“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.
“Measuring the Good Life” – Brendan Case, Katelyn N. G. Long, Tyler J. Vanderweele, and Byron R. Johnson in Christianity Today: “Perhaps this sounds familiar: A church group spent a week in a developing country, building houses for people most Americans would consider desperately poor. Although proud of their work, some volunteers also voiced that, despite their many material needs, their hosts seemed to enjoy a deeper sense of happiness than many Americans living in affluent cities and comfortable suburbs. They were generous, with deep commitments to their faith, families, and communities. What’s going on? Are the perceptions of greater happiness or generosity merely a tourist’s fantasy, or are these reflections of deeper realities? How do we compare to our neighbors, whether down the street or across the globe? And what is ‘happiness’ anyway?…To better understand how flourishing is distributed globally and the key pathways of how individuals and communities attain it, we (alongside our funders and colleagues) launched the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), a groundbreaking five-year longitudinal study of over 200,000 adults across 22 countries, representing well over 40% of the world’s population.”
“How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact” – David Brooks in The New York Times: “I had forgotten how exhausting it is to live in Donald Trump’s world. He’s not only a political figure. He creates a psychological and social atmosphere that suffuses the whole culture — the airwaves, our conversations, our moods. If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is ‘pagan.’ The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know….Judaism and Christianity confront paganism with rival visions of the good. The contrast could not be starker. Paganism says: Make yourself the center of the universe. Serve yourself and force others to serve you. The biblical metaphysic says: Serve others, and you will find joy. Serve God, and you will delight in his love.”
“An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive” – Ross Douthat in The New York Times: “Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a ‘bottleneck’ — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction. When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies. When daily newspapers and mainline Protestant denominations and Elks Lodges fade into irrelevance, when sit-down restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that’s the bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence….This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.”
“First Notes on Consumption“ – Alan Jacobs at The Homebound Symphony: “There are two Ways, and a third practice that is not a Way: Action, Contemplation, and Consumption. A practice is a Way if it has a goal, a telos, such as growth in virtue or grace or skill, the love of God, the love of one’s neighbor. All of the arts depend on a fusion of Contemplation and Action: one prepares oneself, through training and reflection and perhaps even prayer, before acting. (Even in flower arranging contemplation rightly precedes action.) The most important works of art — the ones most necessary for our flourishing — fuse contemplation and action in order to encourage either contemplation or action. (Cf. Terrence Malick’s comments about seeing certain movies and feeling “strengthened” — ready to be a better person.)”
“Signposts of the sacred and mundane” – Bijan Omrani in The Critic: “I hadn’t been expecting the tears. It was more than one member of the congregation. It had all started with an idle daydream of mine that had got out of hand. What would it have been like, I had wondered to myself one day, to worship in our parish church in the Middle Ages? Before I knew it, I was helping to organise a pre-Reformation-style service of Vespers. My normal churchwardenly duties of paperwork and fixing the boiler went neglected as I hunted for incense, copes and clergy who could sing Latin plainsong. The real challenge was working out the liturgy. Before the Reformation, our church would likely have followed the Sarum Rite, a pattern of worship developed at Salisbury Cathedral from the 11th century onwards. But to someone brought up on the wonderful clarity and user-friendliness of the Book of Common Prayer, finding one’s way through the Sarum Rite was like trying to discern the rules of Mornington Crescent.”
Music: Rich Mullins, “I’ll Carry On,” from A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band
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Matthew Erickson 