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 Finally Free, a helpful read for those struggling with purity, and a couple of popular books by Jackie Hill Perry.
Recommended Reading
Aaron Renn often offers interesting cultural reflections from a Christian perspective, and he does exactly that in There’s a Playbook for College. There Should Be One for Marriage. I wouldn’t have minded a little more theological reflection, but it’s thought-provoking nonetheless. He explains how the costs of avoiding marriage and children usually don’t sink in until people have aged and potentially waited too long. He then suggests that just as we have a playbook for college, we need one for marriage and family as well.
In the past, getting married, and then having kids, tended to “just happen” naturally, without anyone having to have a “master plan.” It was part of the culture and rhythms of life, backed up by social pressures.
This is no longer the case. Family formation and fertility rates are in decline. There’s growing polarization between the sexes. People have soured on dating apps, which have become the leading way people meet. Terms like “heteropessimism” have emerged. Permanent singleness or childlessness is now socially normalized. Many people have sworn off marriage or having kids. One of the earliest subcultures of the manosphere was “Men Going Their Own Way,” those young men who explicitly argued against marriage as a bad deal. Others plan to defer marriage until after getting established in a career and gaining some enjoyment of life as a young single, the so-called “capstone” model of marriage. Parents may be as likely to advise against getting married too young as to wonder where the grandkids are. The evangelical church inveighs against the “idolatry of the family.”
Like everyone else, I am encountering more and more text that was obviously generated by AI. I even read this week about someone who sent out a memo warning students not to use AI, yet the memo itself had been written by AI. Anyway, matters like these are in the background of The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI. (Gift link from The Atlantic)
So we end up with canned perfection—writing that can’t really be argued with, because it has no underlying deliberative reasoning process, no train of thought. As I wrote on X recently, AI writing is almost impossible to edit, because even when it sounds plausible, a closer look will show that every element is equally off: The tone is bland; individual word choices are baffling; the structure lacks sense; key pieces of the argument are missing; facts are false. Working on AI text, as an editor, is like trying to operate on a body whose skin, muscles, veins, bones, and organs are all compromised. There’s nothing to leave intact, nowhere to begin.
It is worth reading to consider the reality and the vacuousness of AI-generated text.
And it’s not just text. AI is also invading the world of music. Perhaps you have heard one of the ultra-manufactured, ultra-nonsensical, but also ultra-catchy AI-generated songs that have soared onto the charts recently. Another article from The Atlantic says AI Slop Is Coming for Your Playlists. (Also a gift link)
Late last month, a swarm of songs with near-identical names, lyrics, and melodies started to go viral on streaming platforms across the world. These tracks were not exactly the same—some have a little more guitar than others, some are more dance-oriented—but they’re all named something close to ‘Angel Above Me’ or ‘Run Run River,’ after the song’s first line. They’ve accrued millions of streams on Spotify and TikTok, and versions have hit No. 1 on iTunes in Germany and Austria.
The article makes a couple of interesting points. First, it may be easier to learn to validate that a song is human-created than AI-generated. Second, part of the reason we may listen to AI music undiscerningly today is that music has become “sonic wallpaper” that is permanently present in the background of our lives. This means that we rarely listen to it carefully. Christians need to start thinking now about the consequences of hymns or worship songs that are generated by AI, because you know that if it isn’t already happening, it will be soon!
Most of us have read or seen something by Ben Sasse in the past couple of months, but few of the profiles have gone into the level of depth as this one from The Dispatch (which you should be able to read for free unless you’ve used up your monthly allotment of freebies): Ben Sasse Is Teaching Us How to Die—And Live—Well. He is, indeed, though as I have said in the past, I see him more as a representative of tens of millions of Christians who have died well than as a lone exemplar of faithfulness. He has simply been given the honor and responsibility of doing it in a much more public way.
Sasse’s pain is all too real. But so is the joy that he finds in his family, his friends, his work, and, most of all, in God and the promise of eternal life. Rather than retreat from public life following his terminal diagnosis, Sasse believes his calling to “redeem the time,” as he puts it, includes talking about what really matters in life in interviews and his own podcast, the subtitle of which is: “A Joyful Rebellion.”
