“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.
“The Deeper Journey for Leaders: From the False Self to the True Self” – Robert Mulholland at Beyond Words: “Once I asked the pastor of a large, vigorous, dynamic, growing church with a strong emphasis on the deeper life in Christ—a church that confirmed fifty to seventy-five new members each week—where these people were coming from. His response surprised me. He told me almost all of these people had begun their journey in Christ in an even larger, more vigorous, more dynamic church whose worship was leading-edge contemporary, whose focus was strongly charismatic and whose corporate life centered in highly emotional expressions of faith in God. These people would stay in that church for about two to three years and then the novelty and excitement would become ritualized and dry for them. They began to hunger, in his words, ‘for something deeper.’ They began to sense there was more to the Christian life. You may have felt the same thing and asked yourself, Isn’t there more to the Christian life than being active in a Christian community, affirming a certain set of beliefs, adopting a particular behavior pattern? The answer is Yes. The ‘more’ is the journey from living out one’s false self to living as our true self in Christ—a self that is deeply centered in and utterly abandoned to God.”
“The Art of Revival: some notes on the ‘Quiet Revival’ at Asbury & Wheaton and its relation to art… and everything else” – Matthew Milliner at his Substack Millinerd: “This August my colleague Tim Taylor and I walked into an evening worship service at Wheaton College’s campus in northern Wisconsin. It was part of our new student orientation retreat, and on the surface there was not much to comment on: just a room packed full of students praising God together, expounding the Bible and praying—pretty standard around here. What was not standard though was that it was completely unscheduled in the formal program, and entirely student organized and led. A freshman woman looked at the two of us as we entered and said, ‘The class of ’29 has a real heart for the Lord.’ Now well into the semester, this ‘Quiet Revival’ of sorts continues, in step with similar happenings around the globe. Events have taken place on campus and in dormitories, as reported by The Wheaton Record. There was a scheduled service of all-night prayer, confession and worship just this homecoming weekend as well from 10pm-6:30am. Perhaps it’s enough to wonder if critics of Wheaton earlier this year who declared the ‘Shekhinah has departed’ from our college will find themselves asking, ‘Has the Shekhinah returned?'”
“Pope intervenes in US abortion debate by raising what it really means to be pro-life” – Nicole Winfield in AP News: “Pope Leo XIV has intervened for the first time in an abortion dispute roiling the U.S. Catholic Church by raising the seeming contradiction over what it really means to be ‘pro-life.’ Leo, a Chicago native, was asked late Tuesday about plans by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich to give a lifetime achievement award to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin for his work helping immigrants. The plans drew objection from some conservative U.S. bishops given the powerful Democratic senator’s support for abortion rights. Leo called first of all for respect for both sides, but he also pointed out the seeming contradiction in such debates. ‘Someone who says ‘I’m against abortion but says I am in favor of the death penalty’ is not really pro-life,’ Leo said. ‘Someone who says that “I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,” I don’t know if that’s pro-life.'”
“How to Bite the Machine that Feeds You: Kingsnorth’s Options for Resistance” – Aaron Weinacht in Front Porch Republic: “When I first started reading Paul Kingsnorth’s serial essays on what he calls the ‘Machine,’ I was hoping that he’d collect them all together in one place. Against the Machine is that place. No doubt many FPR readers are familiar with the Machine, Kingsnorth’s term for that certain something everyone who’s trying to live intentionally knows is there, that force in the world that makes life feel meaningless and rootless, while being full of ersatz and offensively desacralized versions of things that used to provide both meaning and roots. The Machine is ‘STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever’ (xiv). Modernity defined as the decision to settle for the second best delivered efficiently is rapidly reaching (pray it be so) peak insanity. One must either give up and agree to a Faustian bargain with technology, where the knowledge that Jeff Bezos’s stock will increase in value is your only cold consolation outside crack cocaine-style enjoyment of the Next Thing, or, one must think seriously about where to draw lines in the sand, arbitrary or not, and stick to them, whatever the cost may be. I often suspect that my existence is just one minor tidbit for the voracious appetite of some state/corporate machine whose occasional nod to my local well-being is the thinly veiled, insincere noblesse oblige that it appears to be.”
“What’s the Difference Between Hearing Aids and Puberty Blockers?” – David Polansky in The New Atlantis: “Nature makes mistakes. It endows us with degenerative diseases, missing limbs, faulty senses, warped spines, cleft palates, and severe mental defects. Even those fortunate enough to be born reasonably whole may still have to contend with the onset of malocclusion, hemophilia, arthritis, schizophrenia, and Tourette syndrome. Ride the subway in any major city, look around you, and you will see firsthand the painful provisions of, as Kant puts it, ‘a stepmotherly nature.’ Yet nature, which was parsimonious in so many ways, was generous in one great one: it gave us reason, and with that reason we would pry into it with every instrument of our devising and wrest away the means to control our fortunes, right down to the bodily defects that plague us. Was it wrong for us to do so? Penicillin, polio vaccines, eyeglasses, life-saving surgical interventions, you name it. By treating nature as raw material for our manipulation, we routinely escape the endless cycle of poverty and disease. This is the modern bargain. For the most part, we take it and don’t look back. I am myself a particular beneficiary of this bargain. I was born mostly deaf — proof of nature’s stinginess — such that I barely heard sounds before the age of three. Until the recent past, I would have remained that way, relying upon a combination of sign language and lip-reading to communicate with the wider world, and limited in musical appreciation to the loudest percussion and the deepest bass notes.”
“Generation Z’s New Vision for Faith and Opportunity” – Aaron Renn at his Substack: “My Generation X was enculturated into the Baby Boomers’ world. Thinking about the songs from my youth in the 1980s, it’s amazing how many of my favorites were literally about the Boomers, such as Bryan Adams’ ‘Summer of ‘69’ or much of Bruce Springsteen’s oeuvre. Phil Collins was never more Boomer than when he sang, ‘My generation will put it right / We’re not just making promises / That we know, we’ll never keep.’ I long noticed that while I could easily have a conversation with people my Boomer parents’ age, there was always a disconnect when talking to those from my grandparents’ Greatest Generation. They were just culturally different. There was a cultural gap between us that wasn’t there with the Boomers….Generation Z is the first generation fully free from the Boomer cultural grip. For example, while speaking to someone who works for a major Christian non-profit, he observed that his younger staff were confused at the press over James Dobson’s recent death, because they didn’t know who he was. They’d never heard of him. Gen Z is not wedded to these Boomer figures, may not even know who they are, and are certainly not concerned with any sensibilities around them.”
Music: David Baloche, “Lead Me to the Rock,” from Labyrinth
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Matthew Erickson 
These were some really interesting reads, thanks for sharing!