I apologize that subscribers received two emails today. Something failed on my server overnight.
Welcome to a new edition of A La Carte. These weekend editions focus on long-form content and think pieces. There’s a lot 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
You’ll find a few interesting new Kindle deals today, including Jerry Bridges’ best book.
Recommended Reading
Progressive Christianity’s Metamodern Posture. Jeffrey Beaupre asks and then answers a series of questions. “What does an elder who is leaving a local evangelical church because—in part—he felt this church wasn’t taking social justice issues seriously have in common with another Christian who is forsaking Classical Theism for Open Theism? Further, what unites these with a third Christian whose journey of deconstruction equates to a refusal to accept the status quo, who questions every whiff of Christian dogmatism because he thinks it arises from the hegemony of church history?”
Off to the Races. I can’t say I know who Jesalyn Bev Randall is, but I can say that I very much enjoyed this introductory article at her new Substack. It would be hard to capture or summarize in a single excerpt, so perhaps I’ll just encourage you to read it. It begins with these words: “The day I realized my childhood was over, I was fourteen. Like many young women, this revelation came to me in the form of an inappropriate remark from a man old enough to be my father. My experience was perhaps a bit unusual in the specifics; the man was wearing bright blue eyeshadow, enormous fake eyelashes, and he directed his comment, or I should say query, not to me, but to my father, who was kneeling down in the straw wrapping a bandage around a racehorse’s leg, while I was at the horse’s head.”
Land Where My Fathers Died. In Canada, like Australia, we have become accustomed to land acknowledgements before many events and occasions (such as concerts, meetings, and even flights). I appreciate what Louise Perry says about them in this article in WSJ’s Free Expression section. She explains how some people in our culture are now expected to revere and even worship their ancestors, while others are expected to despise and disavow them. “In condemning the people who built their society, a faction of the left has turned away from the anthropological norm of ancestor worship and instead embraced its opposite: ancestor annihilation.” (Gift link)
Ducking the New Surveillance. Writing for The Dispatch, Nathan Beacom pushes back against the inevitability of AI and its Large Language Models. “We know, of course, and have known for a while, that our online browsing habits have been tracked by advertisers to more successfully push upon us their goods. But something new, more potentially destructive, has arrived: the large language model. This tool gives corporations and governments an unprecedented level of power and access to watch and manipulate ordinary people.”
A Farewell to Cinema from a Christian Who Loves It. This is an interesting piece from Andrew Barber, who explains why cinema has lost its luster. “For several generations, going to the movies was not just escapism; it was like watching a new Western canon being composed in real time. Maybe we once quoted Shakespeare, but when I was in highschool we were saying “I see dead people” at the right moment and making everyone laugh. In that same classroom, when a teacher brought in Franco Zefferelli’s Hamlet starring Mel Gibson, we weren’t just getting out of some seatwork but also being invited further into the world of film.” But no more.
Waiting in an Age of Instant Answers. In many ways, AI is simply one aspect (or possibly the culmination) of a long technology-led acceleration of life. “We type a question into an AI interface, and within seconds a paragraph appears — then another and another — explaining a topic that once required hours of research. The distance between curiosity and answers has nearly vanished.” This article reminds us that there are some things that can only be accomplished through time and patience.
Christian Content Creators Are Outsourcing AI Slop to Gig Workers on Fiverr. This is a troubling look at modern content creators who firehose slop onto YouTube. A good bit of it is intended for children. “On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook it is very easy to stumble across AI-generated clips that retell stories from the Bible. Like most AI slop, these videos tend to have an inconsistent aesthetic to them, and they’re narrated by mechanical-sounding voices. Rather than focusing on getting details from the Bible right, these videos cartoonishly emphasize emotions like fear and anger that are central to their simplified narratives.”
Inside the Persecuted Church of Nepal
This film from Radical, which I presume has been made largely for teens or young adults, is both very interesting and very well-made. It provides a glimpse of the persecuted church of Nepal.
William Tyndale: The Necessity of the Word
This, the first episode of Missionary’s six-part docuseries Missionary: Obeying the Great Commission, is free on YouTube (and, remarkably, has more than 1.5 million views).
Flashback
Behind-the-Scenes: Christian Publishing. …writing is a solitary and often lonely process that mostly sees the author sitting alone staring at a screen while desperately searching for reasons to procrastinate.
No man preaches that sermon well to others, who doth not first preach it to his own heart.
—John Owen
