“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.
“Mercy, Attentiveness, and Alyosha: Against AI’s forces of privation” – Joshua Heavin in Comment: “Alasdair MacIntyre concludes his groundbreaking, 1981 book After Virtue by playing on the title of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot. We are awaiting, MacIntyre famously (and cheekily) says, not Godot, but another St. Benedict, whose monastic, communal, and formative practices might form a virtuous people who have character amid the moral wreckage and fragmentation of modernity. With all due respect to St. Benedict, the ominous shadow of AI and rapid technological transformations of human life have made me long for another saintly figure to arise: an Alyosha. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ivan launches into a fiery tirade against the plausibility of Christian faith, especially in light of the unfathomable suffering of innocent children. The antiphonal response Dostoevsky provides to Ivan’s arguments is not a discursive but rather a narratival refutation: the elder Zosima and Ivan’s brother Alyosha dramatize a way of being in the world that is determined by participation in the grace of God. Ultimately, mercy abides, while Ivan’s atheistic libertinism and nihilism end in self-destructive madness. The emergence of digital technology in the last few decades, and artificial-intelligence tools in the last few years, has not resulted in Ivan-like invectives against the Christian faith. But they have fundamentally and rapidly altered countless facets of human life throughout the world, from society-wide changes to our deeply personal notions of the self. Such changes pose a serious challenge to the plausibility of a Christian imagination, especially with respect to what it means to be a human being today. “
“Rapper nobigdyl. Wants Listeners to See Jesus in Their Enemies” – Kelsey Kramer McGinnis in Christianity Today: “When Dylan Phillips started working in the Christian hip-hop industry, he was too cautious to try to make it as a rapper. Phillips, who now performs as nobigdyl., started out as a road manager, supporting the careers of artists like Derek Minor. Minor eventually fired Phillips in 2014 in what was meant to be a friendly push into the spotlight. That push put Phillips on a career trajectory that the pragmatic artist and entrepreneur had not set out to follow. Over the past ten years, he has become a successful solo artist and leader in the Christian hip-hop niche. Phillips has over 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify. His independent artist collective, indie tribe, hosts an annual festival in Nashville called Holy Smoke! His latest album, Seoul Brother, is a collaboration with Kato On The Track, an Atlanta-based Korean American artist. In May 2025, Phillips won Fan Favorite in NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest for the second year in a row—and this year, the entry that won was a recording of the song ‘imago interlude.’ The video begins with a close-up shot of the rapper’s T-shirt, printed with the words ‘you don’t know jesus til you see him in your enemy.’ The first line of the song is a confrontation: ‘Christian music or music that Christians use / To get their fix just another hit of the clicks and views.'”
“Does Marriage Have a Future?” – Debora L. Spar and Aryanna Garber in The New Atlantis: “In the fall of 2018, a man named Akihiko Kondo married a doll named Hatsune Miku — not a doll in the figurative sense of a beloved woman, to be clear, but an actual plush doll, with long turquoise hair. The doll was the physical version of a computer-generated pop star created in 2007, who performs online, and ‘live’ on real stages as a hologram. The bride wore white, and Mr. Kondo a matching tuxedo. Their union is in many respects a symbol of the stresses facing marriage today, and a harbinger of what is to come. Across the industrialized world, marriage rates are plummeting. In Japan, where Mr. Kondo despaired of finding a human spouse, marriage rates fell from 9.3 per one thousand inhabitants in 1960 to just 4.1 in 2022. In the United States, they fell from 8.5 to 6.2 over the same period. And although birth rates are no longer linked as closely to marriage as they once were, they fell even more precipitously: again over the same period, the crude birth rate in the United States — the number of live births per one thousand people — dropped from 23.7 to 11.0. Even sex has become scarcer, with trends in sexlessness rising in recent years, and Millennials reporting fewer sexual partners than their parents and grandparents did at the same age.”
“Churches, seminaries among US cultural sites awarded funds to preserve Black history” – Fiona André in Religion News Service: “Black churches, cemeteries and seminaries with ties to African American history are among 24 cultural sites across the country receiving grants from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, in a $3 million total investment. The grants, awarded through the trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and announced on Tuesday (July 22), aim to support historical sites of ‘Black American joy, resilience, innovation, and activism’ in their preservation efforts, according to a news release. The grants are ‘crucial to keeping our nation’s history alive,’ said Brent Leggs, director of the action fund and senior vice president at the National Trust, in the release. ‘We hope this investment will further empower these communities to be leaders in this important effort.'”
“Visions Under the Serviceberry Tree: Robin Wall Kimmerer envisions a new economy in her book The Serviceberry“ – William Thomas Okie in Plough: “The Serviceberry is a short book with a heavy burden. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a distinguished environmental biology professor and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, has been out under the serviceberry trees, thinking about what is wrong with the global economic system. The mixed market economies in which most of us live, she argues, have reduced us to self-interested, greedy competitors, imprisoned in ‘patterns of gross overconsumption that have brought us to the brink of disaster.’ In the serviceberry economy, though, Kimmerer sees only generosity and abundance: gifts of carbon dioxide and solar waves to the serviceberry, gifts of sugar to the pollinating flies and cedar waxwings, gifts of feathers to the beetles, who are themselves gifts to the voles, whose carcasses feed the microorganisms, who build the soil, which in turn nourishes the serviceberry. Out here, she writes, ‘all flourishing is mutual.’ It could be so with humans, says Kimmerer, as suggested by alternative economic arrangements such as Indigenous potlatches, little free libraries, open-source software projects, and – in what seems to be the genesis of the essay – the sharing of serviceberries by her farmer neighbors. Gift economies abound in the world’s unnoticed corners.”
“Breaking bread with the dead: Old books are time machines” – Austin Kleon at his Substack: “Hey y’all, One of the first things I like to read in the Sunday NYTimes is the Book Review’s ‘By The Book’ series. One of their favorite interview questions is: ‘You’re organizing a dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?’ Cressida Cowell, author of How To Train Your Dragon, recently answered:
Shakespeare, George Eliot and Homer, if such a person ever existed (it’s a bit contentious, that one). You have to invite the dead ones. Although one of the many wonderful things about reading is that this is what you are already doing. You are having a dinner party with people who died, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of years ago, and whose voices and feelings and intelligence and opinions are all captured in the extraordinarily brilliant and irreplaceable technology that is a book. Now that really is magic.
The poet W.H. Auden called this ‘breaking bread with the dead.’ I spent five weeks this summer breaking bread with Leo Tolstoy, who’s been dead for one hundred and fifteen years. While reading War and Peace, I marveled over and over again at how something written so long ago can be so applicable to our times while still being very much of its own time.”
Music: nobigdyl., “imago interlude” (NPR Tiny Desk Submission 2025)
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Matthew Erickson 