“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.
“China Detains Influential House Church Pastor” – Angela Lu Fulton in Christianity Today: “Since Thursday, police have detained nearly 30 pastors and staff members of Zion Church, an influential Chinese house church network, in what many fear is the beginning of a new wave of persecution against Christians in China. The arrests took place in at least six cities across China. More than 10 officers broke into senior pastor Jin ‘Ezra’ Mingri’s apartment in Beihai, Guangxi province, on Friday and searched his home all night before taking him away in handcuffs, according to the nonprofit ChinaAid. Authorities detained one pastor at the Shenzhen airport. Church members have lost contact with more than a dozen congregants in Beihai and are uncertain whether they’ve also been arrested. Jin’s daughter, Grace, who lives in Maryland near Washington, DC, first heard about the roundup on Friday morning as she woke up to see her father’s prayer-request letter about Zion pastor Wang Lin’s arrest. Then she received a call from her mom, who also lives in the US, saying she had lost contact with her dad. They later found out he was under arrest in Beihai.”
“How religious is your state?” – Chip Ritolo, Benjamin Wormald, Bill Webster, and Justine Coleman at The Pew Research Center: “Pew Research Center’s 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study was designed to paint a statistical portrait of religion in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. How religious is your state? Select a state below to see where it ranks on some key measures of religion. When comparing states, it’s important to keep in mind that some differences may not be statistically significant, due to the survey’s margins of error.”
“‘The Idea of the Beautiful Is a Signature of God’: A Q&A With Marilynne Robinson” – Peter Wehner interviews Marilynne Robinson in The New York Times: “Marilynne Robinson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and recipient of a National Humanities Medal, is one of the world’s great writers. Her novels, including the four that have come to be known as the Gilead quartet, and her nonfiction books, like The Death of Adam and Reading Genesis, are suffused by her Christian faith. It is impossible to understand her apart from it. There’s an ease with which she speaks about religion, combined with deep conviction. ‘I believe God knows what life has felt like to people, what they’ve dealt with and what they have lost and they are beautiful in God’s eyes,’ she told me. I spoke to Ms. Robinson about her novels and their theological arc; her book on Genesis; her views of the Bible; fear and suffering, beauty and enchantment; how she understands the human soul; and what she hopes her legacy will be. My editor, Aaron Retica, who was deeply affected at a tender age by Ms. Robinson’s first novel, “Housekeeping,” joined me for the interview and popped up with a few questions of his own. Our conversation, which has been lightly edited, is the fourth in a series of interviews I am doing that explores the world of faith.”
“Preaching with Power” – Fleming Rutledge is interviewed in Plough: “It’s so important for people to understand that preaching the gospel requires a complete shift of categories. Preaching the gospel is not like anything else. Preaching is unto itself, because preaching is inhabited by and worked by the agency about whom we are preaching. We are not speaking under our own strength. We are not summing up our rhetorical gifts. We are not sharing our personal experiences either, except with reservations, under certain circumstances, and with care. This is because at all times during the sermon, we are actually being used by the power of the Word of God, which is unlike any other power that the world has ever known. And this idea that God speaks and lives through God’s own Word transmitted through human beings is unique to Christianity. That’s what can happen in any sermon. However dignified and mainline it may be, the sermon is the opportunity for the power of the Holy Spirit to make Jesus alive with us – well, not making him alive, because he isalive, but manifesting him, alive, in the preacher’s speaking.”
“Stewards of the Soil: Agrarian Life in a Calvinist Key” – Holly Stockley in Mere Orthodoxy: “In recent years, agrarianism has reemerged as a serious subject of reflection among Christian thinkers. Publications from Plough to The American Conservative feature essays on rooted, land-based life. Wendell Berry still finds new readers, while Catholic writers revive distributism for both academic and popular audiences. Beyond the page, young Christian families embrace homesteading and household economies not as merely lifestyle choices, but as theological conviction. What was once a niche subculture is becoming a credible alternative to both technocratic liberalism and consumerist Christianity. In short, the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement of the early 2000s has matured. The Benedict Option proved too vague to satisfy, and agorism — a libertarian strategy of creating ‘black and gray’ markets to escape state and corporate control — too impractical to endure. Even the most self-reliant homesteader has come to admit what tradition already knew: no one is truly self-sufficient, and digital community can’t milk the cow when you have the flu. Once the first excitement of discovery wears off, however, a deeper question presents itself: Is agrarian and distributist thought the sole province of Catholic social teaching? Much of the current material is, indeed, heavily Catholic, rooted in papal encyclicals, republication of works by proponents of the Catholic Land Movement, and a neo-Medieval aesthetic. The goal sometimes seems to be the recreation of Millet’s The Angelus in Carhartts and Anthropologie aprons. Is there then no place in agrarianism for Protestants? Or might the Reformed tradition offer its own robust theology; one capable of grounding a life ordered around land, household, and community, in faithful stewardship?”
“Judge bars ICE from taking some violent actions against religious activists, journalists” – Jack Jenkins in Religion News Service: “A federal judge in Illinois has issued a temporary restraining order barring government agents from using a number of forceful tactics against faith-based demonstrators who have been protesting outside a Chicago-area U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. The order hands a win to activists who say their right to religious freedom has been violated by law enforcement who repeatedly shot them with pepper balls and other projectiles. The order, handed down Thursday (Oct. 9), came three days after the complaint was filed against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Although the suit was primarily brought by journalists who allege they have been targeted by federal agents, the list of plaintiffs also included the Rev. David Black, a Chicago-area Presbyterian minister. According to journalist Dave Byrnes, Judge Sara Ellis mentioned Black during court proceedings on Wednesday, recounting an incident that took place last month when Black was filmed praying in front of the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. As the pastor finished his prayer, footage shows federal agents firing at him using pepper balls, which can cause eye irritation and respiratory distress. Black was struck multiple times, including in the head. Other faith-based demonstrators and clergy say they have also been pelted with nonlethal rounds while protesting at the facility, as religious activists have been a regular presence at the location for the past few weeks.”
Music: David Belt, “This Is My Father’s World (Voice Memo at Laity Lodge)” (feat. Paul Zach)
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Matthew Erickson 