“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.
“Seeing Pope Leo XIV beyond America’s right and left” – Joseph J. Tyson at Religion News Service: “People keep asking me, ‘Is the new pope liberal or conservative?’ The question itself betrays our culture’s tendency to view our faith and many moral issues through a partisan political lens. The lens is red or blue, left or right, but if we are Christian our lens should be Christ. Merely applying that American lens to the new pope might make a ‘click-worthy’ news story or trigger some misguided tribalism, but it’s wrong. Sure, we Catholics find many things to disagree about, but the church’s social doctrine is very clear. Care for the poor and marginalized isn’t red or blue — it’s what we are called to do as Catholics. Jesus teaches us to draw close to those who suffer. When the Catholic Church engages on issues such as economics, immigration and abortion, we start with what Jesus teaches us. We start with the Gospel of Matthew’s Chapter 25 and caring for ‘the least of these.’ We recall Jesus’ solidarity with the lepers, the disabled and the outcast woman at the well. Inspired by the teachings and actions of Jesus, Catholic doctrine on social issues has long held a preferential commitment to the poor. Looking through the lens of the gospel, we seek to protect the unborn, migrants and people on Medicaid. Whether it’s Pope Leo XIII in 1891 uplifting the rights of workers, Pope Francis speaking about the dignity of migrant labor today, or even our new Leo XIV urging us in 2015 to sign the Catholic Climate Petition, loud voices in media and politics dismiss this as left wing, blue-tinted politics.”
“Will AI Be Alive?: What lies ahead and how to face it well” – Brian J. A. Boyd in The New Atlantis: “With the immediate landscape of AI shifting so quickly, it can be hard to keep the broader view in sight. In just the last few months, OpenAI published findings that, during safety testing, its o1 model would sometimes strive to deactivate its oversight, deny doing so when asked, and seek to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ or distinctive neural architecture parameters so that it could not be shut down. Meta’s and Alibaba’s open-source models have proven capable of creating functional copies of themselves. OpenAI rolled out access to its AI agent ‘Operator,’ and let third-party developers use it to build applications that can autonomously browse the web and write code. DeepSeek demonstrated that very impressive AI ‘reasoning’ can be done at a fraction of the cost previously thought possible, and then Grok 3 showed that a full-steam-ahead approach of building data centers continues to improve the state of the art. But we also have a helpful preview of what’s to come. ‘Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,’ a June 2024 essay series by former OpenAI programmer Leopold Aschenbrenner, makes a strong case that artificial general intelligence is likely to be here within two years. ‘These machines will outpace college graduates,’ he writes. ‘By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word.’ This following essay proceeds in three parts, borrowing the ‘see, judge, act’ framework developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest and activist on behalf of industrial workers. To act rightly, we must judge prudently. And to judge prudently, we must see clearly. The stakes are profound: understanding the fate of humanity while our leading technologists expressly seek to build what many call a successor species to the human race.”
“The Monastery of the Midwest: Creative lifeblood from the heartlands” – Young Woong Yi at Inkwell: “‘I believe the world will be saved by beauty,’ says Prince Lev in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Though I believe this statement is true, I find myself implicitly asking the follow-up question: which kind of beauty? Let’s face it—people enjoy dunking on the Midwest. While it’s known by some as ‘flyover country,’ to others, it’s ‘the heartland of America.’ Name your gripe, and I’ve probably heard it come from the mouth of a friend or family member—it’s too slow, too boring, the winters are too long, there are too many mosquitoes. Between its paradoxical nicknames, it’s clear that people don’t quite know what to make of the Midwest. But I can’t help but argue that this land contains a unique kind of beauty, and I wonder what would happen if we worked to become a true creative heartland as well. While we literally exist in the middle, we often feel like we’re on the margins in a cultural and aesthetic sense. However, people on the edges see what those in the center cannot—margins can birth movements.”
“Nicene myths: The Athanasians won, so they got to tell the story of Arianism. Arius would barely have recognized it” – Philip Jenkins in The Christian Century: “In May 325, 300 bishops responded to the summons of the Roman emperor Constantine, gathering at Nicaea, in present-day Turkey, to discuss pressing theological controversies then dividing the church. That event, the Council of Nicaea, has featured prominently in the church’s memory, from historical accounts of the church’s theology and its relationship with state power to artistic visions of the proclamation of orthodoxy. In this 1,700th anniversary year, what must strike us most powerfully about that council is the very different ways we tell our stories—and how one version overrides and eliminates its competitors. It comes to be the plain truth, even the only truth. As usually recounted, the Nicene story tells how the early church formulated its doctrine of the Trinity, in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit always coexisted. John’s Gospel starts by declaring that the Word, the Son, was there ‘in the beginning.’ Around 310, the Alexandrian presbyter Arius taught the seditious rival doctrine that the Father, who genuinely was from eternity, had generated or begotten the Son. This might have occurred mere nanoseconds after the moment of creation, but even so, there was a time when the Son was not, and that fact marked a fundamental distinction between the two persons. The Son was begotten and was subordinate to the Father. The Alexandrian church condemned Arius, and that decision was decisively endorsed at Nicaea, where only two of the assembled prelates dissented. Athanasius emerged as Arius’s main foe and the nemesis of his cause. Christian orthodoxy was saved. In recent decades, scholars such as Rowan Williams have devoted immense attention to Arius and Arianism, stressing that the two are by no means the same. Their scholarship raises questions about the Nicene conflict, questions that should be asked about many of the church’s debates.”
“Polycarp: An Early Christian Martyr” – Charles E. Moore and Timothy J. Keiderling in Plough: “When a young Christian named Irenaeus first encountered the elderly Polycarp teaching in the metropolis of Smyrna, he was captivated. It’s not hard to understand why. According to Irenaeus, Bishop Polycarp was one of the few living disciples of the apostle John, who was the ‘beloved disciple’ of Jesus himself. Polycarp preached what he had learned directly from eyewitnesses of Jesus. His connection with Christ’s first apostles served as a bridge between the first generation of believers and those who followed, including influential thinkers and theologians such as Irenaeus, who would live to be a prominent church father in his own right. Polycarp led the church in Smyrna with wisdom and authority, having been appointed to leadership by men who had seen and heard the Lord. He was frequently called on to settle disputes or correct false teaching. Even the other leaders of the early church valued his insight. When Polycarp visited Rome, the bishop there deferred to him regarding when to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, as a sign of honor and respect. Heeding John’s warnings against false teachers, Polycarp faithfully defended the apostles’ teaching against early heretics, including one Marcion, who held that the God of the Old Testament and the Father of Jesus were separate entities. Polycarp could be fiery, particularly when faced with such dangerous errors.”
“Meet the Mount Athos monks living at Simonos Petra monastery in northern Greece” – Costas Kantouris in AP News: “Mount Athos, a verdant peninsula in northern Greece, has been a center of Christian Orthodox monasticism for more than 1,000 years. The all-male autonomous community, known in Greek as Agion Oros, or Holy Mountain, is no stranger to non-Greeks. Of its 20 monasteries, one is Russian, one is Bulgarian and one is Serbian, and the presence of monks from other nations is not unusual. But it is in one monastery — Simonos Petra — that the greatest range of nationalities reside. Here is a look at four of Simonos Petra’s monks, and how they view Mount Athos.”
Music: Rich Mullins, “Land of My Sojourn,” from A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band
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Matthew Erickson 