Since today is Saturday, I have a collection of think-pieces and long-form content I think you’ll enjoy. Topics cover declining fertility rates, the Boy Scouts, The Odyssey, AI and the elderly, and Gen Z. Beneath that, you’ll find all kinds of reader recommendations. I hope there’s something that catches your eye!
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include a selection of newer and older titles.
Recommended Reading
I enjoyed this essay from LuElla D’Amico, who considers her son’s involvement in Boy Scouts. She explains the importance of both boys and girls being involved in single-sex organizations.
My experience suggests one of the paradoxes of well-designed single-sex organizations. Rather than winnowing down our understanding of masculinity and femininity, they can actually broaden it. By removing some of the pressure to perform for one another during the most self-conscious years of adolescence, they give boys and girls alike the freedom to discover gifts, interests, and capacities they might otherwise have left unexplored.
That is why I wasn’t eager to solve our troop’s problem by replacing the very thing my family had come looking for in a boys-only troop. The question was whether one of this troop’s distinct gifts was precisely that it gave boys the opportunity to grow up in the company of good men who freely chose to invest in them. More broadly, it was whether preserving that kind of community remained important enough to justify the sacrifices required to fortify it.
Read: Can Scouting Still Raise Boys? (The Dispatch uses a metered paywall, so if you haven’t used up your quota of free articles, you should be okay.)
The Odyssey came to the big screen this week, and it seems to be getting good reviews. That said, what I have seen of it on social media is largely negative. I never know whether that is because the movie is objectively bad or whether influencers are creating negative reviews for the sake of the algorithm, and those are then getting algorithmically fed to me. Anyway, here’s an interesting article from Jake Adkins about the significance of Nolan’s adaptation and what it says about the current age.
The stories a culture chooses to tell — and how it chooses to tell them — are among the more reliable indexes of what a society actually believes about the world. Often the form of retelling says as much as the substance. To that end, this is not a review of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey so much as a review of the moment in which it arrives — an attempt to ask why this story, why this filmmaker, and why now.
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The gods in Homer’s Odyssey are present from the first lines — not as decoration or metaphor, but as actors in the drama, playing a direct role in whether a man will make it home. The human story is held, from the outset, inside a divine one. That is the story Christopher Nolan has chosen to tell now.
Read: Remythologizing the Myths: Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey and the Fractures in a Secular Age.
We have probably all read some of the recent articles lamenting the decline in the birthrate in almost all parts of the developed world. Where it is not in decline is among Orthodox Jews. This article explains how that community keeps its birthrate so abnormally (or, I suppose, traditionally) high. Much of it is not replicable outside that community, but I found it interesting nonetheless.
What would it take for the world to turn around the widespread decline in births? Ultra-orthodox Jews may have something to teach us. They live squarely in the urban centers of the US and Europe, including 200,000 in New York City, but unlike most city dwellers, they have very high birth rates. Today, a Yiddish-speaking woman in the United States can expect to have 6.6 children, compared with 1.6 for the country as a whole.
Everything in ultra-orthodox life is geared toward facilitating large families, from how children play to how couples have sex. In this piece, I’ll use the example of Chabad, the largest denomination of Hasidic Jews, although many practices mentioned here are shared by all the ultra-orthodox.
It’s not clear that many modern people, Westerners or not, would want to adopt the family-friendly elements of Chabad life. What’s more, little of the Chabad lifestyle can easily be practiced in isolation. But understanding how this community encourages fertility can help to explain why it is falling in many other parts of the world today
Read: Chabad Life.
Here’s an alternate take: That if we want to solve the birthrate problem, we first need to solve the friendship problem.
The headline finding is simple. The American birthrate has fallen below 1.6 children per woman. Replacement fertility requires about 2.1. The United States is now in its third extended period of below-replacement fertility, after the Great Depression years and a stretch from 1972 to 1989. The current period, though, has lasted longer and fallen lower than either of the previous two. If the trend continues, Stone and Brookes project that the American population will peak around 351 million in the 2050s and then decline.
Why? Here the authors have uncovered something genuinely novel: evidence that the fertility collapse is not only economic, but social. Americans are not having fewer children because they want fewer children. They are having fewer children, in part, because friendship has thinned and social support for family life has weakened.
As you read it, you’ll see why friends are so important.
Read: Want More Babies? We Need More Friends.
And here’s another interesting one. Like the others, it does not come from a Christian worldview, so you will disagree with parts of it. Still, it offers lots of fascinating insights, not least related to the lag between falling birthrates and the effects on society. (Essentially, the drop in birthrate doesn’t really show up in society until the elderly generation dies.) Consider this:
Finally, if fertility really stays at 1 or 1.1 for a long time, I don’t think we appreciate how big a change this is. Now I’m going to make a crazy forecast, and I want everyone to understand this is a crazy forecast. Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people.
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How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million? When population starts falling a lot, countries may do crazy subsidies for having kids, things can change. Maybe the people who are still having kids tend to have more kids and they grow as a share of the population. All those things can happen. I’m just highlighting that these things compound over time. You are going from a society that has 63 million people to a society that has two million. It means you need to close 98% of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98% of the schools of the country.
There is also the matter of how to pay for Social Security benefits in the context of a declining population.
It means you’re stuck in this almost like a Chinese finger trap, where you need to increase taxable income on the one hand, but doing so in a low-fertility environment can only require either slashing Social Security or adding immigrants. But adding immigrants increases populism. Slashing Social Security creates another backlash. So you find yourself in an environment where there is no long-term popular solution to your political problems. That’s what I see as an outsider.
