“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 the articles

“Iona was once the beating heart of Celtic Christianity” – Kenneth Steven at The Christian Century: “For me, pilgrimage begins with the Isle of Iona. I started going there with my parents in the earliest days of childhood. We traveled from the heart of landlocked Perthshire: as the crow flies it’s a couple of wing beats to Iona, while by car it involved a two-hour journey west to Oban, a ferry to the Isle of Mull, a long and beautiful drive across that island, and then a second short ferry crossing to Iona. In those days a small passenger ferry took pilgrims to Iona; I had the sense of reaching the outer edge of some tectonic plate or even the edge of the world. I felt, doubtless like tens of thousands of Iona pilgrims each year, that I had gone back in time. Iona was a place of remoteness and quiet, little changed, I imagined, from the island Columba found when he landed in the sixth century. I felt its isolation when I walked alone to Sandeels Bay in the middle of the island’s east coast or when I battled against the omnipresent winds to the south end of Iona and St. Columba’s Bay. Despite roads and telephones, this was still the Iona the saint had come to find and from which he and his followers had gone out with the Christian story.”

“How the Ukraine war is dividing Orthodox Christians” – Jonathan L. Zecher at The Conversation: “There is a famous tale within Russian Orthodox Christianity that goes like this: In the 16th century, Ivan IV – the Terrible, arguably the first Tsar of Russia – sought to extend his power and sent men to ravage those towns that had not submitted to him. At that time, Basil, a “fool for Christ”, came and offered him a gift of raw meat. It was Great Lent, the time when Christians fast from meat and dairy foods in preparation for Good Friday and Easter, and Ivan said that as an Orthodox Christian he would not eat meat. Basil responded: you drink the blood of humans, why not eat meat? Ivan was shocked and repented his violence, and called off those attacks. When it comes to Russian ambitions, not much has changed since Ivan’s days, except the range and power of the weapons. But the current war has an important religious dimension, because both sides of the conflict are not merely Christian, they are members of the same church, sharing a thousand years of religious history. Today, 71% of Russians and 78% of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians. In fact, until 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was part of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), and many parishes remain there (UOC-MP), in conflict with a self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine (UCO).”

“Is Congregational Singing Dead?: It’s time to make church music weird again” – Benjamin Crosby in Plough: “It is easy to assume that congregational singing has always been a part of Christian worship. Indeed, if anything it has something of an old-fashioned air at present, conjuring up seemingly timeless images of dusty, yellowed hymnals, of the old mainline church in the center of town, of Garrison Keillor paeans to the Lutherans of Lake Wobegon. But of course, none of those images are in fact timeless, and congregational song has a quite precise history: like the hymnal, the mainline churches, and Lutherans, congregational singing is a product of the Protestant Reformation. Today, however, the practice of congregational singing in church is threatened by a sea change in how people relate to music outside of church. All is not lost, however: the church, if it commits to the weirdness of congregational singing, might work to rebuild a culture of communal music-making within and outside the church, use that culture to invite people into the church, and – most importantly – continue to offer psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to Almighty God.”

“Can China’s New Regulations Really Stop Evangelism on the Internet?” – Sean Cheng at Christianity Today: “China’s new internet regulations went into effect March 1, laying out broad restrictions on religious communication, teaching, and evangelism. The new rules put into writing unofficial penalties that some Christians already faced for their online activity, so Chinese believers aren’t sure how the rules will be implemented and how much it could hamper missions. The regulations were announced at the end of last year by China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs (SARA) and allow only religious groups with government approval to share information on the internet. According to the new Measures on the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services:

Organizations and individuals must not proselytize online and must not carry out religious education or training, publish preaching, or repost or link to related content; must not organize the carrying out of religious activities online; and must not broadcast religious rites … through means such as text, images, audio, or video either live or in recordings.

On February 28, the Chinese government issued a press release answering questions about the new regulation, stating the government ‘will have close and thorough cooperation to ensure the implementation of the measures.’  How will the implementation of these new measures affect the use of the internet for evangelism and mission by Chinese Christians? Will Christians in China no longer be able to do anything online? As the new measures come into force during the ongoing pandemic, where will the internet mission of Chinese churches in China and overseas now go? CT Asia editor Sean Cheng interviewed several Chinese pastors and Christians (for security reasons, the names of Christians in China are pseudonyms).”

“Episcopal Bishop Curry says ‘more to do’ as poll shows Christians viewed as hypocrites” – Emily McFarlan Miller and Jack Jenkins at Religion News Service: “Ask a Christian to describe other Christians and the answers likely will be ‘giving,’ ‘compassionate,’ ‘loving’ and ‘respectful.’ Ask a non-Christian, on the other hand, and the more likely descriptors you’ll get for Christians are ‘hypocritical,’ ‘judgmental’ and ‘self-righteous.’ Non-Christians are also far more likely to say Christians do not represent the teachings of Jesus. Those are the results of a new survey conducted by the Episcopal Church, released Wednesday (March 9), that illustrates stark differences between how Christians and non-Christians view Christianity in the United States. ‘There is a disconnect between the reality of Jesus and the perceived reality of Christians,’ said Bishop Michael Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church….Closing the gap between people’s perceptions of Jesus and their perceptions of his followers will take a ‘new Reformation,’ according to Curry — one that includes not only ‘re-presenting’ a Christianity that he believes looks more like Jesus to the rest of the world, but also better formation of Christians around Jesus’ teachings and way of life. ‘The church has got a lot more to do, which is a good thing,’ he said.”

“Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age” – Dorothy Wickenden in The New Yorker: “Hidden in the woods on a slope above the Kentucky River, just south of the Ohio border, is a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a long front porch. If not for the concrete pilings that raise the building high off the ground, it would seem almost a living part of the forest. Readers around the world know the ‘long-legged house’ as the place where Wendell Berry, as a twenty-nine-year-old married man with two young children, found his voice. As he explained in his essay by that name, he built the cabin in the summer of 1963—a place where he could write, read, and contemplate the legacies of his forebears, and what inheritance he might leave behind.  The cabin began as a log house built by Berry’s great-great-great-grandfather Ben Perry, one of the area’s first settlers, and it lived on as a multigenerational salvage operation. In the nineteen-twenties, with the original house in disrepair, Wendell’s bachelor great-uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly took apart what remained and used the lumber to make a camp along the Kentucky River, where he could escape ‘the bounds of the accepted.’ Wendell, ‘a melancholic and rebellious boy,’ found peace in the tumbledown camp, even though it flooded every time the river overflowed. Eventually, it became uninhabitable, and he pried off some poplar and walnut boards to use in building his own cabin, on higher ground—a ‘satisfactory nutshell of a house,’ he wrote. Standing on its long legs, it had ‘a peering, aerial look, as though built under the influence of trees.'”

Music: Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno, “An Ending (Ascent),” from Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks