America was very busy, and it happened again. ‘I bit off way too much and kind of hit a wall,” he said. “I had never had a panic attack before, so I thought it was a heart attack.’ Still, he didn’t seek help from a psychiatrist. He has his wife, Gina, to thank for eventually getting him help. She was, at first, just hoping that he could be prescribed something to help him sleep and that a little regular rest would alleviate the anxiety. So she made an appointment and made him go. While talking to the doctor, Davis mentioned he had had thoughts about ending his life. Following protocol, the psychiatrist admitted Davis for care. Today, Davis is glad he did.”
“California Son: On the Patron Saint of Lost Western People” – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule: “Last year I was invited to give a talk about Christianity and nature at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. After the talk, I took some questions from the audience. One of the questions, asked in sweet innocence, was a deadly honeytrap for a visiting Englishman: ‘What do you think of America?’ I had just been talking about the dangers to the soul of the technological culture of Silicon Valley, and the impact of its machine-like ways of thinking on the world, so I said the first thing that came into my head. This is rarely a good idea, especially in public. ‘America is Babylon,’ I said. Then, remembering I was speaking to an audience of Americans, I quickly added a qualification. ‘It’s Babylon,’ I said, ‘but it might also be the place that counters Babylon. It’s as if one force somehow begets the other. After all, California is home to Silicon Valley, but it’s also home to the monastery of Seraphim Rose.’ Somebody else in the audience put their hand up. ‘Who’s Seraphim Rose?’ they asked. It was a fair question. The strange name I had conjured is hardly widely known. It is the name of a man who in many ways embodied the twentieth-century West’s aching search for meaning.”
“Review: Charles Taylor on how poetry expresses our deepest yearnings” – James K. A. Smith in America: “To my mind, the career of the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor embodies the very spirit of ‘Gaudium et Spes,’ the Second Vatican Council’s revolutionary vision for the church’s engagement with the modern world. Its famous opening paragraph reads like the backstory of Taylor’s body of work over 60 years: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts..” In massive—and massively influential—books like Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, The Language Animal and now Cosmic Connections, Taylor sympathetically enters into the grief and anguish, the joys and hopes of modern humanity. He is a philosopher of remarkable erudition, but his philosophical brilliance is, fundamentally, an act of service to fellow humans. Taylor is a thinker with heart. His rigorous philosophical analysis is, in the end, existential: He wants to help us understand ourselves. He wants to help us articulate our longings and losses. He wants to hear, even in our grief and anguish, a still small whisper that calls us to something more. He wants us to find fulfillment.”
“There’s No Turning Back from Pluralism in America” – Aaron M. Renn in his newsletter: “When I read about pluralism, or multiculturalism, it is often debated as a normative matter. That is, is it a good thing or not? In reality, it’s a factual matter. Empirically, pluralism is an actually existing reality in the United States, and will be for the foreseeable future. There are officially 48 million foreign-born people in the United States. I estimate that there are 80-100 million people who are descended from post-1965 immigration. Even if Donald Trump successfully deported every illegal immigrant in the country, which isn’t going to happen, there would still be tens of millions of foreign-born people and their descendants living here. The impact of this has transformed the majority of the communities in the country. For example, the city of Indianapolis, once a byword for being an overwhelmingly white flyover city, is today majority minority. These new populations are highly diverse, consisting of a vast panoply of different national, ethnic, and religious groups. White America itself has also fractured socially, culturally, and politically into at least two major groups, red and blue. Few people have truly taken the measure of the implications of these changes.”
“Rev. William Barber arrested in Capitol Rotunda after praying against Republican-led budget” – Jack Jenkins in Religion News Service: “Prominent pastor and anti-poverty activist the Rev. William Barber and two others were arrested while praying in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Monday (April 28), an action he said would be part of a recurring series of demonstrations aimed at challenging the Republican-led budget bill. The arrests occurred roughly 15 minutes after Barber, the Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Steve Swayne, director of St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, started praying in the Rotunda as dozens of police stood nearby, some prepared with plastic handcuffs. The three took turns praying, lamenting potential budget cuts to social safety-net programs such as Medicaid, often chanting together: “Against the conspiracy of cruelty, we plead the power of your mercy. ‘When we cannot depend on the courts and the legislative power of human beings, we can still depend on … the power of your love and your mercy and your truth,’ Barber said in the Rotunda as police began to surround him. While arresting protesters at the Capitol is not unusual, the response to Barber’s prayer was unusually dramatic: After issuing verbal warnings, dozens of officers expelled everyone in the Rotunda — including credentialed press — and shut the doors, obscuring any view. Press and others were then instructed to leave the floor entirely.”
“Hagia Sophia: Secrets of the 1,600-year-old megastructure that has survived the collapse of empires” – Ali Halit Dike at CNN: “Whether you’re a believer or not, visiting Hagia Sophia is a spiritual experience. The architectural genius of this place of worship — which was built as a church in 537CE before its conversion into a mosque in 1453 — creates an illusion of vastness. It feels like the space starts to expand when you enter the building. Acoustic alchemy transforms visitors’ murmurs into shimmering sounds, suspended weightless in the air, like echoes of a prayer in an ancient language. The art inside the building is a testament to coexistence. There is no other place on Earth where Christian mosaics of saints and Byzantine rulers are juxtaposed with Islamic calligraphy, also known as Hüsn-i Hat — large roundels displaying the names of Allah (God), the prophet Mohammed and the four caliphs, the leaders of Islam following the death of Mohammed….The current Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th century when Constantinople — as Istanbul was then called — was the heart of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire that emerged as Ancient Rome’s domination dwindled and ruled swathes of Europe and northern Africa, as far away as modern-day Spain, Libya, Egypt, and Turkey, until the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The building we see today isn’t original, having been preceded by two earlier churches at the same location — which were themselves built over a pagan temple.”
Music: Sandra McCracken, “We Will Feast,” from Steadfast (Live)
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Matthew Erickson 
Convicted, again, to pray for the pastors I know, especially my current pastor. I need to ask him how he’s doing more often, too.
I’m sure your pastor would appreciate it, Eric. Thanks for sharing.