Welcome to Weekend A La Carte. Today, you will find some long-form content and think pieces. Below these, you’ll find a new feature—recommendations that come from readers of this newsletter. I found that feature a whole lot of fun to put together, so I hope you’ll scroll down and enjoy it too.
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 quite an extensive selection of titles. Have at it!
Recommended Reading
I know I share a lot of articles about AI, but that’s only because so many people are thinking and writing about it right now. This week, Cal Newport, a leading thinker in the area of technology, wrote an excellent op-ed for the New York Times. He called out the AI companies for their strange habit of doom-trolling.
As a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I’m both optimistic about the possibilities of A.I. and confounded by the terrifying and grim way that current technology leaders insist on talking about it. This could have been a period of hopeful innovation, but instead our emotions are being manipulated by Silicon Valley’s self-serving and morally untenable addiction to doom trolling. This communication strategy has to stop. The harm it’s causing to the public’s mental health has arguably outweighed the benefits that A.I. has so far delivered.
Read: Dear A.I. Companies: The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop.
But Newport isn’t the only writer who is concerned about doomerism. Writing for Mere Orthodoxy, Griffin Gooch called out Christians for their tendency to express doom and gloom about the state of the world. He thinks it’s important to acknowledge that, in many ways, the world has actually become a much better place.
The reality is that the world really isn’t as uniquely terrible as the average internet think piece or primetime news segment makes it out to be. It isn’t particularly good—but it’s not unilaterally bad. There’re many things that make living and breathing nowadays uniquely advantageous.
One of the easiest showcases for this truism that I offer my students is simply the lightbulb. In 1st century Rome, if you wanted to produce light after sundown, you had to acquire candles and matches that would’ve cost the equivalent of 12-20 USD per candle and only produced about 12-15 lumens. Worse, without building codes, a candle toppling over and setting fire to the whole neighborhood was an all-too-common occurrence.
Read: A Case Against Christian Doomerism.
The issue of women in ministry in general, and women in pastoral ministry in specific, has been much in the news over the past couple of weeks, primarily because the Southern Baptists were making motions on the issue at their annual Convention. Dani Treweek has been doing some interesting writing on the subject, and in her most recent article, she explains how egalitarians can be condescending toward women who, like her, have come to complementarian convictions.
Any time a complementarian points out an example of inconsistent or problematic complementarian theology or practice, a predictable egalitarian response is to immediately insist that the problem obviously lies with complementarianism itself.
While they tend to have no problem critiquing an individual element of poorly considered or inconsistently applied egalitarianism without tearing down their entire system, egalitarian commentators can rarely resist the opportunity to turn any critique of complementarianism into a zero-sum game. Or to switch up my metaphors, they are ever poised to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Read: Picking a Path Through the Egalitarian Scorched Earth.
It’s obviously no surprise that a lot of text, and very possibly the great majority of text today, is being generated by AI or heavily edited by AI. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Krzysztof Pelc expresses his concerns about what this may do to readers and writers alike.
A recurrent blind spot when imagining the effects of any large-scale technological change is to assume that the world will change but that what we value in it will not. In practice, our tastes swiftly adjust—and in ways that often blunt the most alarmist forecasts. Mass industrial production didn’t wipe out handmade crafts; it turned them into a marker of distinction and raised their price. Photography didn’t kill painting; it updated its ambitions. Wikipedia didn’t abolish expertise; it changed what we demand of experts. In the same way, AI won’t downgrade writing, but it may permanently change what counts as good writing.
Perhaps you’ve already adjusted. Perhaps you’ve started treating books, articles, essays, and emails written today differently from anything before, say, 2022. On hearing a polished sonnet in effortless iambic pentameter at a wedding toast, you may now smell a rat. If that reflex hasn’t set in yet, my bet is that it will soon. In fact, I suspect the distinction will be drawn first by those of us who rely most on LLMs in our own writing, who know how hard it is to resist their knack for finishing a thought before it has fully formed—sometimes directing it in an unanticipated direction. The better and more omnipresent these systems become, the more we will come to prize the culture that preceded them. We have ejected ourselves from our all-human paradise, and we will look back on its artifacts with a trust that can never be recovered.
Read: Fakes of the Future.
