“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 Devil’s Plan to Ruin the Next Generation: I asked ChatGPT how it would destroy America’s youth. Its answers were unsettling — and all too familiar” – Jonathan Haidt in After Babel: “Earlier this year, someone started a viral trend of asking ChatGPT this question: If you were the devil, how would you destroy the next generation, without them even knowing it? Chat’s responses were profound and unsettling: ‘I wouldn’t come with violence. I’d come with convenience.’ ‘I’d keep them busy. Always distracted.’ ‘I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly, silently. And the best part is, they’d never know it was me. They’d call it freedom.’ As a social psychologist who has been trying since 2015 to figure out what on earth was happening to Gen Z, I was stunned. Why? Because what the AI proposed doing is pretty much what technology seems to be doing to children today. It seemed to be saying: If the devil wanted to destroy a generation, he could just give them all smartphones. My work over the last decade has centered on one question: Why did the mental health of Gen Z — the cohort born between 1996 and 2012 — plummet in so many countries starting in the early 2010s?”
“The Table of Dissent: Julian of Norwich, James Baldwin, and Robert Farrar Capon walk into a bar…” – Gregory Thompson in Comment: “Of the many, many peculiarities of our age, one of the most peculiar is the widespread embrace of a dissident identity. In red states and blue cities, Midwestern factories and East Coast faculty clubs, in the bro labs of Silicon Valley and barber shops of Southern towns, in unemployment lines and in gilded offices, we gather, we complain, and we fantasize about how we might rise up and resist the man. On its face, the existence of widespread dissidence is something of an oddity, if not an impossibility. After all, at its root, dissidence—from the Latin, dissidentia—means ‘contrary to’ or ‘set apart from.’ That numerically vast and ideologically divergent portions of our society all see themselves as members of a minority resistance movement is not only logically impossible and historically implausible but also psychologically bizarre. And yet here we are. Absurdity notwithstanding, we are a vast community held together by little more, it seems, than our shared commitment to dissent. From one perspective, a commitment to dissent is a necessary aspect of any society that aspires to health. As the prophetic traditions remind us, dissidence is an essential guardian against the drunken tyranny of a collective mind; a critical—if unwelcome—portal exposing us to the light of truth. From Isaiah to Augustine, Teresa of Ávila to John Brown, Dorothy Day to Václav Havel, dissidents stand apart from the conventional and summon us to the sacred.”
“Pope Leo urges Lebanon’s youth to stay and rebuild amid crisis and conflict” – Claire Giangravé in Religion News Service: “At a meeting with a head of the one of the Christian faith’s earliest communities, Pope Leo XIV addressed young Christians on Monday (Dec. 1), urging them to stay in their country despite the recurring challenges and obstacles. ‘Dear young people, perhaps you regret inheriting a world torn apart by wars and disfigured by social injustice,’ he told the crowd gathered at Bkerki, the seat of the Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch, northeast of Beirut. ‘Yet there is hope within you, a gift that we adults seem to have lost. You have time! You have more time to dream, to plan and to do good.’ Among the mostly local youth present were some from Syria and Iraq, as well as many from the Lebanese diaspora around the world. An estimated 15 million Lebanese live outside the country, according to government data, while the population in the country is around 5.8 million.”
“A long-lost Rubens painting depicting Crucifixion sells for $2.7 million” – In AP News: “A long-lost painting by Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens, which was hidden for more than four centuries, sold at 2.3 million euros ($2.7 million) at an auction Sunday in Versailles. The painting was recently found in a private townhouse in Paris. It depicts the crucifixion of Jesus Christ….Nils Büttner, an expert known for his research on Rubens, explained before the auction that the master often painted crucifixions but rarely depicted ‘the crucified Christ as a dead body on the cross. So this is the one and only painting showing blood and water coming out of the side wound of Christ, and this is something that Rubens only painted once.'”
“The relief people need: David Zahl focuses on sharing a gospel that’s unapologetically about the grace of God” – Katherine Willis Pershey in The Christian Century: “I hadn’t heard of David Zahl before I read a review, in the March 2023 issue of the century, of his 2022 book Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself). My first reaction was irritation; that was the book I had long wanted to write myself, and this cretin had the audacity to beat me to it. My second reaction was to buy the book and devour it three times, first on my own and then with groups of church members. Low Anthropologywas my gateway to Mockingbird Ministries, where Zahl is director and editor in chief. Now I’m hooked on multiple podcasts, a print magazine, and weekly newsletters. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before I get on an airplane to attend one of the Mockingbird conferences. What’s so compelling about Zahl and the ministries he helms? The pastors and writers in his network are, by and large, mainline Protestants perpetuating a gospel that is unapologetically about the grace of God.”
“The 10 Best Books of 2025: The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s top fiction and nonfiction” – in The New York Times: “The envelope, please: After a full year spent reading hundreds of books and meeting regularly to bicker — er, converse — about their merits and flaws, the editors of the Book Review have chosen the 10 Best Books of 2025. In novels that transport us from the battlefields of World War I to contemporary Swedish dance clubs to the halls of a convent in rural Australia, and from Nazi movie studios to New York art galleries where immigrants look for a sense of connection, our fiction picks offer sweeping stories about timely and timeless topics with a sense of verve and style. In nonfiction, we chose immersive journalistic accounts of the housing crisis and a historic Black church, along with a riveting biography of a misunderstood painter, a fraught mother-daughter memoir and an enthralling shipwreck story that is as much a meditation on marriage as it is a seafaring adventure.”
Music: Future of Forestry, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus” (Live)
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Matthew Erickson 