Weekend A La Carte: Hutterites, Gen Z, Thiel, Scientism, CT

Welcome to Weekend A La Carte. I hope you find something here, whether a longform article, a reader recommendation, or something else entirely, that makes your weekend just a little bit better.

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals include several newer and older books that are all worth at least thinking about.

If you’re interested in doing some theological reading, Westminster Books is offering up to 57% off the three-volume set of Warfield’s works. Also, I haven’t reviewed it yet, but did want to briefly recommend the new graphic novel adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress. It seems to be priced just about equally at Westminster Books and Amazon (for me, at least).

Recommended Reading

Canada’s Maclean’s magazine has an interesting article about the Hutterites and their caution when it comes to modern technologies. The author, like so many of us, is alarmed by the ways technology overtakes our lives, and sees that the Hutterites may have a healthier relationship to it.

Most of us—including me—are worried that we’ve all become desensitized to the manifold and multiplying ways technology is negatively affecting our lives. Social media has been blamed for rising rates of political polarization and radicalization, damaging young people’s ability to form relationships and eroding mental health.

And we’re all trying to figure out what to do about it. Slick startups sell devices you tap with your phone to “brick” it (that is, blocking distracting social media, apps and internet access). There are apps to remove short-form videos from social media feeds. There are now social media bans in place for youth in Australia, in parts of Europe and Asia and, this June, proposed in Canada. Sales of dumbphones and flip phones have grown in the past few years. Even landlines are trendy again. But this is like pushing back the tide with a broom. For most of us, technology feels like a force of nature that will wash over us whether we want it to or not.

The Hutterites are more optimistic. They think if they can keep their distance from the wider world, and adopt the right set of rules around technology, they can hold onto its positive features and simply seal out what they don’t like.

Read: The Hutterites’ Guide to Technology.

The New York Times was in touch with many Gen Zers and explains how their entry into the job market is much different from previous generations. I think it’s easy for those of us who are older to act as if Gen Z is lazy or otherwise not putting in much effort, but this article ought to give us some compassion.

They described a process that is lonely, opaque and impersonal, in which it is hard to tell whether one is being rejected by a hiring manager or an A.I. screener.

The problem is not just that hiring has slowed across the labor market, or that the specter of A.I. is threatening entry-level positions, they said. It was that they could not get a real, live human being to speak to them. Ever. About anything.

The same language came up over and over in their responses: They felt as if they were throwing their applications into “the void.” Some of them opted for slightly different terminology — a “black hole” or an “abyss” — but they painted a similar picture of the application process as a swirling vortex where aspirations and cover letters vanish, unlikely to be retrieved.

One part that jumped out to me was the person who insists on they/them pronouns. I would imagine that is a huge red flag for people in charge of hiring!

Read: Searching for Jobs, Gen Z Feels Like It’s Staring Into ‘The Void’.

The Verge has a lengthy article that describes the bizarre and heterodox gospel according to Peter Thiel.

It’s a time of apocalyptic worldviews in Silicon Valley. The latest AI doom cycle is driven by effective altruism (EA), a philosophy that has lurked around the fringes for years but recently burst into the mainstream because its adherents are embedded across the AI industry, from Anthropic to newly appointed AI safety watchdog METR. EA is a utilitarian approach to charity premised on doing the most good for the most people over the longest time, and EA advocates see halting an AI-induced doomsday as critical to saving as many humans as possible.

But EA has an important and equally apocalyptic rival in the crosscutting cosmologies of the tech titans — a strain of Christianity best represented by Peter Thiel, who believes EA will bring about the Antichrist. It’s an issue on which the billionaire techno-capitalist is a self-styled expert, and, somehow, Thiel has become America’s most provocative and visible Christian theologian.

Read: The Gospel According to Peter (Thiel).

Jessica Miskelly has a thoughtful piece on Mere Orthodoxy that deals with scientism, which is essentially the view that science is the ultimate and most trustworthy arbiter of rational knowledge.

Away from our workplaces, and especially in churches, we scientists often find ourselves alone.

Yet an ideology now commonly called “scientism” has “a popular hold on the imagination,” according to Alister McGrath. On the popular level, much of the trouble began with the New Atheists, who wielded science into an “ism” after wrenching it from the death throes of positivism. These authors convinced many to buy into their claim that science is the only rational way of understanding reality. Away from popular non-fiction, fictional characters tout seemingly wise lines, like from Dana Scully: “what I find fantastic is any notion that there are answers beyond the realm of science.”

The circularity of this view has been pointed out by many, even secular, philosophers and scientists. The only way to verify (and science is enamoured with verification) the claim that science is the only rational way of investigating reality is to somehow get ‘outside’ of science and obtain an overarching vantage point from where we can assess the relative rationality of science. But, as writes philosopher Edward Feser, “the very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.”

Read: Scientism and the Allure of Control.

Speaking of science and scientism, T.J. Holland asks whether science is capable of explaining the beauty of sparkling rivers.

Can we explain how the sparkling river makes me feel? The joy I get from watching it? The sense of the scene’s transcendent and timeless beauty? That the curves of the river look deliberately painted that way, by an artist and not an impersonal force? We can explain why the river sparkles; but can we explain why I would want to write about that fact?