When I talk about these problems, someone always raises their hand and says, “Yeah, we will just bring in a few immigrants and that will fix the problem.” Let’s go back to the example of Japan. Japan right now is around 98% ethnically Japanese. If we wanted to keep the population of Japan constant in 200 years through immigration, in 200 years Japan will be 5% Japanese and 95% non-Japanese. This is not about bringing in a few immigrants. This is about changing your country. That country will not be Japan. You may say, “I’m perfectly fine. I’m not attached to the idea of Japan in the abstract.” But I can see a lot of Japanese say, “This is not about being a xenophobe. This is not about being anti-immigrant. This is about not having a country anymore.”
This is a massive phenomenon and one that is likely to change the world as we know it.
Read: The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think.
An article in Architectural Digest discusses what may be the future of home care: AI-powered, always-on, always-listening devices that monitor seniors and report any concerns. It’s not hard to see how such devices can prove beneficial, but also how they can supplant care that would be better given by family.
It was January of 2026 in North Seattle, and my 86-year-old father was struggling to move around his house.
“I’m stumbling around here,” he told a guest in his home this past January.
“Oooh, ooh, careful,” the guest replied.
“Yeah, I almost fell down.”
Meanwhile, I’m 5,000 miles away in Austria, unaware of any trouble until months later, when I read a transcript of the entire incident via Sensi.ai: an always-on, AI-enabled microphone that’s been monitoring my father’s life for nearly a year. His coughs, toilet flushes, and even snippets of private conversations—Sensi records it all.
Read: My Father Wants to Age in Place. AI Will Be Watching. (I’m not sure why the author deems it necessary to talk about coming out, but anyway…)
Finally, a report from Lifeway explains that Gen Z is enthusiastic about church attendance and participation, but lags in having their faith substantially impact their lives.
The faith of Generation Z frequently draws them to church on Sunday but often fails to shape their lives during the week.
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“Young churchgoers who identify as Christians in any of the Protestant traditions agree with many of the beliefs and go along with the practices of the faith but often with less surrender and less discernment of theological details,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research.
Younger churchgoers outpace their older counterparts in specific signposts, including sharing Christ and building relationships. Gen Z churchgoers also attend church more frequently than others in the congregation. However, Gen Z significantly trails other generations in the signposts of exercising faith and living unashamed. They also have the lowest levels of agreement with key theological beliefs.
“My biggest concern for Gen Z is not that they are disconnected from the church; our research shows that Gen Z is deeply involved. The greater concern is that they are not being deeply formed,” said Chuck Peters, director of NextGen ministries at Lifeway.
Read: Gen Z Churchgoers Attend More but Often Lag in Application.
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! Check in Monday to add your own recommendations for next week’s article.
Caleb recommends the Two Ways to Live gospel presentation by Tony Payne and Phillip Jensen. He says it is “concise, clear, and with helpful diagrams that are easy to remember and to adapt to someone!”
Drew recommends Anki, which he finds the best way to memorize and retain lots of information. He uses it for Greek and Hebrew vocabulary.
Emily recommends the Things Unseen podcast with Sinclair Ferguson. It’s
“short but incredibly rich,” she says.
Phil says The Sheep Detectives was a fun, clean movie to watch with his kids.
Another Tim is enjoying Nick Needham’s 2000 Years of Christ’s Power as much as I have. He is almost through volume three (of five) and says it has been an extraordinary journey.
Carol recommends Jan Karon’s “Mitford” series. “Mitford is a small fictional town in the mountains of North Carolina. The main character is a Gospel-hearted Episcopal priest who has a good and godly effect on the whole town.”
Sue is excited to be in England’s Lake District for week 1 of the Keswick Convention with the theme this year of ‘Strong in His Strength.’
I agree with Zach and his recommendation of anything written by David McCullough. “It’s not for nothing that he’s considered one of the great historians of his age. I highly recommend jumping into one of his works (which are often available at second-hand stores, garage sales, library sales, etc) and learning to love history more because of the voice of this great scholar!”
Judy enjoyed Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa.
Sean has been taking music lessons from Psallo for several months. “It’s a website by the Worship Initiative, and you can take guitar and voice lessons from various artists, including Shane & Shane and Bryan Fowler.”
Lynn loved A Place to Hang the Moon by Kate Albus. “It is an incredible story. It is written for ages 9-12. I could hardly put the book down from start to finish. While it is for young readers, as an adult, it was a treasure to read, and I hope to share it with any grandchildren I may have.”
Jared says he and his family “have been walking through a prolonged season of some very difficult trials. I have been greatly helped by the book Overcoming Bitterness by Stephen Viars. I had no idea how much the Bible had to say about bitterness and how prevalent it was in my own heart until I began reading it. I’m glad that I did.”
Beth recommends Young Washington as an excellent movie about George Washington’s formative military experiences in the French and Indian War. “The film features excellent acting and highlights the virtues of integrity, loyalty, courage, and humility through thrilling action and — though we know Washington survives! — suspense.”
Flashback
Scepters, Crowns, Thrones. If there are scepters in God’s invisible kingdom, they are not grasped in clenched fists but joyfully surrendered to the true king. If there are crowns in God’s invisible kingdom, they are worn only so they can be removed to be thrown at his feet.
Knowledge is proud that she knows so much; wisdom is humble that she knows no more.
—William Cowper
