“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.
“30 Things I’ve Learned in 30 Years of Ministry” – Russell Moore in Christianity Today: “Last week on August 6 marked the 30th (!) anniversary of my ordination to ministry by the Bay Vista Baptist Church in my hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi. I’m recognizing the milestone this week by offering you 30 things I’ve learned in 30 years in ministry. I do not claim that these are the 30 most important things I’ve learned. If I tried to do that, I would procrastinate forever, weighing how one thing is more important than something else. So instead, I am tricking myself by forcing myself to do it randomly, not allowing myself time to think between each of these bullet points. Some of the points are ones I’ve made before; some have never occurred to me until right now. They are in no particular order except in how they occurred to me as I wrote them down. Here they are.”
“Minneapolis Catholic schoolchildren listened to a prayer, then ducked for cover from gunfire” – Jesse Bedayn and Giovanna Dell’orto at APNews: “In the vaulted church of a Catholic school in Minneapolis, the pews were packed with teachers, parents and schoolchildren listening to a psalm on the third day of the new school year. ‘For you darkness itself is not dark, and night shines as the day,’ a church member read to some 200 students Wednesday morning as sun streamed through stained glass windows. Just before the congregants were to proclaim ‘Alleluia,’ bullets blasted through the windows. ‘Down! Everybody down!’ someone shouted as children ducked for cover behind wooden pews from a barrage of gunfire. One student threw himself on top of a friend and was shot in the back. A youth minister called her husband to say goodbye as bullets flew. People used a wood plank to barricade a door and fled to a gymnasium. Sixth grader Chloe Francoual raced down a set of stairs and left behind a classmate in the rush before hiding in a room with a table barricading the door. She’d later tell her father that she thought she was going to die.”
“A Call to Reflection and Repentance” – Hildegard of Bingen, an excerpt from her book Scivias at Renovaré: “All of you people who were born and cleansed through God’s wisdom, hear what I, the radiant light and Creator of all of you, have to say to you. You were planted in My heart at daybreak on the first day of creation. When I created the first human being, I made him a touchstone of what the Devil mocked. In other words, I gave him the commandment the Devil through his evil nature had disregarded. But evil does not correspond to My nature, for I am the good in all its fullness, power, and penetrating clarity. But you, O people, do not know what you say.”
“1,400-year-old cross found in Abu Dhabi” – At The History Blog: “A 1,400-year-old Christian cross has been found on Sir Bani Yas Island in Abu Dhabi. The cross is about a foot long and seven inches wide and was molded on a plaque of stucco plaster. The cross plaque is intricately designed and in excellent condition, cracked but complete. It is an eight-point cross with four small eight-point crosses inside circles embedded into the four Vs of the ends and in the center where the arms intersect. It stands on a stepped base that represents the hill of Calvary. These iconographic elements — the stepped base, the leaves, the pointed ends, the complexity of the abstract tableau — are characteristic of Christian crosses in the Middle and Near East.”
“How Churches Use Data and AI as Engines of Surveillance” – Alex Ashley in MIT Technology Review: “On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face ‘probes’ per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s stored behind the church’s firewall. Late one afternoon, a woman scrolls on her phone as she walks home from work. Unbeknownst to her, a complex algorithm has stitched together her social profiles, her private health records, and local veteran outreach lists. It flags her for past military service, chronic pain, opioid dependence, and high Christian belief, and then delivers an ad to her Facebook feed: ‘Struggling with pain? You’re not alone. Join us this Sunday.’ These hypothetical scenes reflect real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize. Where Big Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, this unlikely amalgam has given birth to an infrastructure already reshaping the theology of trust—and redrawing the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life.”
“Care, Not Control” – L. M. Sacasas at The Convivial Society: “As I thought about what I’ve written over the last few weeks, I realized that much of it could be summed with a simple imperative: Resist the temptation to confuse control for care. Implicit in how digital technologies are often marketed is the promise of greater control as if it were equivalent to greater care. I chose the word control because it captures a wide array of possible practices and technologies. The promise of control might be expressed, for example, through technologies that offer the possibility of improved data-gathering, planning, monitoring, calibration, customization, scheduling, outsourcing, security, or documentation. In each case, we are encouraged to reduce the skill of caring—either in the sense of taking an interest in or looking out for the welfare of another—to one of these various forms of technological mediation. Technologically mediated expressions of control also suggest relationships of distance and detachment rather than presence and involvement, which can in turn imply a certain evasion of the risk and obligations that care can entail.”
Music: J.S. Bach, “Schwingt freudig euch empor,” Cantata BWV 36 / Part 1,” John Eliot Gardiner, English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir
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Matthew Erickson 