Welcome to Weekend A La Carte. I’ve got some interesting think pieces and long-form content below. After that, you’ll find recommendations from readers like you that cover podcasts, books, apps, sermons, and lots of other good stuff.
Before we get to any of that, let me express gratitude to Harvest House for sponsoring the blog this week. They wanted to be sure that you know about the new Gospel Way Catechism for Kids, a resource meant to build a strong biblical foundation and confidently navigate today’s culture.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include a collection of newer and older books. Be sure to scroll down and look at some of this week’s options since there were plenty of good ones that will be expiring by the end of the day.
Recommended Reading
Douglas Groothuis wrote an article against gambling this week and drew his argument largely from a theology of work. Essentially, he argues that God means for us to work for our money, not gamble for it. While I am adamantly against betting, I also don’t entirely disagree with Stephen Kneale, who says that, as far as he can see, most arguments against gambling are not entirely compelling or carefully proven from Scripture. “I cannot find anywhere in scripture that says gambling is wrong. I have looked. I have heard numerous arguments that claim it is morally wrong from a biblical perspective, but the arguments simply don’t seem to stack up.” So much like him, I have an instinct against gambling and think it must be wrong, even as I’m somewhat dissatisfied with the arguments Christians make. That’s perhaps especially true when we compare gambling to other sports, hobbies, or occupations.
So again, hear me: I am not endorsing gambling and do not gamble in any way. But I also wonder if Christians have been content with relatively weak arguments against gambling. I am very willing to be proven wrong. (And, indeed, one of the reader recommendations below is for another article on gambling.)
Read: Against Gambling and Is Gambling Sinful?
Kevin DeYoung has shared the first in a two-part series that tells what the Bible teaches about nations. He says that these articles are meant to be neither polemical nor academic, but to simply walk through biblical terminology while addressing what the Bible teaches about the nations and those who lead them. “Nation” is undoubtedly one of those terms for which we import our twenty-first-century understanding and thus potentially obscure the actual meaning.
The word “nation” or “nations” is common in our English Bible, with the singular noun occurring 155 times in the English Standard Version and the plural noun occurring 490 times. The word “nation” usually refers to the nation of Israel or another specific nation on the earth (e.g., Egypt). The word “nations” can refer specifically to non-Jewish (i.e., Gentile) peoples or simply to the totality of peoples around the world (inclusive of Jews). From the opening chapters of the Bible, we see that the nations are subject to God’s wrath, but also the object of God’s saving intentions. By the end of the Bible, we see as God’s people that our national identity is relativized by the far greater blessing of our heavenly citizenship. While the reality of each person’s earthly citizenship is not erased—now or in the life to come—the weight of the New Testament stresses that God’s redemptive kingdom no longer resides in any particular nation but in the multinational church of Jesus Christ.
Read: What Does the Bible Teach About Nations?
This week brought the news that columnist Ross Douthat is moving from the New York Times to 60 Minutes. Writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador laments this and says it exposes a wider concern about columnists being remade into media personalities.
We have shifted into a media environment in which individuals are far more powerful than institutions. Columnists and essayists who are good at those roles have a tendency to build platforms that surpass their employer’s, in some ways. Over time they cease to be “columnists” or even “writers” and instead become “media personalities.” And as media personalities, they often have a kind of power that can rival or even surpass that of their employers. I expect that the Times will lose many subscribers over Douthat’s departure.
But we have seen this pattern play out many times before: Tucker Carlson left Fox News and while his audience is not as broad as it once was and he is somewhat quarantined on Twitter in a way he was not while at Fox, he still has a meaningful audience and clearly has a sustainable media operation behind him. Candace Owens’s departure from The Daily Wire played out in a similar way: Her audience is almost certainly larger at this point than that of her former boss Ben Shapiro, who has remained rooted in the institution he built. Obviously both Carlson and Owens are extremely different figures from Douthat. It may be that their commercial success as independent producers is not replicable because it depends on a particular sort of audience that is toxic enough to alienate anyone not already part of it and large enough to sustain some larger media operations. Douthat obviously will not profit from that same arrangement, nor would most other media figures.
