“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.
“2 killed in church attack in Nigeria, days after dozens of schoolgirls abducted” – CBS News: “Two people were killed in an attack on a church in central Nigeria, authorities said, just days after dozens of schoolgirls were abducted and one staffer killed in the country’s north. No group has claimed responsibility for Tuesday night’s attack in Eruku town in central Nigeria. Police responded to gunfire and found one person fatally shot inside the church and another nearby, Kwara state police spokesperson Adetoun Ejire-Adeyemi said in a statement. Kwara State Gov. AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq in a statement Wednesday praised Nigerian President Bola Tinubu for the deployment of 900 additional troops there. Tinubu has delayed his departure to South Africa, where he planned to attend this weekend’s Group of 20 summit of the world’s leading rich and developing nations after the attack and the abduction of 24 schoolgirls on Monday, a spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, said in a statement.”
“The Tune of Things: Is consciousness God?” – Christian Wiman in Harper’s Magazine: “A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term ‘species’ is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness. Better to begin with a jolt. Lord knows we need it. But also I aim to call into question some of our most settled ideas, and lay a little depth charge under some of the dualisms that define and derange us: subjective/objective; mind/brain; belief/unbelief; reason/imagination; intellect/intuition. My goal is to solve the “hard problem”—What is consciousness?—and thereby save America from its death wish. Impossible, you say? But then your reaction to some of the statements above was the same. All but one of them are true, though the outlier will depend on who you are.”
“Illuminating the icons: Theologian Eve Tibbs’s book on Eastern Orthodox iconography is accessible, enlightening, and beautifully illustrated” – Scot McKnight in The Christian Century: “Along the flat highway that approaches the mountains of Meteora, Greece, on the second floor of offices, is a family-owned workshop of Byzantine icons. Father Pefkis, the iconographer, serves locally as a Greek Orthodox priest, and on a typical day he produces at least one icon. The studio serves double duty as a museum of icons, the most famous of which for this iconographer is the Holy Family icon he made for the Vatican. Each of his icons is painted on aged wood and uses traditional colors with gold sheets. I was there with a group of doctor of ministry students, and nearly everyone in our group bought an icon from him. For those of us who have grown up on Western paintings and European frescoes in cathedrals, it can be challenging to make sense of Eastern icons, informed as they are by layer after layer of Orthodox theology. Eve Tibbs, who teaches theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and published A Basic Guide to Eastern Orthodox Theology in 2021, offers in this beautiful new volume a brief explanation of Orthodox iconography, accompanied by brilliant photos.”
“Anxiety Doesn’t Have to Consume Us: And Sara Billups, with her new book Nervous Systems, can help” – Winn Collier at his Substack: “Much of what I’m up to — much of my writing, my preaching, my musing, my praying, my silence (and yes, silence is essential too)—circles around my longing to be a deeply alive and whole human, which, as I understand it, rests at the heart of what we call ‘discipleship.’ Only I find myself using the language of becoming a truly alive human more often than discipleship because I don’t always want to spend time unraveling the modern assumptions fueling much of the modern discipleship industry. (And it strikes me right now as I type that I probably ought to rethink this disposition because reinvigorating good, old, sturdy words has become one of my lifelong tasks, but that conversation is for another day.) All this to say: becoming truly human—and this undergirds all my conviction—means being reanimated and refashioned by the truest human who has ever existed: Jesus. To become more human requires abandoning the potent lies, the suffocating and entrenched systems, the pernicious power structures, the dehumanizing assumptions. To become truly alive means being reanimated into an entirely different way of being human, the Jesus way.”
“Viral videos draw attention to church benevolence practices” – Scott Barkley in The Baptist Press: “Benevolence ministry never slows down, but it picks up during the holidays. For it to truly be successful, benevolence must also be ongoing. It may begin with a phone call, but it doesn’t stop there. ‘”Tell me more,”‘ said Taylor Field, a Send Relief consultant who ministered in New York’s Lower East Side for over three decades while leading Graffiti Church. ‘Those three words are something you can ask, even if you’re not a counselor or social worker. You can sit down with someone, look them in the eye and ask that. Once you do, you’re going to find out a lot more about them.’ The topic of benevolence got a boost in recent weeks after a young woman’s TikTok videos went viral. The woman made calls to numerous churches and religious groups posing as a single mother with a crying baby, represented by a sound effect. If the person on the other end directed her to a partnering ministry, she said she did that and they weren’t available but could that individual church help her at that moment. According to her chart, 31 out of 40 churches she called fell in the ‘No’ category of offering help.”
“Pope Leo XIV Talks Movies To A-List Crowd At Vatican: Read His Speech” – Mike Fleming, Jr., in Deadline: “Pope Leo XIV came to become head of the Catholic Church by way of Chicago. You’d expect him to be well versed in the ’85 Bears’ 4-6 defense or the triangle offense of Michael Jordan’s Bulls. But algorithms? Who knew he might have such an understanding of the higher artistic aspirations of cinema? Today, the Pope held court at the Vatican with an audience of filmmakers, actors and executives, offering calming and encouraging words about the importance of movies and even the challenges facing the business right now. Here is his speech, delivered to an audience that included Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, Greta Gerwig, Julie Taymor & Elliot Goldenthal, Azazel Jacobs, David Lowery, Monica Bellucci, Marco Bellocchio, Alba Rohrwacher, Darren Aronofsky, Spike Lee & Tonya Lewis Lee, Judd Apatow & Leslie Mann, Chris Pine, Sally Potter, Dave Franco & Alison Brie, Adam Scott, Gus Van Sant, Kenneth Lonergan & J. Smith Cameron, Joanna Hogg, Gaspar Noe, Albert Serra and Bertrand Bonello. The coterie of film festival chiefs in attendance included Vanya Kaludjercic from Rotterdam, TIFF’s Cameron Bailey, Locarno’s Giona Nazzaro, Sundance director Eugene Hernandez and Sundance Institute board chair (and filmmaker) Ebs Burnough.”
Music: Maverick City (feat. Naomi Raine & Nate Moore) , “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” from Maverick City Christmas
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Matthew Erickson 
You seem to highlight things I have missed. Most days, I try to avoid watching or listening to the news because the depravity of the world makes me sad.