Good morning and happy Saturday. This promises to be a very destructive day around here, as Aileen and I are in the process of removing the floors, doors, and baseboards from our upstairs. Next week should be more constructive as we begin to replace them all. This project has been a long time coming, and we are looking forward to getting it done.
Since today is Saturday, I have a collection of think-pieces and long-form content I think you’ll enjoy. The topics range across the World Cup, originality and plagiarism, Canadian progressivism, surrogacy, and a positive perspective on AI. Down below, you’ll find all kinds of reader recommendations. I hope there’s something that catches your eye!
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include newer books, older books, and some that probably fall between. There’s also a collection of general market choices.
Recommended Reading
If you have been watching any of the World Cup action, you have probably become as frustrated as I have with the video replay system. It seems to me that all sports are trying to have their rules catch up with the new technology. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem fair to allow an errant call to stand when high-definition video clearly shows a violation of some kind. On the other hand, it erodes the fun of the sport to have every call challengeable and half of the exciting plays clawed back. Anyway, more on that in this piece from the Wall Street Journal.
This is my rule with sports replay: If someone is explaining a decision and it makes you scrunch up your face like they are telling you they live inside a walnut tree and talk to all the neighborhood squirrels…it’s a bad call.
Replay should feel rational, attached to reality. Not disconnected from the action it is trying to officiate. Not the kind of thing where you wonder if the review officials are sitting there watching the game or quietly online shopping for linen shorts on J.Crew.
VAR doesn’t feel like a backstop. It’s become a joy denial device. It has been designed by evil robots to rob wonder and suck the soul out of a beautiful game based on constant flow.
Read: The World Cup’s Awful Instant Replay System Must Be Destroyed. (Gift Link)
I found this a thought-provoking piece from Griffin Gooch, which makes it just the kind of article I like to share on the weekend. He writes about the disquieting sense so many of us have that everything is really just plagiarism and nothing is truly original. Yet he chooses to embrace this reality rather than battle it or consider it a negative. He ends up with a kind of syllogism.
There’s nothing new to say—even your most creative thoughts start to feel uncreative with enough backtracking through your creative influences.
Especially for those doing theology: most of what you could write—or even think—has already been written or thunk before. Which makes the pressure to come up with something original both ridiculous and exhausting.
Yet that constraint—the fact that we’re all stuck repeating & remixing ideas because we’re supposed to stay within the sandbox built by biblical theology—is a good thing. That limitation provides a bottomless well of innovation.
Read: The Pressure to Try to Be Original Is Obnoxious and Ridiculous.
This article from Text & Canon explains how the Bible influenced America’s Founding.
The Bible figured prominently in the political thought and practices of the patriotic Americans who, in the last third of the eighteenth century, fought for and secured independence from Great Britain and established new constitutional republics in their respective states and nation. It was, after all, the most accessible, authoritative, and venerated book in the world of the American founders.
The founders read the Bible. Their many quotations from and allusions to both familiar and obscure scriptural texts confirm that they knew the Bible from cover to cover. Biblical language and themes liberally seasoned their rhetoric. The phrases and cadences of the King James Bible, especially, informed their written and spoken words. Its ideas shaped their habits of mind and informed their political pursuits.
Although the founders held diverse theological views and some even doubted Christianity’s transcendent claims, including the Bible’s divine origins, many turned to Christianity and its sacred text for insights into human nature, civic virtue, social order, political authority, the rights and responsibilities of citizens, and other concepts essential to the establishment of a political society.
Read: The Bible’s Influence on the American Founding.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that Canada is extremely progressive. Yet even that level of progressivism can be hard to see when you live here. I suppose it’s the “frog in the kettle” factor. This article from the National Post tries to catalog some of the most significant ways in which Canada has “awokened” over the past few decades. On that note, I recently read a news report in which a judge exonerated a man for his criminal actions because his race had made him “less morally culpable” than if he were white. It’s almost impossible to imagine a more racist statement than that.
Each of the major Anglo states is struggling with shame for their past, and, to cope, has turned to a new philosophy of anti-West, anti-white, decolonial, self-obliterating multiculturalism that elevates foreign above familiar. But it’s Canada, of all places, that seared this way of thinking into its Constitution and social matrix without democratic debate.
Reconciliation. Diversity, equity and inclusion. Soft-on-crime rules. Immigration levels so high they shift national identity. If they weren’t written into the Constitution directly, they were interpreted into its text by judges, or were practiced into existence by civil servants. It’s a mission that most accept wholeheartedly: it’s so often taught that Canada’s history is one of fighting injustice and expanding the franchise, which means abandoning old points of pride and finding new ones on the progressive path towards inclusion.
Of these pillars holding up new Canada, it’s that of reconciliation that bears the most weight. This is the agreed-upon state policy of making amends to the Indigenous people of Canada for colonizing the territory and raising a British state upon it.
