“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.

“Religious but not spiritual? Meet the skeptics favoring ritual over the supernatural” – Kathryn Post at Religion News Service: “From what she eats to how she ties her shoes, religion shapes nearly every moment of Michelle’s life. An Orthodox Jew living in New York City, she follows a line of discipline guided by halacha, or Jewish law. She keeps a kosher kitchen, and on shabbat she doesn’t drive or turn on lights, following ancient strictures against lighting a fire on the Lord’s day. The one part of Judaism Michelle said she’s not necessarily sold on is the whole ‘God’ thing. ‘I have zero desire or inclination to stop being a practicing Jew,’ said Michelle, who asked to keep her last name private out of concern for her employment at a faith-based organization. ‘I recognize about myself that I am skeptical about the God stuff and the Torah stuff. I don’t really believe all that. I don’t feel like I need to.’ The phrase ‘spiritual not religious’ has become a near-catch phrase in American culture, and the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as having spiritual leanings without adhering to a given faith continues to climb. But only rarely have pollsters plumbed for those who separate their religion from their spirituality in the other direction: the religious but not spiritual. While few studies dedicated to the group exist, a December 2023 study on spirituality from Pew Research Center found that 1 in 10 Americans can be categorized this way.”

“The Connection Between Racial and Environmental Injustice” – David Swanson at his occasional newsletter: “I’m glad for you, the readers of this little newsletter to be some of the first to learn the title of my forthcoming book. After a bit of brainstorming back-and-forth with my publisher, InterVarsity Press, and input from friends and family, here’s where we landed: Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some of the assumptions behind the title. Plunder is a theme that runs through the book, particular in my description of the force which animates both environmental and racial injustice. For a couple of reasons, this is something that felt very important as I was writing. First, it’s been my experience that most people who care deeply about confronting systemic racism don’t see its connection to environmental destruction, and vice versa. If they intuit a connection, it remains vague: both are expressions of injustice. But, as I do my best to show in the book, the connection is precise and deep. I go as far as to say that addressing either racial or environmental injustice without addressing the other guarantees that our efforts will never address the root cause behind both.”

“Reflections on the Evangelical Fracturing, Ten Years In” – Jake Meadow at Mere Orthodoxy: “While reading an ARC of Mike Cosper’s forthcoming book, I was caught up in how Cosper described the church planting scene of the mid 2000s, particularly as it existed around the then still embryonic Acts 29 network. There was a blending of innocence and confidence and hopefulness that Cosper captures well. I wasn’t part of it directly, but I remember listening to Mark Driscoll sermons and then Matt Chandler sermons at the time and picking up something of the atmosphere from afar. (I was born in 1987, left the fundamentalist church I grew up in in 2005, spent 18 months in an attractional megachurch more in the Willow Creek stream than Mars Hill, and then found my way to RUF and the PCA in 2007, where I have been ever since.) From about 2005 until the early 2010s it seemed as if Acts 29 might represent the defining movement in the next wave of evangelicalism: They had found a way of blending the best insights of the attractional movement of Bill Hybels and Rick Warren with the theological and missiological acumen of Tim Keller and John Piper. Moreover, because of their particular grunge-inflected aesthetic they naturally avoided some of the worst excesses of the attractional movement, which was a tendency toward the superficial and happy clappy. Their strength here wasn’t necessarily a product of any special virtue—Gen X tends toward the brooding and melancholic, after all, and virtually all their leadership were poster children for Gen X. But the resultant synthesis of their many influences was compelling.”

“How social media algorithms ‘flatten’ our culture by making decisions for us” – Tanya Mosley interviews Kyle Chayka on NPR’s Fresh Air: “If you opened Facebook, Twitter or Instagram about a decade ago, you’d likely see posts from friends and family, in chronological order. Nowadays, users are hit with a barrage of content curated by an algorithm. Passionate about plants? Sports? Cats? Politics? That’s what you’re going to see. ‘”‘[There] are equations that measure what you’re doing, surveil the data of all the users on these platforms and then try to predict what each person is most likely to engage with,’ New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka explains. ‘So rather than having this neat, ordered feed, you have this feed that’s constantly trying to guess what you’re going to click on, what you’re going to read, what you’re going to watch or listen to.’ In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.”

“ADD Revisited” – Alan Jacobs at his blog, Homebound Symphony: “On the first day of my Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century course — mentioned here — I played for my students a few minutes of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. We paused to talk a bit about the musical language of late Romanticism, about Rachmaninoff’s gift for lush melody, etc. Then I played them this [Rachmaninoff’s Vespers]. Hard to believe it was composed by the same man, isn’t it? But (I suggested) that’s the difference between a young Russian composer in 1901 — he wrote that concerto when he was 27 — and a middle-aged Russian composer living through overwhelming political turmoil and world war. In time of desperate need Rachmaninoff, not a churchgoer, turned to the liturgical and musical inheritance of Orthodoxy to make sense of his world, to begin the long healing that would be necessary.”

“REVIEW: Why Do the Heathen Rage?: Flannery O’ Connor’s unfinished novel raises persistent questions” – Katy Carl in Current: “Staring down our own limitations requires the greatest degree of courage. Writing in 1963 to editor and anthologist Sr. Mariella Gable, novelist Flannery O’Connor forthrightly unburdens herself of the creative and spiritual barriers preventing her next work: ‘I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.’ The revelation is more poignant because we know, as O’Connor knew, that she was slowly dying from complications caused by lupus. The O’Connor who sent that letter was mere months away from death. Yet some of her finest work still lay ahead of her. ‘Parker’s Back’ articulates an incarnational spirituality set sternly against Gnosticism. ‘Revelation’ renders the long-overdue comeuppance of a prejudiced farm wife who, in an iconic final scene, receives a mystical vision that upends the unjust racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. O’Connor completed both stories during her last months of life. But when she writes to Sr. Mariella about ‘the larger things,’ O’Connor seems to mean not these works for which she ought to be most remembered but her novel-in-progress Why Do the Heathen Rage? In this unfinished work, now available to the public in its first edition, O’Connor strives to grow beyond her comic gifts. She seeks to develop the latent strengths of her Dostoyevskian religious consciousness, chronicling life after the violent moment of grace while also handling social questions in earnest.”

Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vespers, Op. 37 – II. “Blagoslovi dushe moya“