“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.
“Israel Gaza war: History of the conflict explained” – BBC News: “The Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an unprecedented assault on Israel on Saturday, with hundreds of gunmen infiltrating communities near the Gaza Strip. At least 1,300 Israelis have been killed, while dozens of soldiers and civilians, including women and children, are being held in Gaza as hostages. More than 1,300 Palestinians have also been killed in numerous air strikes on Gaza that Israel’s military is carrying out in response, and Israel has imposed a total blockade on the territory, denying it food, fuel and other essentials. It is also massing its forces along the Gaza border and Palestinians are bracing themselves for a ground operation which could cost many more deaths.”
“‘He’ll Ruin Your Life the Way His Daddy Ruined Ours’: What my broken father showed me about the goodness of God” – Esau McCaulley in The Atlantic: “My father and mother met in the winter of 1976. I’ve seen photos. There they are, looking as young and untroubled as any two high-school students on a Friday-night date. Not yet parents, not yet weighed down with the responsibility of caring for four children, both are smiling, my father standing behind my mother, who sits on a stool with her head nestled into his chest. My parents were introduced by my father’s cousin Larry, whose easy smile and welcoming personality marked him as a charmer. Larry and my mom attended school at J. O. Johnson High in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was two years ahead of her. Intrigued by the sly older boy, my mother dated him, but after the second outing, she opted to let him down easy by introducing him to her friend Wanda. Larry, in turn, suggested that my mother meet his cousin Esau, who went to school out in the country, at Gurley High.”
“America’s nonreligious are a growing, diverse phenomenon. They really don’t like organized religion” – Peter Smith in AP News: “Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. ‘And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,’ he recalled. Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades. ‘Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,’ said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. ‘I can’t buy into that,’ he said. As Dulak rejects being part of a religious flock, he has plenty of company. He is a ‘none’ — no, not that kind of nun. The kind that checks ‘none’ when pollsters ask ‘What’s your religion?’ The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it. In U.S. religion today, ‘the most important story without a shadow of a doubt is the unbelievable rise in the share of Americans who are nonreligious,’ said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University and author of ‘The Nones,’ a book on the phenomenon. The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.”
“Dream of a New Rhythm: A Conversation with Miho Nonaka” – Nathan Suhr-Sytsma interviews Miho Nonaka in Image: “Miho Nonaka is a bilingual poet from Tokyo whose first collection of poems, Garasu no tsuki, was published in Japanese in 1998. She went on to earn graduate degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Houston. She is the author of the English-language collection The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020) and the Japanese translator of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (Kadokawa, 2021). Ever attentive to matters of both cultural and linguistic translation, she has published poems and essays in journals including The Christian Century, Adroit Journal, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, and Southern Review. She is an associate professor of English at Wheaton College, where she teaches creative writing and literature. She spoke with Nathan Suhr-Sytsma by video call and email about her literary education, her poems’ unexpected points of departure, the dilemmas posed by translation, their mutual admiration for the anime director Miyazaki Hayao, and Japanese writers who should be better known in North America.”
“The teacher as gardener” – Austin Kleon shares some quotations from John Holt on his blog: “The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.”
“The white evangelical march toward climate disaster” – Mark Silk at Religion News Service: “The most striking — and disturbing — finding of the Public Religion Research Institute’s new climate change survey is that while the proportion of all Americans who consider climate change a crisis has risen 16% since 2014, among white evangelicals it has dropped 38%. That brings crisis-level concern among white evangelicals down to 8% — the lowest of any religious community in the country. They are also the only community whose support for action to mitigate climate change falls below 0.5 on a scale of 0 – 1. (Their 0.41 support level compares with 0.57 for all Americans.) At the other end of the scale are the nones (or, in PRRI lingo, the unaffiliated), among whom crisis concern has risen by nearly a quarter, from 33% to 43%, with support for mitigation action at 0.66. Black Protestants are the only other religious community whose crisis-level of concern about climate has declined in the past decade (from 24% to 19%). But their support for mitigation action, at 0.61, is above the national average. (It may be that, since 2014, the situation of Black people in American society has edged climate out of the crisis category for some.) Of course, it’s hardly news that white evangelicals come in last on the scale of faith-based climate concern. Beginning in the 1990s, they were the principal audience for the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, an outfit funded by the Koch brothers and fossil fuel companies that promoted skepticism about climate change and the science behind it.”
Music: The Porter’s Gate, “All Creatures Lament (feat. Fernando Ortega & Molly Parden),” from Climate Vigil Songs
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