Flock is gross, but so is this.

I feel like everything I read about the Taylor Farms response to being identified with the cyclosporasis outbreak makes me distrust the company more than just their being identified with the outbreak.

Quelle surprise.

Love this headline, hate the story.

I wish I’d had this on hand during a conversation with someone last month who was willing to give Musk credit for what he’s done with Starlink. As Bode points out, there is genuine value in the product, but there are huge problems, too.

Terrifying stuff.

I haven’t been preaching for Community of Christ for very long, but by virtue of different demographics and traditions than the denomination I grew up in (in short, I preach more often for Community of Christ than I would have continuing in Latter-day Saint congregations), I suspect that I may be soon approaching the number of “talks” that I’d given in my past religious life. Maybe not this year, but that might happen in the next couple of years if I keep up the schedule that I’m on. Anyway, I bring that up because in my short time preaching for Community of Christ, I’ve never struggled with a sermon as much as I have with this one, and I’m trying to remember if that’s also true of my contributions to Latter-day Saint worship services over the years.

Wow, was this good! I picked it up because I was struggling with a sermon on the parable that gives the book its name, but even if I didn’t end up taking much from the book for my sermon, it really made an impression.

It’s evocative, and it does an amazing job of describing a hopeful apocalypse. I can see how other media I like—Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway or the indie TTRPG Why We Fight—owe something to this book.

Every word of this is enraging and disgusting.

I appreciate Masnick’s pushing back against Haidt-like discourses about social media, but I haven’t taken the time to dig into the weeds myself. I’m bookmarking this for my own reference.

Bookmarking in case I need to reference this in conversation.

Earlier this week, I got to meet with Margaret Olsen Hemming to record an episode of the Dialogue Out Loud podcast about my recent article in Dialogue on rethinking sexual ethics through Jacob’s temple sermon. It feels like a real accomplishment to have something theological published in this journal, and being interviewed by someone I cite in the article only makes it more surreal. It was a good conversation, and I’m happy to see that it’s already available for listening!

Just so gross.

When Musk brags about Grok not being “woke” or whatever, he is signaling that he’s implicitly okay with this kind of edge case.

Self-driving cars are surveillance machines.

This is good!

So gross.

How cruel we are being as a country.

Wait, what?

This is good.

Comme il m’arrive de lire un peu sur l’anarchisme, comme les écrits anarchistes parlent souvent de la Commune de Paris, comme je ne savais pas beaucoup sur cet évènement, et comme j’avais besoin de quoi écouter ce matin, j’ai choisi cette série pour approfondir un peu mes connaissances. J’ai toujours l’impression de ne pas savoir grand-chose (et de ne pas connaître la réponse à la question posée par cette petite série), mais elle a été bien faite.

I’m very pleased to share that the latest issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought includes an exegetical essay (available here as webpage, PDF, and audio recording) that I wrote arguing for reading Jacob 2 in the Book of Mormon as an example of reinterpreting scripture and rethinking sexual ethics. I’ve published in Dialogue before, but with my secular social scientist hat on, and it feels like a personal accomplishment to have published something more theological in nature.

I had another chance to preach for the Beyond the Walls ministry based out of Toronto yesterday. I went a bit off-script in emphasizing passages other than the one I was assigned to, but I’m pretty happy with the result, and I hope it worked out for others, as well. There are a lot of people (Jacques Ellul, Pete Enns, Thomas Römer) whose ideas are floating in the background of this sermon without ever getting mentioned—it channels a lot of thoughts that I’ve had over the past decade or so. Here are the recording and the script:

Some insightful comments here. I don’t know if they capture the whole picture of what’s going on here, but I think they’re an important part of it.

This book deserves all the honors, and if it gets made into a movie(?!), I would be thrilled.