“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.
“What is All Saints Day?: a brief summary” – This is an old post from my blog but seems appropriate for today: “Today, November 1, we celebrate All Saints Day. All Saints Day is a feast day in the church year that follows All Hallow’s Eve (October 31). All Saints Day offers an opportunity to remember all those saints who have gone before us in the faith and to celebrate the reality that we stand amidst a great cloud of witnesses.”
“The Unbusy Pastor” – A classic article by Eugene H. Peterson in Leadership Journal: “Over the coming weeks, we are highlighting Leadership Journal’s Top 40, the best articles of the journal’s 36-year history. We will be presenting them in chronological order. Today we present #38, from 1981, written by the pastor of a small church in Bel Air, Maryland, Eugene Peterson, the first of many he would write for the journal. The one piece of mail certain to go unread into my wastebasket is the one addressed ‘to the busy pastor.’ Not that the phrase doesn’t describe me at times, but I refuse to give my attention to someone who encourages what is worst in me. I’m not arguing the accuracy of the adjective; I am, though, contesting the way in which it is used to flatter and express sympathy. ‘The poor pastor,’ we say. ‘So devoted to his flock; the work is endless and he sacrifices himself so unstintingly.’ But the word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife, or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront. Hilary of Tours diagnosed pastoral busyness as ‘irreligiosa solicitudo pro Deo,’ a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.”
“Erika Kirk’s words spotlight forgiveness in a divided nation” – Deepa Bharath in AP News: “‘That man, that young man — I forgive him.’ Erika Kirk softly spoke those words about the gunman accused of assassinating her husband, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, as she struggled to hold back tears last month during his memorial service. Her public declaration inspired another. Hollywood actor Tim Allen said he was so moved by her words that he was forgiving the drunken driver who caused his father’s death 60 years ago. Barely two weeks after Charlie Kirk’s death, members of a Michigan congregation made public that they too were forgiving a gunman, the one who had just attacked their church, killing four people and injuring eight others. Their high-profile acts of forgiveness are all the more remarkable given the politically charged and highly polarizing climate gripping the U.S. It has pushed people of faith to contemplate what forgiveness means, particularly in the face of violence, trauma and unspeakable grief, and whether it could shift public consciousness toward compassion. While some see a glimmer of hope in this moment, others are skeptical. Miroslav Volf, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School, said he views President Donald Trump’s response to Erika Kirk’s words — that he hates his opponents — as the more typical sentiment.”
“What MacIntyre Meant: Many competing movements claimed the late, eminent moral philosopher, whose encompassing critique of modernity made him an outsider despite his outsized influence” – Michael Baxter in Notre Dame Magazine: “‘Tough day for philosophy.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘MacIntyre died.’ This matter-of-fact text exchange with a colleague at the McGrath Institute for Church Life brought me the news that Alasdair MacIntyre, the Notre Dame professor emeritus and world-renowned moral philosopher, died on May 21, 2025. It was hardly a surprise. MacIntyre was 96 years old, and in recent years his activity had been limited. Still, it was sobering to think there would be no more of his lectures to attend, no more of his latest essays to pore over and discuss, no more new books of his to read, study, mark up and read again. No more conversations with him on campus. Like many, I first encountered Alasdair MacIntyre through his groundbreaking book After Virtue. In a Notre Dame seminar on theological ethics in 1982, the year after the book was published, Professor Stanley Hauerwas plopped a hardcover copy on the table and explained why it did not have a place on his syllabus alongside Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Barth. Of MacIntyre’s masterwork, Hauerwas said, ‘In this course, it’s presupposed.'”
“Exvangelicals and the Exodus: Spiritual Lessons for Deconstructing Faith” – Graham Joseph Hill at Spirituality and Society with Hilly: “There’s a migration unfolding across Western Christianity. You can hear it in the discussions on podcasts, the honesty of social media posts, the long pauses in once-familiar prayers. They call it deconstruction: a word that sounds like demolition but often hides something gentler, something more sacred. For many, this journey begins not with rebellion but with heartbreak. It starts when the old answers stop fitting, when the inherited certainties of childhood faith crumble beneath the weight of reality, trauma, or hypocrisy. This exodus from evangelicalism (or from institutional religion more broadly) isn’t unlike Israel’s flight from Egypt: bewildering, liberating, dangerous, and holy. To leave behind a spiritual home, even one that has wounded you, is never easy. The wilderness between ‘what was’ and ‘what’s next’ stretches wide and dry. But what if this wilderness, this long wandering called deconstruction, isn’t a failure of faith but an invitation into more profound knowing? What if doubt isn’t the enemy of belief, but its refiner? The mystics have known this path for centuries. Long before deconstruction became a hashtag, they spoke of unknowing as the narrow gate to divine union. They too wrestled with silence, contradiction, and loss. They too found that the God who seemed to vanish in the dark was in fact waiting there, hidden in mystery.”
“AI vs AI: Slop in, slop out” – Nicholas Carr at New Cartographies: “If you’ve done much googling recently, you’ve probably noticed the odd and dubious set of sources that Google’s large language model draws from in generating the ‘AI Overviews’ that now appear at the top of the company’s search results (after the ads, of course). Rather than dig deep into authoritative writings on a subject, Google’s bot usually pieces together its overview from recently published, cursory summaries posted on a hodgepodge of highly trafficked websites — the same dumbed-down, search-engine-optimized sites that have long appeared highly in Google results. Taking the path of least epistemic resistance, the AI slaps together a bland, often unreliable summary of summaries and presents it as a judicious, objective overview. The problem becomes more acute when you search for advice on buying a product or service. The overview in this case tends to be a synthesis of text drawn three kinds of sources: (1) promotional sites run by businesses that supply the product or service, (2) influencer sites written by people who often get referral fees from suppliers, and (3) crappy ‘best of’ sites operated by content farms (‘Ten Best Parrot Cages for 2025!’). The AI Overview is little more than a rehash of corporate marketing messages.”
Music: Jon Guerra, “I See the Birds,” from Jesus
Discover more from Matthew Erickson
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Matthew Erickson 