Read: The Western Surrender: Canada Is the Wokest Country in the World. (National Post uses a metered paywall, which means you get a certain number of free articles per month.)
Also in the National Post is this heartbreaking, appalling, and distinctly twenty-first-century story about surrogacy. Surrogacy carries so many ethical issues that it is difficult to even know where to begin, and this story highlights many of them. Essentially, a homosexual couple created a surrogacy agreement with a woman but, when they learned the child would have a cleft lip and the possibility of other genetic abnormalities, ordered her to abort. She refused and brought the child to term. Yet:
A Canadian couple is suing the surrogate mother who carried their son, two years after she refused their request to abort the fetus because of a cleft lip and possible genetic abnormalities.
The Ontario-based surrogate insisted that more tests be conducted and eventually the same-sex couple agreed to let the pregnancy continue, as specialists indicated he was a healthy child with a relatively minor birth defect.
But in a suit filed in Ontario Superior Court this May, the parents allege the woman failed to keep them informed about the health of the baby, put the child at risk, caused them emotional distress and violated their confidentiality, all charges the surrogate denies vehemently.
I know there are many Christians who, for reasons of compassion, feel positive about surrogacy, but stories like these, and others like them, should cause us all to examine the ethics of it.
Read: Couple Sues Ontario Surrogate Mother Who Refused to Abort Fetus. (Again, National Post uses a metered paywall, which means you get a certain number of free articles per month.)
This is a hearteningly positive but still deeply thoughtful article on AI. The author writes about using AI as a kind of intellectual sparring partner, a use I have found very helpful as well. He acknowledges the very legitimate problem of sycophancy, but then expresses that it is simply an opportunity to improve the models.
One criticism continues to dominate public discussion: AI is making people intellectually lazy. There is research supporting that concern, including studies that have identified cognitive offloading when people use AI carelessly. But there is also a growing body of research showing that guided LLM use can increase learning engagement and improve academic outcomes. Thus the same tool produces opposite results depending on the conditions around it: a student left alone with a chatbot that hands over answers offloads the thinking, while a student working with one designed to ask questions does more of it. The interesting thing is that both sets of findings are correct. When you look closely at the evidence, the determining factor is not the technology itself. It is how the technology is used.
…
Humans have always delegated. We handed memory to writing, calculation to the abacus, direction to maps, recall to libraries and then to search engines. AI belongs to that lineage. So the useful question isn’t whether we’re offloading our thinking—we always have. It’s which faculties this particular delegation will weaken and which it will finally let us develop, which corners of the mind will narrow and which will open. That’s what I want us to argue about. Not what AI will do to human thought, but what human thought can become alongside it. The future in fact belongs to what I call generative thinkers—people who use AI not to avoid thinking but to think further, learn better and create something genuinely new.
Read: Can AI Make Us Smarter?
Your Recommendations
Earlier in the week, I asked what you are enjoying and what you would recommend to others. There were far too many responses for me to share them all, but I did want to share a broad selection. Thanks to all who sent them along!
If you’ve got your Greek, David wants you to work on keeping it through Robert Plummer’s A Daily Dose of Greek.
Steve has been listening to Jason Mraz’s rather unexpected album Grandma’s Gospel Favorites. It’s surprisingly good!
Tim is on his third reading of The Gospel Way Catechism by Trevin Wax & Thomas West. His church will be studying it in 24 sessions beginning in September.
Ruth is enjoying Machen’s classic Christianity and Liberalism and recommends the one with a foreword by Carl Trueman (as do I).
I would also share Karl’s recommendation of Brant Hansen’s The Men We Need. He qualifies that it “isn’t a strong book of theology on being a man, but it brings up some great observations and insights.”
James says that this week’s episode of Practical Engineering provides a fascinating look at why New Orleans flooded during Hurricane Katrina.
A different James is enjoying the Room for Nuance long-form podcast.
The New York Times has suggested you work on shaping your focus by staring at art for 10 minutes at a time. Chris has been doing so and encourages you to take the challenge, then apply it to Scripture. “Take one verse or one phrase or one word and look at it for 10 minutes.”
Tiffanie has been pursuing a master’s degree through the online program at Bob Jones University and has been extremely impressed by the experience. As a bonus, she has been using the instrumental tab on the Abiding Radio app while writing in her journal each morning and recommends it.
Darren’s wife suggested he read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and he’s glad he did.
I will look forward to reading and sharing more of your recommendations next week.
Flashback
Breathe a Sigh of Relief or Recoil in Terror. A single object can be a source of comfort to one person and a source of fear to another. The same object can make one person breathe a great sigh of relief and another to recoil in terror.
The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.
—R.C. Sproul
