Weekend A La Carte (March 28)

I want to offer fair warning that, beginning next week, I plan to update the format of A La Carte. It will have the same great content (and more!), but it will look just a bit different. Even if you are resistant to change, just breathe through it, and you’ll be okay. First, though, I have a new edition of Weekend A La Carte that features some think pieces and other longform content. I hope you enjoy it!

I’m grateful to the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals for sponsoring the blog this week to ensure you know about Here We Stand!, their book that includes contributions by Carl Trueman, Albert Mohler, Michael Horton, and many others.

Today’s Kindle deals include a variety of books, most of which are classics.

And now on to those links…

Make Cousins Great Again

I appreciated Mary Julia Koch’s piece for the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression newsletter, in which she laments the decline of cousins. Because of declining birth rates and growing mobility, many children will never know the experience of being part of a pack of extended family members who know and love one another. That’s a sad loss. “America’s baby bust is shrinking more than nuclear families—it’s thinning out entire family trees. As the U.S. average fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman compounds across generations, extended family members are dropping in numbers at a faster rate than siblings. Among the branches being cut are what was once a staple of childhood: cousins.” (Gift link)

The Empty Promises of Sentimentalism

There is a lot to think about in Tim Rosenberger’s article about sentimentalism. He considers how Christianity has given people ideas and concepts they like to use, even as they reject the Christian foundation behind them. This results, he says, in “a politics that promises compassion while frequently producing consequences that harm the very people it claims to defend. The pattern is consistent enough to deserve sustained examination.” He shows how this works itself out in sanctuary cities, abortion, and the progressive prosecution movement. “Good intentions do not ensure good outcomes. And the persistent gap between the language of compassion and its practical consequences is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a moral vocabulary that has been uprooted from the theological soil in which it grew.”

AI In the News

AI is once again in the news and in the thinkpieces. Here are some of the highlights as society navigates this massive new technology.

• The Atlantic considers How AI Is Creeping Into The New York Times and most other news outlets. It seems like we are witnessing a bit of an arms race between the AI generators and the AI detectors. The article suggests several measures that could prevent the use of AI in many circumstances, but I am skeptical that they will prove useful in the long term. I’m afraid we may be stuck with AI-generated news for the foreseeable future. (Gift link)
• Meanwhile, the New York Times asks Is Taste the One Thing AI Can’t Replace? In this case, they mean “taste” in discerning between the excellent and the ugly, rather than taste as a sense of flavor (though I suspect AI also can’t do much with that). While there is much that can be programmed into the algorithms, taste has proven elusive, which may explain why so much of what AI generates is, well, tasteless. (Gift link)
• Writing from a Christian perspective, Alan Noble asks Why Should We Just Accept AI? “I don’t think we have to roll over and accept the juggernaut of AI, at least not in every area of our lives. And I think we will look back with regret if we don’t act now to temper AI, if we don’t change our posture toward AI to one of prudent skepticism.”
• Sahaj Garg is co-founder of Wispr, an app that does a phenomenal job of capturing voice and turning it into text. Of course, the company’s long-term goal is much more ambitious and intimidating: a wearable neural interface. Garg wrote The Displacement of Cognitive Labor and What Comes After. While I think he may take things too far at times, it’s still an interesting piece that comes from a technophile who is deeply immersed in the world of AI and who is trying to show where this technology may lead. “We are past the point where the question is whether artificial intelligence will exceed human capability across most cognitive domains. It already has. The remaining question is not if but when the full implications arrive, and the ‘when’ is measured in months and years, not decades.”
• Finally, I Love the Em Dash—Too Bad If AI Does Too is a tribute to the humble em dash—a piece of punctuation my editor once begged me to stop using so often. Yet because AI uses it so much, it has fallen on hard times and begun to arouse suspicion. But I assure you, as does this writer, that I used it and loved it long before AI made it sus.

The End of the Free-Range, Device-Free ‘Stand by Me’ Childhood

Don’t take my linking to this article as an endorsement of Stand By Me, which I haven’t watched since I was a child, and therefore don’t really remember. But I do share the author’s sorrow that it reflects a childhood that few get to experience today—a childhood like mine, where I was a free-range child who could wander, explore, and discover at will, as long as I was home by bedtime. “The autonomy of the boys in ‘Stand by Me’ is vastly different from the freedoms allowed a child living in 2026, when each is practically AirTagged, when we can track a car or a person’s phone across a map on a device in our palms, when we can know each moment of every day where each and every person in our home can be found. A gathering of children is more likely to be in front of a screen than with a rucksack and a deck of cards, as in the movie.” (Gift link)

Videos

Here are a few videos that may be of interest:

• Spiritual Formation and the Reformation: Comer, Willard, Calvin (Video). Michael Horton discusses the contemporary spiritual formation movement that is now associated with John Mark Comer, but which was heavily influenced by Dallas Willard. He critiques it gently and compares its emphases to Calvinistic piety.
• Christian Work Ethic: Busy for Christ (Video). This video is a bit older, as A La Carte goes, but I stumbled across it and thought it was worth sharing. Joel Beeke tells how he stays busy for Christ and why he is committed to never wasting five minutes. (True story: I was on a flight with Dr. Beeke once, sitting in front of him, but across the aisle. I wanted just to kick back and watch a movie, but felt too guilty knowing he’d be working up a storm behind me, so I pridefully redeemed the time!)
• Redeeming Productivity: Are You Making the Most of Your Time? (Video). Compared to that 👆, I feel like a bit of a pretender when it comes to productivity. Yet I was recently interviewed on the subject and thought I’d share that interview in case it’s of interest.

The Rest

Here are a few more links:

• We keep hearing that the Roman Catholic Church is seeing an unusual number of new converts. The New York Times wrote about this a couple of days ago and seems to back it up with facts in Roman Catholic Churches See a Surge of New Converts.
• Ryan Burge asks, Can We Blame the Nones for America’s Marriage Crisis?. To answer, he digs into the data and eventually decides that it’s a bit more complicated than that.
• Kim Riddlebarger says that TBN Headquarters Is No More, and this is no loss for the Kingdom. “Originally built as the headquarters for the ‘Full Gospel Businessman’s Fellowship,’ this garish facility became the Trinity Broadcast Headquarters in 1996. It was eventually sold in 2017, several years after TBN founders Paul and Jan Crouch both died. The building—in the opinion of many—was the ugliest in the county.”
• I believe you’ll need an account to read Could the Girls of Camp Mystic Have Been Saved? which is a heartbreaking account of last year’s tragic flood at Camp Mystic. Note that there is a fair bit of bad language in interviews. You can also find it in Apple News if you subscribe to that.

Flashback: The Only Way To Do The Work Of A Lifetime

We can hardly boast we have lived a worthy life if we succeed in what we like to do but fail in what we must do, if we succeed in our passions but fail in our obligations. The successful life is the one that accounts seriously for its duties and that meets them with diligence.