“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.
“Wisdom Is Not Intelligence: Why the voyage of life demands something deeper” – David Brooks in Comment: “We live in a culture that overrates intelligence, but the academic research urges otherwise. Cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich of the University of Toronto has found that there is a low correlation between being intelligent and behaving rationally—behaving in ways that display common sense. Political psychologist Philip Tetlock has found that if you take extremely smart people who have spent their lives mastering a specific field and then you ask them to forecast the future within their field of expertise, they are terrible at it. The more celebrated the expert, the worse they are at forecasting. Locked into their one view of the world, they struggle to consider other viewpoints. Being a great intellectual does not mean you can anticipate what will come next. Being very intelligent does not mean you know how to proceed in the presence of incomplete knowledge. It does not mean you understand what aspects of a situation really matter. It does not mean you have a superior awareness of what you don’t know. It does not mean you are better than other people at detecting the flaws in your thought processes. Do you want to know what highly intelligent people are really good at? They are really good at persuading themselves that their own false beliefs are true.”
“The Country We Could Have Had” – Marvin Olasky at Christianity Today: “June is National Immigration Heritage Month, a time to remember the millions who have come to America from a land far, far away….In September 1903, though, the New York Times headlined an extraordinary visit: ‘PRESIDENT [ROOSEVELT] STARTS ELLIS ISLAND INQUIRY Astonishes Officials by Naming a Special Commission. HE INSPECTS IMMIGRANTS Perilous Trip Through Blinding Storm.’ A reporter told of how wind increased to almost hurricane force and nearly threatened the craft. The seas ran high. … President Roosevelt was dripping wet when he dashed down the shaky gangplank of the tug and set foot on Ellis Island.’…Whether through personal encounters or political reckoning, Roosevelt changed his immigration approach going forward. He quoted the Bible and told listeners, ‘We need to remember our duty to the stranger within our gates.'”
“The Rule of St Augustine: Wisdom for our Augustinian Moment” – Joey Sherrard at Mere Orthodoxy: “The election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as the new head of the Roman Catholic Church has been accompanied by no small amount of fanfare and speculation. Prevost – now Leo XIV – was a relative unknown before his elevation to Bishop of Rome; he’d only recently become a cardinal and was not on many papal shortlists before the conclave began. Only the most intimately acquainted with the Roman curia had ever even heard of his name before his ascendancy. This low profile has meant that those seeking some sense of the trajectory of his papacy have needed to scour his biography for details upon which to base their prognostications. Prevost’s US origins are what is most intriguing about him to many: Midwest-born, Villanova-educated, a fan of the White Sox. For others, it is his ministry in Peru: like his predecessor Francis, Leo XIV lived and worked in the Global South and is attentive to the realities of poverty, conflict, and migration that he encountered there. And many – including Leo himself – have noted how his choice of papal name invokes the memory of Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum and its relevance to our modern moment. But the most significant influence upon Leo XIV may not be any of these various formative threads that people have begun to pull upon to attempt to unravel his biography. It may instead be what is both most plain in his biography and yet also least obvious to us: Leo XIV is an Augustinian friar. He not only attended Villanova, an Augustinian university, but even more significantly he took vows in the Order of St Augustine (O.S.A.), a religious order organized around the spirituality of Augustine of Hippo, eventually becoming prior general of the global order. In joining the O.S.A., the young Robert Prevost was submitting himself to a deeply formative way of life that organized not only his exterior behavior, but was also aimed at re-ordering his heart according to the ancient wisdom of Augustine of Hippo.”
“Egypt nationalizes ancient monastery’s grounds, fraying ties between Athens and Cairo” – David I. Klein at Religion News Service: “As news filtered out of Egypt on Thursday (May 29) that a court ruling had called for nationalizing an ancient Orthodox Christian Monastery in the Sinai Desert and the eviction of its monks to make way for a museum, disbelief turned to outrage, from the Middle East to Greece, where politicians blasted the decision. St. Catherine’s Monastery, which is inhabited by Greek Orthodox monks in Egypt, is considered to be the world’s oldest continuously operating Christian monastery. Established in the 6th century by order of Byzantine emperor Justinian I, St. Catherine’s lies at the foot of the mountain Christians identify as the biblical Mount Sinai and hosts a vast library that harbors priceless manuscripts and icons. The monastery, whose right to function undisturbed is said to have been granted by the Prophet Muhammed, is a symbol of interfaith tolerance and Christian longevity in the Muslim world.”
“The Metaphysics of Music: Catholic sacred music is not mere ornament to theology” – Christopher Carson in The Hedgehog Review: “The Catholic tradition sings her theology. From motets by William Byrd, to Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, to Tomás Luis de Victoria, music is often considered one of the most aesthetically impressive elements of Catholic worship—and perhaps one of its least controversial today. Even a hardened New Atheist would struggle not to find beauty in the soaring ‘Christe Redemptor’ motet by Venetian composer Andrea Gabrieli, or the simple Gregorian chant of supreme Marian devotion, ‘Salve Regina.’ And though the Gregorian and Renaissance polyphonic traditions have been neglected by the Church over the past half-century, recent reports of a renewal in sacred music indicate its appeal even in an allegedly disenchanted age. But that singing is not to be understood as an aesthetic sweetener—nor does it merely add ornament to theology. It is best understood as a medium of metaphysical expression in its own right—a mode in which the great themes of Christian thought are embodied. And in the two most venerable forms of sacred music in the Western Church, Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony, we encounter not only aesthetic differentiation but profound theological divergence. These are two ontologies, not merely two styles. Gregorian chant gives voice to the Augustinian soul: yearning, interior, restless until it rests in God. Polyphony, in its golden flowering under Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, and Byrd, renders audible the architecture of Thomistic metaphysics: ordered, radiant, harmoniously manifold.”
“‘A huge loss’: In remote Nagasaki islands, a rare version of Christianity heads toward extinction” – Foster Klug, Mari Yamaguchi, and Mayuko Ono in APNews: “On this small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan’s Hidden Christians gather to worship what they call the Closet God. In a special room about the size of a tatami mat is a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She looks like a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus. Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist’s beheading and martyrdom. There are other objects of worship from the days when Japan’s Christians had to hide from vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s. Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room can be linked directly to Christianity — and that’s the point. After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan’s insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism.”
Music: Van Morrison, “When Will I Ever Learn to Live in God,” from Avalon Sunset
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Matthew Erickson 