Read: Ross Douthat and the Future of Digital Media.
Every organization that deals in writing is having to craft policies related to the use of AI. This week, The Gospel Coalition released its policy, which it described as “a line in the sand.”
It’s an offense to the word “writing” to apply it to AI-arranged words and sentences. What AI produces is an impressively polished, usually helpful, sometimes cheeky string of words. But it’s just instantaneous pattern recognition and data organization. It’s soulless slop that can mimic and masquerade as brilliant writing. It’s aggressively efficient, speedily rendered, sycophantic information.
But it’s not writing.
Even when it’s created at the behest of a human’s creative prompt and detailed parameters, and even when it’s just assisting a human who has real writing chops, AI-fashioned content doesn’t deserve to be called writing.
Hence, TGC allows AI to be used in only the most minimal of ways. Christianity Today crafted its own policy, and it’s quite similar. In both cases, the organizations have a full editorial team and process that allows them to do what individual writers cannot: discuss ideas together, outline them in community, get the feedback of an editor, and so on. Hence, I think those policies work well for those organizations, but I expect many individual writers may institute policies that are a bit looser.
Read: Our Line in the Sand on AI: TGC’s Missional Opportunity.
The Atlantic covers the phenomenon of people growing tired of influencers–a phenomenon most of us understand, I’m sure.
Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.
But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.
You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.
Read: The Extras Are Tired.
Reader Recommendations
Every week I ask readers what they recommend. (Check Monday A La Carte if you’d like to have a say.) Here are some of this week’s recommendations:
Joshua recommends the sermon “According to the Election of Grace” by Elder Ward. He says, “Listening left me deeply encouraged and delighting in God for the beauty and necessity of election. Soul-stirring fire here.” (At the very least, watch for a couple of minutes beginning at 50 minutes.)
Karen enjoys the RISE leadership podcast for leadership and development. “It offers insight and actionable takeaways to make a Christ-centered impact in your church and life.”
Matthew and Andrea both use Versify, a Bible memorization app that gives flexibility in what and how you memorize Scripture.
Maria says, “My family has seriously enjoyed and has been blessed by the From the Rising of the Sun documentary by Tim Challies & Tim Keese. They did a wonderful job of showing us that every Sunday we are worshiping with family around the world!” It’s free with the book, so check the inside front cover if you already have a copy.
Michael recommends Zotero, a free app “that easily catalogues any print books, ebooks, logos books, blogs, pdfs, videos, podcasts, charts, or anything else you want to organize, with just an ISBN or webpage.”
Darcy votes for the audiobook of Murder on the Orient Express, narrated by Kenneth Branagh. “He does an excellent (and amusing) job with the wide-ranging cast of characters!”
David remembers that, a number of years ago, Phil Johnson had an exceptional series of articles about gambling. “Highly recommend reading those … and recommend that a publisher pesters Johnson into turning them into a book.”
Chris recommends Grant, Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. “This work does an excellent job showing Grant, his strengths and weaknesses, and how they played out in his life. I came away with significantly more respect for one of the most important figures in American history.”
Scott likes The Heart Taken Up: 90 Days with the Puritans by Stephen Yuille published by Reformation Heritage Books.
Summer “recently read Made for Friendship by Drew Hunter and found myself very encouraged and walked away with a better perspective and understanding of the value of friendship with others and with our God!”
Samantha shares that her “friend Hannah has shared this devotional with me and it has been so helpful to realign my mind first thing in the morning. Yesterday’s guest was J.E. Tada, who has been a source of godly encouragement to my heart through the years.”
Mike thinks you should read Sammy and His Shepherd, a children’s book by Susan Hunt.
Flashback
We Must, We Can, Bloom for Him. No matter what unfolds around us and no matter what is done to us, we are able to bloom for him—to display the truest love, the greatest gentleness, the highest reaches of Christian character.
Self-help doesn’t help. My self is the problem.
—Jared Wilson
