Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash'
- kudos:Some strong arguments from Dash here. link to “Don’t call it a Substack. - Anil Dash”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Future, by Naomi Alderman
- kudos:This book has everything: critiques of tech billionaires, a crazy heist, and some fantastic riffing on Abraham and Lot that could make it into a sermon one day. I regret not reading it earlier and look forward to my next read of it!
personal and theological reflections after a minor bike wreck
- kudos:After six years and over 6,000 miles1 of bike commuting without any real incident2, I took a corner too fast this morning, hydroplaned, and slid a few feet on the road before picking myself up to get back to the sidewalk and out of the way of the cars whose path I was blocking. It wasn’t a huge wreck: I didn’t hit my head, my bike seems to be fine3, and three scrapes (one bigger than others) and some torn-up clothes are the worst of the damage.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump’s Historically Small Victory'
- kudos:I’ve seen this argument floating out there, but this is the first time I looked at some of the numbers. link to “Trump’s Historically Small Victory”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'In France, a family reckons with World War II Allies' legacy of rape and murder'
- kudos:If there were such a thing as a good army fighting a good war, it would be the Allies in World War II. It’s wildly irresponsible to overlook the awful things done by that army in that war for the sake of holding both up as “good,” though. link to “In France, a family reckons with World War II Allies’ legacy of rape and murder”
- kudos:
I expected Naomi Alderman’s The Future to be good, but I didn’t expect an interesting, responsible reading of the destruction of Sodom to be a throughline of the story.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Refuge In Kakistocracy'
- kudos:Interested by Ken’s take here, even if it doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about gestures at everything. Also, this line cracked me up: Pete Hegseth’s chief qualification to be Secretary of Defense is that Trump saw him on the teevee a lot and his tattoos are not, technically, Nazi symbols. link to “Refuge In Kakistocracy”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw
- kudos:I’ve seen a newer edition of this book on the shelves of my local indie bookstore and been curious about it for a while. So, I decided to look it up when searching for a new hoopla audiobook. It’s a breathtakingly radical book in its aspirations, and I loved that. It captures the kind of nonviolent radicalism that I want to explore more in this period of personal faith and world politics.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward
- kudos:I have Ward’s Anarchism in Action waiting for me on my nightstand while I work through a Jimmy Carter biography, so I thought I’d listen to this on hoopla in the meantime (since I regularly do an ebook, an audiobook, and a print book in parallel). It’s an interesting and helpful overview of a political philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Lots more to be read, but this gives some context.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People, by Terry Stokes
- kudos:I enjoyed listening to this book: Stokes writes well and reads his own writing well, too. It’s funny and (mostly) accessible, and it has a lot of ideas I can get behind. I also have a list of nitpicks, though. Stokes wants to have it both ways with critical Biblical scholarship, accepting (for example) that the Garden of Eden story is allegorical rather than literal but then also running with traditional interpretations (e.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'And Yet It Moves'
- kudos:I don’t agree with Ken on everything, but I always appreciate his perspective. I could quibble about some of his finer points here, but I think this is worth a read. link to “And Yet It Moves”
books I want to reread after this particular Election Day
- kudos:Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, because it’s a story of radical hope in the face of bleak reality The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, because I’m going to need to keep up my frustration with self-enriching amoral tech bros The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, by Jeffrey Lewis, because it compellingly portrays the danger of entrusting nuclear weapons in the hands of any president but especially one who is particularly petty and impulsive The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, because it so compellingly describes the soft edges and semi-plausible deniability that American fascism would inevitably be draped in Superman Smashes the Klan, by Gene Luen Yang, because it’s unapologetically pro-immigrant and anti-racism (and implicitly argues that churches should be, too) Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, by Scott Branson, because it advocates for solving problems of care and support on our own when it’s clear that the government won’t do it for us The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy, because it argues for loyalty to all of humanity over loyalty to any country the March trilogy, by John Lewis, because reading it the first time made me realize that I might well have been a “surely it’s not that bad” bystander during the Civil Rights movement, and I refuse to be that guy over the next four years There are, of course, a number of books that I want to read for the first time in response to last night, and I probably need to prioritize those for a number of reasons.
