Spencer Greenhalgh likes RSS and thinks you're great for using it

🔗 linkblog: Musk’s Starlink Socks Customers With $1500 ‘High Demand’ Surcharge

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:09:41 -0400

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.

🔗 linkblog: A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:01:52 -0400

🔗 linkblog: A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-13-terrifying-stuff./

sermon text on Parable of the Sower

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:03:59 -0400

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.

I mentioned in this morning’s review of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (which, I forgot to mention, feels truly written for the 2020s and not just because it’s set during that time) that I listened to that book in order to prepare for the sermon but ended up not using it much. I think I could have if I hadn’t finished the book in the minutes before I arrived at the church building, and that’s something to think about for next time.

This time, though, I wound up solving my problem by addressing that difficulty head on and talking about how I can’t see this parable as a metaphor for missionary work anymore—to make any sense of it, I need to think of it in a broader sense of building the peaceable reign of God. Here’s the text"

introduction

My parents recently moved, and one of the consequences of that move is that I am going through a bunch of stuff that they kept from my childhood and teenage years and that they don’t want to keep anymore. Now it’s my responsibility to go through this stuff and decide if I want to keep it.

In one binder I went through, I found a handful of pieces of paper with outlines for speeches written on them. When I was in 10th grade, one of my friends encouraged me to join our high school’s speech and debate team, which I did. I quickly learned that I enjoyed competitive extemporaneous speaking, where you had 30 minutes to research, write, and memorize a 7-minute speech in response to a question that you were given on the spot.

This was a very nerdy thing to do in high school and was not as impressive as being on a sports team, but it gave me a lot of experience that has been very helpful ever since. For example, when you only have 30 minutes to research, write, and memorize a speech, you learn to think on your feet. I have found in the past couple of years that this is really helpful for sermon writing. Even though I have a lot longer than 30 minutes to prepare a sermon, and even though I need all of that time to do it properly, my high school instincts mean that I often have the broad outline of a sermon in my head within a day or two of receiving a scripture assignment.

Or, at least, that’s usually the case.

the Parable of the Sower

A couple of months ago, I got the latest worship schedule in an email and looked up my name so that I could start preparing for anything that I’d been assigned. This time, my assigned scripture was the Matthew 13 version of The Parable of the Sower. You’ve probably heard this scripture before, but let’s go over the first part together:

That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. If you have ears, hear!”

Well, friends, when I read over this scripture back in May, all of my high school instincts failed me. I had no idea what to preach about when it came to this parable—not just in the day or two to come, but for a solid month or two: no matter how often I thought about it, it just didn’t seem like any ideas were coming.

the disciples and parables

If there’s one comfort I can take from just not getting this parable, it’s that Jesus’s disciples felt the same way. The Parable of the Sower appears in Matthew 13 (today’s scripture) as well as Mark 4 and Luke 8. In all three tellings of this parable, the disciples sheepishly walk up to Jesus afterward and say “hey, Jesus, do you mind helping us out here? what exactly are you talking about?” In all three tellings of the parable, Jesus agrees to explain what he meant, and here’s what he says in Matthew 13:

“Hear, then, the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

my real issue

Knowing that the disciples needed things explained to them brings some comfort, but to be honest, I already knew that explanation when I was struggling to know what to preach about. I’ve heard this parable countless times since I was a kid, so I already knew that the seed is the word, and the ground is the people who hear the word, and all the rest. I just didn’t want the parable to be about that.

I mentioned earlier that my parents just moved. They moved because they accepted an assignment from the church that they attend (and that I grew up in) to go supervise missionary efforts for that church in another part of the world. They will probably talk about the Parable of the Sower a lot to the missionaries that they work with, encouraging them to be sowers who sow seed, hope that it grows, and know that it won’t always grow the way they hope. I know this because when I was younger, I took two years to be the kind of missionary that my parents are off supervising. We talked about the Parable of the Sower a lot, encoouranging ourselves to be sowers who sow seed, hope that it grows, and know that it won’t always grow the way we hope.