GLP-1s have changed how we think about obesity (or even being a little bit overweight) and how we respond to it. Not surprisingly, Christians have some differing perspectives on these medications and whether they are a valid form of treatment. Christianity Today has a thorough look at the matter.
The wellness industry and influencer world are shifting emphases and tactics in response to the GLP-1 boom, and Christian wellness influencers are no exception. Their reactions vary widely: Some caution against the use of drugs to lose weight, urging followers to build discipline and self-control. Others have embraced the potential of GLP-1 to help people (especially women) achieve the body size and shape they desire.
The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first GLP-1 for diabetes treatment in 2005, but the drugs have only been broadly prescribed for weight loss for five years. In 2025, the estimated global market size for this category of pharmaceuticals was $66 billion. It’s projected to reach $185 billion by 2033.
Read: Christians Debate Drugs vs. Discipline in the Age of Ozempic.
Finally, A.S. Ibrahim provided a long-form piece to Christ Over All that explains seven pillars of a distinctly Islamic worldview. Ibrahim, a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has written several helpful books on Islam, and is an authority on the subject.
A worldview is more than a set of religious opinions. It is the invisible architecture of assumptions through which a person interprets every experience—what is real, what is right, what is worth living and dying for. The Islamic worldview is the particular architecture that Islam builds in its adherents. It is drawn from the Quran, from the example of Muhammad, and from fourteen centuries of tradition. It operates across cultures and continents with remarkable consistency: a Muslim farmer in rural Mali and a Muslim engineer in Kuala Lumpur may share far more assumptions about the nature of the deity, community, and history than either of them shares with their non-Muslim neighbor next door. Understanding this architecture is not about stereotyping individuals—no two people think identically, and the range of Muslim opinion is wide. But the framework exists, and it shapes real lives in real ways. Here are seven of its most important pillars, and how Christians might engage Muslims using these very pillars.
Read: Inside the Muslim Mind: Seven Pillars of the Islamic Worldview.
What You Recommend
Earlier this week, I asked the people who read this newsletter to send along their recommendations—recommendations for just about anything. I cannot possibly share all that were submitted, but I did want to share a substantial and varied list. Enjoy!
- Beth recommends you watch the movie A Great Awakening, which is about George Whitefield’s unlikely friendship with Benjamin Franklin.
- Mitch wants you to know that Field & Stream magazine is back in print and that you (or your dad) may love it.
- Caleb has enjoyed reading Jackie Hill Perry’s devotional Upon Waking and says it reminds him of Paul Tripp’s devotions. (As it happens, it’s on sale now in both print and Kindle formats.)
- David recommends RHB’s family devotion series, Teach Your Children the Scriptures. He says it gives simple material to read to your children for family worship time.
- Jordan recommends this system for memorizing Scripture for both you and your children.
- David picked up Jerry Bridges’ The Joy of Fearing God for $1 at a thrift sale and now keeps it in his van for when he needs just a quick bit of encouragement.
- Rebecca has discovered and enjoyed the podcast Storytime For Grownups. “Each season she reads a classic novel and makes (very limited and not at all distracting) comments throughout to clarify things that might be confusing or not easily understood in today’s world.”
- Another Rebecca loves the Merlin Bird ID app. She loves how it helps her identify birds by both sight and song.
- Bob loves being part of a handbell choir and commends it to those who are looking for a way to serve others, perhaps especially in retirement homes and other similar settings.
- Alisha is one of many who enjoyed Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden, a novel that has taken the publishing world by storm.
- Philip is listening to The Red Clay Strays and especially enjoying their new album Grateful (which I’m listening to as I write these words).
- Erin and her husband are watching, for the umpteenth time, the classic British series Foyle’s War, which they access through Acorn TV.
- Malinda has been encouraged by Teasi Cannon’s True Comfort podcast, which she watches on YouTube.
- Evan simply rejoices in the fact that he is dating a wonderful young lady, and recommends dating to other young men!
Thanks to all those who sent in a recommendation, and sorry to all those whose recommendations I could not include. Let’s do it again next week!
Flashback
Royalty in Disguise. They are humble men who have little and who may never own so much of what you and I are certain we could never live without…Yet they, too, are royalty, made by God, known by God, loved by God, adopted by God.
It has been said that as goes the family, so goes the world. It can also be said that as goes the father, so goes the family.
—Voddie Baucham