- kudos:
I’ve been scheduled for a while to preach on hope during Advent. It was always going to be about hope in the face of bleakness, but I can see the tone changing a bit now anyway.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web'
- kudos:Well, this sucks. link to “Mozilla is eliminating its advocacy division, which fought for a free and open web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:I appreciate these thoughts from Doctorow. I understand the excitement around Bluesky, I’m happy to follow people there, and I will likely lean into it more as a POSSE vector. That said, I still don’t know that it’s what I want the future of social media to look like. link to “Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
on art and punching Nazis
- kudos:A brief, entirely-unrelated-to-this-post conversation on Mastodon this afternoon got me thinking about an art exhibit that I saw in college and still think about every once in a while. The exhibit was on something along the lines of pop culture and politics, and one of the only two things that I remember from the exhibit (the other being D&D character sheets for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney) was a statue depicting an action figure-y Captain America brandishing the severed head of Saddam Hussein.
a local news dilemma
- kudos:A while ago, the RSS feeds for my local newspaper stopped working (at least with my feed reader), which caused me some consternation as I tried to decide whether to build a workaround or just give up on the Herald-Leader. I believe in supporting local news, so I’ve wanted to find a technical solution to this, but a lot of the decision making is out of my hands, and I don’t really have time on my hands to build myself the kind of webscraper that would be fun to try out.
- kudos:
Between class, early voting, and Halloween yesterday, I did not get to much of my email inbox. Today’s going to have to be “All Sends Day.”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Beshear calls for electing president by popular vote, says it would be better for Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern'
- kudos:Andy is a good one. link to “Beshear calls for electing president by popular vote, says it would be better for Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Long lines reported on first day of early voting in Kentucky'
- kudos:Standing in one of these lines right now! Fingers crossed for the future. 🤞🏻😬🤞🏻 link to “Long lines reported on first day of early voting in Kentucky”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Second Class Saints: Black Mormons and the Struggle for Racial Equality, by Matthew Harris
- kudos:I’ve read a number of books on Mormonism and race, but this one might be the most compelling. Its focus on the 20th century is important, and it has the most thorough discussion of the 1978 lifting of the priesthood and temple ban that I’ve ever seen. It’s maddening to see all these details in one place, but I’m grateful that Harris made that available to readers.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles'
- kudos:Some powerful stuff in here. link to “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for school shootings and measles”
- kudos:
The only good thing I got out of reading a blog post arguing that ChatGPT leaves open the door for young earth creationism just now was a reminder to reread Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie ».
- kudos:
Sure looks like someone finally got fed up with the majority of Harris signs in our cul-de-sac and decided to swipe them all overnight.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report'
- kudos:Rank hypocrisy. I don’t necessarily think Musk should have been deported way back when, but I think he should be called out on this. link to “Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance'
- kudos:This is cute, but also Ring doorbells are seriously the thing that scares me most on Halloween. link to “The Real Monsters of Street Level Surveillance”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
- kudos:I saw the trailer for the upcoming Hulu series earlier this week and decided to give the book a try. It’s a quick listen, though I probably should have read it to really lean into the metafictional aspects. Weird in all the right ways and got me thinking.
letting go of what made others proud of me
- kudos:As I continue to digitize old journals and documents by copying them into Day One (which is a great app, though I wish it hadn’t been acquired by Automattic, given all the drama currently happening there), I am regularly confronted with tensions between past-Spencer and present-Spencer. Maybe “confronted” and “tensions” aren’t the right words, because it’s good and natural for people to change, and I get some benefit out of making these observations, but there are ways that noticing these things can be difficult.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, by Sara Horowitz
- kudos:I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today? Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment'
- kudos:There are countless GOP politicians and voters who believe Harris is unqualified for the job for lesser (and often exaggerated or fabricated controversies), and yet none of this seems to bother them. gift link link to “For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission'
- kudos:Fascinating look at a controversial element in Mormon history. I wish more of the data here were firm rather than anecdotal—I think this topic is enough that it could be its own book if there were enough data (made) available. link to “Baseball Baptisms and the British Mission”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'McConnell called Trump 'stupid' and 'despicable' in private after the 2020 election, a new book says'
- kudos:McConnell comes so close to having a conscience and then seems to always bail when it becomes inconvenient to him. That makes him more of a disappointment than if he showed no moral awareness at all. link to “McConnell called Trump ‘stupid’ and ‘despicable’ in private after the 2020 election, a new book says”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’'
- kudos:Like so many other things, this alone should disqualify him. Gift link. link to “Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’”
funerals, business meetings, and church futures
- kudos:When I was ordained an elder a couple of months ago, my congregation gave me the gift of a full set of the 1976 History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I genuinely love this gift and am excited to one day make my way through all eight volumes! Yet, it’s also gotten me thinking a lot about what I want my service in this denomination—now, of course, named Community of Christ—to look like.