Welcome to Weekend A La Carte! These weekend editions focus on long-form content and think pieces. There’s plenty of good material here, so I’m sure you’ll find something that’s of interest.
For some of the articles, I have provided gift links, which should get you around any paywalls. Note, however, that these gift links may expire in a few days or weeks.
Sales & Deals
Today’s Kindle deals include Carl Trueman’s The Wages of Spin, Matt Perman’s How To Get Unstuck, and lots of other options both newer and older.
Westminster Books has a deal on their beautiful edition of Redemption Accomplished and Applied. They’ve also got a Father’s Day Gift Guide if you’re looking for something for dad.
Recommended Reading
Canada’s National Post (which is a moderately conservative newspaper) has begun a series of articles “that delves into the Wild West of the egg-freezing industry, its aggressive marketing, the high cost and the chances of an eventual successful pregnancy.” Their concern is aptly summarized in the headline: Egg Freezing Is a Booming Business in Canada. Here’s How Women Are Being Oversold.
Today, the egg-freezing industry is booming.
In Canada, it more than doubled from 2020 to 2024, according to data from the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society (CFAS). Yet, of the 4.1 million babies born in Canada between 2013 and 2023, just 70 are known to have come from frozen eggs, according to CFAS data. Industry insiders say the number of babies born from frozen eggs is low for two reasons: lower survival rates for eggs through freezing, thawing, fertilization and implantation stages; and because many women who paid for this elective procedure have not yet tried to use those eggs. Most will end up never using them.
Even so, women in Canada paid millions to freeze their eggs between 2013 and 2023.
Christians need to think well about this issue and all the peripheral issues related to fertility, and in its own way, this article helps show why.
The PCA recently released its extensive report on Christian Nationalism. Samuel James read it and thinks it can prove especially useful to the church right now to Help Us Move on From the Christian Nationalism Moment.
I think the men behind this report have done an excellent job. This examination of Christian nationalism, both as expressed in older forms of political theology, and in new movements today, is biblical, fair, wise, and practical. What’s more, I think the report can help evangelicals situate Christian nationalist debate more accurately in its historical context, accomplishing two important things: 1) Creating space for legitimate, in-bounds disagreement about civil government’s relationship to the church, and 2) Taking away space for pernicious, sinful partiality and rhetoric.
The Sunday Times has a long and fascinating article about Life With Locked-in Syndrome. Reporter Matt Rudd “has remarkable conversations with three Britons who, after life-changing accidents, have fully active minds but cannot move or speak, and can communicate only via the blink of an eye.” He reports on the amazing work of neuroscientist Shannan Keen, who is a leading authority on the condition. This seems like an especially important article as society turns more and more toward euthanizing those who are especially ill and/or incapable of advocating for themselves.
I have been hearing about this more and more—people creating AI versions of themselves in order to answer questions, make decisions, or carry out conversations on their behalf. Hence: Sorry, I’m Not Available. Talk to the A.I. Me. ( Gift Link)
It started as a writing assistant. Jeremy Allaire, the C.E.O. of the stablecoin company Circle, trained an A.I. agent to think and write like him, feeding it his podcast interviews, his public writing and a corpus of internal communications. He called it the ‘Jeremy Allaire skill.’ The bot helped him compose drafts. And Allaire was impressed by how well the artificial intelligence captured the way he thinks and writes. So impressed that he decided to let the bot talk to his more than 1,000 employees. Because while Allaire can’t meet with everyone, he realized that the A.I. version of him can.
But it can get even weirder than that, because in some contexts, not only are human beings now expected to speak to AI bots, but often, human beings are asking their AI bots to speak to other people’s AI bots. If that’s the case, who is actually talking, deciding, and discussing?
Writing for the Institute for Faith & Culture, Rosaria Butterfield relates a bit of her story to reject The Lie of Living Your Truth.
I have been walking with the Lord for 27 years now. I am married to a faithful Christian man, and I am a mother and grandmother. Before my conversion to Christ, I believed many lies. I believed that lesbianism was who I was rather than how I felt. I believed that atheism was a free choice. I believed that feminism was good for the world. I believed that LGBTQ rights and lives hurt no one. I believed that abortion was a moral good, preventing children from entering abusive homes. I believed in evolution. I thought the Bible was a book of mythology. I believed so many lies.
Here’s a slightly alternative take on the roots of the Reformation from Mizhraim Rivera who wants to set its context not in Luther’s hammer but in a word: One Word Changed Everything: How a Latin Mistranslation Built the Sacrament of Penance.
The Reformation did not begin with Luther’s hammer. It began with a single Greek word, metanoia, mistranslated in Jerome’s Latin Vulgate and built into a system of penance that contradicted what the historic church had already settled. This article traces that mistranslation from Jerome to Trent, dismantles Trent’s use of John 20:23 as a proof text for the Sacrament of Penance, and shows that the Council of Orange had closed the door on this doctrine nearly a thousand years before Trent opened it again.
He is right, of course, that that mistranslation played a key role. Yet I don’t think we need to choose between it and Luther’s hammer!
The Walrus (which is a way-left Canadian magazine) has a feature by Alex Cyr who reports on the many ways the younger generation is being told they can extend their lives. As he says, My Generation Is the First to Believe That Aging—and Perhaps Dying—Is Optional.
Soon, technological advancements may make it so that how long one lives depends almost exclusively on how much one spends—or cares to spend. For early-ish adults like me, this turns longevity into a philosophical problem as much as a biological one. How much control do I believe I have over the number of healthy years I’ll live—my so-called health span—and how much time, money, and attention am I prepared to devote to extending it?
It is, of course, silly to think that humanity can live forever on this side of eternity, though certainly lifespans are steadily increasing. But he is right to think about all the treatments and promises on offer, and even to think about these will advantage the wealthy over the poor.
I have enjoyed many of Desiring God’s long-form feature articles, and that includes this one by Kyle Claunch, who is a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: Feminism Goes Back to the Fall: Three Waves of Disordered Desire.
My thesis is that feminism is a series of ideological movements that materially actualize the words of God to the woman in Genesis 3:16: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband.’ Thus, the common root of the various waves of feminism is the rejection of God’s good design for properly ordered relations between men and women in the world. As such, feminism is out of step with nature itself, as created by God. To the extent that feminism has made inroads into many of the most basic aspects of societal life, its effects have hindered human flourishing in light of God’s design in creation.”
Flashback
This Broken, Beautiful World. It is good to rejoice when one of God’s people has gone home to Jesus, but to be present with the Lord is to be absent from the earth and from all who loved him here. In our greatest joys we are never far from tears and in our deepest sorrows we are never far from laughter. Such is life in this broken, beautiful world.
We measure worship by how we feel as we worship. True worship is measured by what God thinks about our worship.
—Kevin DeYoung