I’m so thankful for his faithfulness and pray he finishes well.
I’m no doctor and no scientist, so medical matters tend to go way over my head. However, I was able to hang in there enough to marvel at the new treatment for blood cancer that is described in The Blood Cancer That Became Solvable.
During the twentieth century, cancer treatment rested on three pillars: surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy. Surgery has been used against tumors since antiquity and radiotherapy since the discovery of X-rays in the 1890s. Chemotherapy, the newest of the three, was developed in the 1940s and 1950s, its origins tracing back to observations about mustard gas during the Second World War.
These therapies were developed before anyone understood cancer at a molecular level. Blunt and often brutal tools, they work by exploiting the fact that cancer cells tend to divide faster than normal ones, and then doing something destructive enough to kill dividing cells preferentially. And while these treatments can cure some cancers discovered at an early stage, they offer little hope of a real cure for more advanced or relapsed cases.
Then, in the mid-2010s, a new class of genuinely transformative drugs arrived: immunotherapies. These treatments recruit the body’s own immune system to recognize and destroy malignant cells. The results, particularly in metastatic and relapsed disease, have been extraordinary.
Speaking of scientists, Marvin Olasky has a long feature at Christianity Today that is well worth reading: Men Who Didn’t Get the Message. (Gift link) What is the message? That man evolved from other life forms. Who are the men? Trained and credentialed scientists who are Christians and believe the biblical account over the naturalistic Darwinian one.
They didn’t get the message. They won’t bow down.
About 2,600 years ago, King Nebuchadnezzar erected a 90-foot-tall image of gold on the plains of Babylon. He assembled his empire’s leaders, and a herald announced, “When you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp, bagpipe, and every kind of music, you are to fall down and worship the golden image.” The alternative: “Be cast into a burning fiery furnace” (Dan. 3:5–6, ESV).
For decades now in university science classrooms, the furnace hasn’t been fiery, and most of the music has come from marching bands on football fields. But the message to conform to Darwinistic materialism has seemed unstoppable. Rice University chemistry professor James Tour says Darwin devotees preach it to their students, who pass it along to their students in turn. Nobody “wakes up in the morning thinking, I’m going to deceive people today,” he told me. “You grow up with it. The professor acts like he knows it, and you just nod along.”
I think you’ll find it both illuminating and encouraging.
Finally, I found this article fascinating. It asks a simple question, but one that is really difficult to answer: Why did China get rich while India didn’t? As the author shows, around 1950, there were many similarities between the two nations. Yet China accelerated in a way India did not, and that despite Communist oppression and a famine that killed between 30 and 45 million people.
I suspect that if I’d been around in the year 1950, it would have been obvious to me that India would succeed and China would not. I would have made the same bet in 1960, when China was starving tens of millions of its own people while exporting grain abroad; and I would have done it again in 1970, during the insanity of the Cultural Revolution. Nor would I have been alone. As late as 1985, prominent economists were writing articles in the New York Times suggesting that “far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen.”
So what happened? See Why China Got Rich and India Didn’t for one explanation.
Quick Links
Your Will. I enjoy Steph Macleod’s music and was glad to see him release a new album yesterday. “Your Will” is a standout track. It is simply about trusting the Lord with your life, and it features some pretty good guitar work.
This Body Is Only the Seed. A quick and simple reminder from Justin Huffman that our bodies are only the seed, the bare kernel, of what our glorified bodies will be. That is something to look forward to!
A Biblical Guide to Giving Your Testimony. Equally simple, a brief and biblical guide to giving your testimony (or telling others how you came to Christ).
Flashback
Your Loved Ones Love You Still. Even as we yearn for the time when what was severed will be restored, they are yearning for it too. Their love for us continues and their love for us grows, for absence truly does make the heart grow fonder.
Preaching is not men teaching from the Bible. It’s God teaching from the Bible through men.
—Ian H. Murray
