The big news in the world of American Christianity this week seems to be the Vanity Fair profile of Jerry Falwell Jr. in which he admits to not being religious. What I found most interesting about this revelation is that it's not really one at all. I remember an interview with him on NPR in 2016 where he talked about then head of the ERLC for the Southern Baptist Convention, Russell Moore.
Sometimes, I feel like I need to stop ruminating on the "deep cleavages in American society," as this piece from the Bush Institute refers to them. I wonder if it would be helpful to remember the turbulence of the sixties, just to have some frame of reference for comparison, but it doesn't seem to be doing much good for my mom's outlook. She's just as exasperated with our current climate as the rest of us.
This week, I gave in to the hype and started playing Wordle and quickly became addicted to my daily fix of puzzling through scrambled letters. Matt Birchler has a list of the things that make Wordle great. This is a play on some very old word game, I'm sure, but that doesn't diminish it. Wordle is great because of how its executed and all the little things it does right that add up to something many can't stop playing.
Barrie is another band that was recommended to me by the Apple Music algorithm. I immediately checked out their back catalog and noticed that they had a video for the song that I had discovered, "Darjeeling." I was particularly drawn to the video because it is set mostly at The Crane Estate. The Crane Estate is a sprawling piece of property in Ipswich, MA, where a young Cornelius Crane (AKA, Chevy Chase) spent his childhood summers.
Professor at a Christian college, Chad Ragsdale, has a blog post in which he embeds an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that featured Dr. Robert Malone. He writes about the episode in the first paragraph of his post. This morning I finished listening to what is undoubtedly one of the most listened to podcast episodes in the history of podcasting. You can listen to it here. In fact, I would encourage you to listen to it not because I’m convinced that everything said is absolutely true, but because being exposed to ideas that run contrary to conventional narratives is helpful and even necessary for clarifying our own thinking.
In our county, mask mandates in schools continue to be a hot button issue. There are parents who blame the enforcement of mask rules for deteriorating mental health amongst students. These parents are frustrated and seeing their kids struggling encourages them to want to do something. “The dehumanization, isolation and fear mongering caused by all these mandates and COVID hysteria is literally killing our children,” Colleen Fleming, a parent, told the school board on Tuesday.
Andy Nicolaides over at the Dent urges us to take it easy on ourselves when it comes to social media. Look around the interwebs and you will find no shortage of people berating themselves up for their time spent on social media or trying to concoct ways to curb their use of those platforms. A big one is the use of Twitter. A huge amount of people are using this service multiple times a day, for various reasons.
Last week, I wrote about some musical favorites from 2021. This week, I'm posting the video from one of my favorite songs that isn't from last year, but that I discovered last year. I think this one surfaced due to the Apple Music recommendation algorithm, which has gotten really good. I ask Siri to play a song on the diminutive but fairly powerful HomePod Mini, then, once the song is done, the device magically plays other music that I like.
Image source: Artturi Jalli/UnsplashMy favorite Christmas piece this season was How Christmas Changed Everything by Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren in the NYT. She goes back to the early days of Christianity to observe how the life and death of Christ impacted believers in such a profound way that they defied deeply embedded cultural norms. Warren explains that our familiarity with Christianity in the West tends to make us forget how much it changed the rules for people, who were, in every ancient society, involved in some sort of caste system.
For this Friday Night Video, Spectres comes your way with some powerful, muscular post-punk. At first, I thought this was a fan-made video with the traditional fuzzy retro found footage. It wasn’t until the band was shown in the same style that I realized it was a legit official video for the song. This one has been in heavy rotation as part of my The Noise That I Loved Best 2021 playlist.