Some would say that these questions also have scientific answers, just slightly more complicated and convoluted ones. That these feelings are all a result of human culture and nature, which are both downstream of evolutionary biology. Perhaps our interest in shiny things is little different to the interest shown by animals collecting metal objects. Perhaps our sense of beauty is an unintended side-effect of an enlarged mind developed mainly for survival. Perhaps our need to write and express ourselves, or to praise what we love, are simply consequences of our social nature and desire to communicate, itself only developed over millions of years as a way to form clans and tribes that survive better than lone individuals. In this worldview, the artistic and poetic are ultimately just emergent phenomena from sociology and anthropology, which themselves emerge from behavioural psychology, which emerges from evolutionary biology, which emerges from chemical and physical processes like everything else in the natural world. Sure, that makes any specific question like ‘Why do I like sparkling rivers?’ quite tricky to answer in a directly scientific way as you have to work your way through several complex layers before arriving at some mathematical equations or physical laws. But the answer is still a scientific one eventually.

Read: Can Science Explain Sparkling Rivers?

You’ve undoubtedly heard of Christianity Today‘s recent struggles to remain relevant and viable. Daniel K. Williams wrote a long, fascinating article about the publication’s history and the many changes it has made along the way—the kind of changes that led it to this point.

While I wish that different editorial decisions had been made at CT – and while I suspect that there’s a good chance that the recent decisions will accelerate rather than reverse the decline in the magazine’s readership – I think that the problem is larger than these decisions. The enrollment decline at Wheaton College, the closure of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School’s American campus, and the financial struggles of several other northern Christian colleges are all part of the same phenomenon. As I wrote in a Substack post last year, midwestern evangelicalism has declined – and that’s a problem for Christianity Today, which was founded as the flagship journal of a midwestern-based evangelical movement.

The real question, therefore, is the one that former CT senior editor Kara Bettis Carvalho asked: “Can you have a centrist evangelical magazine?”

Before we reflexively answer that question with either a “yes” or a “no,” I think it’s important to consider how CT got to this point and how it navigated its relationship to evangelical political divisions in the past. How did it become as successful as it once was, why did it begin to decline, and is its former success repeatable today?

Read: What Led to Christianity Today’s Crisis?

Reader Recommendations

I like to solicit recommendations for things readers are reading, listening to, watching, eating, or otherwise experiencing. Here’s what you sent along:

Bill is enjoying Derek Thomas’s new teaching series from Ligonier, The Life of John: From the Son of Thunder to the Apostle of Love.

Vonnie is “simultaneously reading and listening to” Katherine Wolf’s Treasures in the Dark: 90 Reflections on Finding Bright Hope Hidden in the Hurting. “The reflections are genuinely personal, funny in spots, and marked by a depth of theological insight that comes only from someone who has suffered greatly and is deeply immersed in Scripture.”

Elizabeth has been blessed by a video from Hymns of Grace that shares the story behind the hymn “Ah, Holy Jesus” along with a performance of it. “It is unbelievably beautiful.”

Dorian is enjoying the new ESV Symphony of Scripture Audio Bible, Gospel of John. “I’ve been listening to it on repeat; it helps me relax while exercising, driving, or doing chores around the house. Can’t wait for the complete Bible version.”

Marissa recommends John Piper’s Future Grace and Jen Wilkin’s Women of the Word.

Mabel recommends two devotionals by Rachel Dodge: The Anne of Green Gables Devotional: A Chapter-by-Chapter Companion for Kindred Spirits, which is “good for parents reading it with their children or adults reading it with fresh eyes for the 12th time,” and Praying with Jane: 31 Days through the Prayers of Jane Austen. “With so many revisionist historians turning Jane Austen into a person of their own imaginations, this book serves to ground her personality in her identity as a Christian.”

Donna says her church just replaced its older Trinity hymnals with the Gettys’ Sing! Hymnal. “It has been a great joy to return to actually using our printed hymnals with many contemporary and well-written hymns and relying less on screens and slides.”

Michelle recommends the sermons of H.B. Charles Jr., available through his Cutting It Straight podcast. “He is probably one of the most gifted preachers of our day. I have been blessed by his preaching since I became a member of his church in LA 30 years ago.”

Ramy recommends The Autobiography of George Müller. “Amazing to see the Lord’s provision and answer to prayer through trial after trial. George Müller lived with integrity, consistency, and dependence on the Lord alone for his needs.”

Trent recommends Joel R. Beeke’s For Me to Live Is Christ: From Genesis to Revelation. “I just started reading this last week. I am enjoying the richness of these sermons. Chapter 1, ‘The Creation of Woman,’ was incredible, and I wish I had had the opportunity to read or hear this sermon before getting married.”

David recommends the Inspired podcast with Simon Guillebaud. “It does what it says on the tin—inspiring stories of faith from around the world!”

Dave was recently introduced to The Singing Bible. “The whole Bible (Berean Standard Bible) is set to music. You get to choose the book and chapter, and you also get to choose the music style—imagine listening to Jonah as a sea shanty, Lamentations as a Gregorian chant, or the creation as opera. There are 20 different music styles.”

Flashback

A Tribute to Those of Simple Faith. People of complex faith are prone to see apathy in those of simple faith, and people of simple faith are prone to see obsessiveness in those of complex faith. Both can grow weary and suspicious of the other.