“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.

 

“The Greatest Enemy of a Leader (And What to Do About It)” – J. R. Briggs writes about his own personal grappling with what a recent interview mentioned as the greatest enemy of a leader. This parallels some of my own journey with distraction, technology, and recovering focus in my life. “Several months ago I listened to a fascinating podcast interview on the importance of focused work. The leader being interviewed said one of the greatest enemies of leaders today was distraction. I stopped to listen more intently—this was not the answer I was expecting him to say. He went on to share that our phones are the single greatest factor to distraction in the life of a leader.”

 

“Pro-Lifers Aren’t Hypocrites” – Here is Tish Harrison Warren addressing the hype around anti-abortion campaigns around the nation and claims of hypocrisy that have been leveled against pro-life advocates. “In any debate about abortion, someone will eventually say that pro-lifers only care about babies until birth or only care about children in the womb, not outside of it. The pro-choice advocacy group NARAL even uses this ubiquitous cliché in an ongoing public campaign that encourages supporters to share memes spotlighting ‘pro-life hypocrisy.’…This cliché distorts our picture of the pro-life movement and is often used to dismiss the larger moral argument that a person in utero is a human being who deserves legal protection. Its invocation allows pro-choice advocates to hold their opponents to abstracted standards of radicalism in order to sidestep substantive debate.”

 

“A Kind of Experiment, Separating Gender and Sex: Why the Church Says No” – Since we’re on the run with hot topics, why not take a read of Kevin D. Williamson’s sharp critique of current gender theory and the recent Vatican release of “Male and Female He Created Them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” Williamson writes: “For this reason, the Catholic Church’s education committee, the Congregation for Catholic Education, formally, has turned its attention to one of the peculiar and destructive ideas of our time, what it describes as ;’the theory of a radical separation between gender and sex, with the former having priority over the latter.’…The stakes here are high, as the Church sees it, employing language that will be entirely familiar to American conservatives: ‘Similar theories aim to annihilate the concept of nature,’ the document reads, ‘that is, everything we have been given as a preexisting foundation of our being and action in the world.'”

 

“Longing for lost worlds won’t convert America” – And in case reading some of these articles gets your blood boiling and ready to amp up the culture war, then you might benefit from reading Matthew Schmitz’s essay. Schmitz, a conservative and Senior Editor for First Things, writes: “Converting America begins with love, not contempt. We should cherish our nation’s variegated traditions, its multi-racial people, its habits of piety and liberality. Anyone who presents America as irredeemably ‘commercial’, ‘Protestant’, ‘liberal’ or ‘decadent’ has conceded the territory for which he should contend. Those who dream of defending the Church against 20th-century Spanish anti-clericals should be equally eager to protect her rights in 21st-century America. Those who lament the fall of Austro-Hungary should also resist those who would tear apart the United States.”

 

“Are All White People Privileged?” – Cultural competence consultant, David Livermore reflects on white privilege from a cultural intelligence framework in this provocative article. “You can’t have an honest conversation about cultural intelligence (CQ) without addressing white privilege,  the idea that white people inherit certain privileges simply by the color of their skin. But privilege is not an easy topic of conversation. People on all sides of the issue quickly become emotional and defensive. People of color are fatigued by having to prove the point to white colleagues while many white people feel anything but privileged and experience what Robin DiAngelo refers to as white fragility.”

 

“The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood” – “On the day C.S. Lewis died, his last written work was already in press with the Saturday Evening Post. ‘We have no “right to happiness,”‘ Lewis declared in the essay, by which he meant that we have no moral right to trample the rules of justice to gratify our impulses.”

 

“Crying in Church” – Here’s Martha Park in Image: “When I first started attending church again, I found myself crying at some point during every service. It could happen any time: at the start of worship, when my dad stands in the hallway ringing a hand bell, the signal for us all to settle into our pews; or at the start of a hymn I have not heard in church for years but find myself humming even now; or when my father baptizes a baby and asks us all to promise we will ‘nurture one another in the Christian faith and life.'”

 

“Data from a Century of Cinema Reveals How Movies Have Evolved” – Okay, so I have to admit that I’m a cinephile. I love film, even if our family has agreed to forego movies for the summer to take advantage of the beautiful Wisconsin summers. But in this article, Greg Miller at Wired explores how shorter shots, different patterns of shots, more motion, and changing light has shifted the way that movies are developed and our experience of film.

 

Music: Henryk Górecki, Symphony No. 3 [“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”], Op. 36

[I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within the articles linked from this page, but I have read them myself in order to make me think more deeply.]