That missionary interpretation is a pretty common way of understanding this parable, so I don’t think that I was wrong to think about it in those terms or that my parents will be wrong to think about it in those terms. However, I have issues with how I used to think about that parable, and that stops me from appreciating the parable now. When missionaries from that church think about the Parable of the Sower, the seed doesn’t just represent “the word,” it usually represents the specific teachings of that church. For the missionaries that my parents are supervising, so long as I don’t believe the things that they do and practice my faith in the way that they do, I represent the path, or the rocky ground, or the ground with thorns—somewhere where the seed is not growing.

I think those missionaries have the right to believe that; when I was one of those missionaries, I did, and I believed it sincerely. But I obviously don’t believe that anymore: I’m preaching for all of you this morning, and not for the church I grew up in. I also don’t know that I can bring myself to believe it back at them, that just because they don’t believe the things that I do and that they don’t practice their faith the way that I do, they aren’t good soil, no matter how sincere they are. Besides those missionaries, I have friends and family members with lots of different beliefs—including no religious beliefs at all—and as deeply important as my Christian commitment is to me, I have to be honest: I don’t want to be in the business of sowing the word at them and judging whether it’s growing. Maybe that makes me a bad Christian, maybe that makes me a bad minister, but that’s where I am, and that’s why I struggled with this scripture for today.

what is the word?

One thing I loved about doing speech and debate in high school is that I never knew what I was going to get asked to speak on, and that forced me to learn a lot of things so that I would always have something to say. One thing I love about getting scripture assignments for sermons is that even when I struggle with the scripture, it is always an invitation to learn something new about my own faith. I found something I love about this scripture, something that helped me know what to say today, something that helps me transform this parable from the way I used to understand it to something that speaks to my faith here and now.

What is the word in this parable? At least in the version we read in Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that the seed represents “the word of the kingdom.” In Mark, it’s just “the word,” which is mysterious; in Luke, it’s the word of God, which is good; but what I needed for today is Matthew’s version, which is “the word of the kingdom.”

In our foyer, we’ve got copies of a little booklet called “Sharing in Community of Christ.” One of the sections in that booklet is called “Basic Beliefs of Community of Christ,” which is pretty self explanatory, but it has an entry called “The Reign of God,” which is just another way of talking about “the kingdom.” Here’s how it goes—here’s how our denomination thinks about “the kingdom.”

The Reign of God is the coming triumph of love, justice, mercy, and peace that one day will embrace all of creation. Jesus’ life and ministry were the living expression of this promise. He taught his disciples to pray for the kingdom’s full coming and sent them out into the world to be living emblems of that new creation. “Zion” expresses our commitment to herald God’s peaceable kingdom on Earth by forming Christ-centered communities in families, congregations, neighborhoods, cities, and throughout the world.

Wow. If that is the seed in this parable, that changes a lot for me. I’d get a little grumpy if missionaries from another church told me that my heart was unprepared ground because I wasn’t learning to believe like they believe, but I do need regular reminders that “the cares of this age and the lure of wealth” are distracting me from “love, justice, mercy, and peace.” I’m hesitant about sowing the seed if that means convincing everyone else to practice their faith like I practice mine, but sign me up for building the better world that “one day will embrace all of creation.”

I know that that seed won’t always grow the way that we hope, but I do hope it grows, and I want to be involved in sowing it wherever I can.

conclusion

This sermon is a little more personal than usual, and I’m not sure that that’s how sermons are supposed to be. But thank you for letting me make this sermon personal, because it’s been a chance to think through a lot that’s been on my mind for the past couple of months. I love what we believe about the Reign of God, and I love Matthew’s emphasis on sowing the “word of the kingdom.” I hope we can all be sowers of that seed—and that we can all be prepared ground to let “love, justice, mercy, and peace” grow in us.

📚 bookblog: Parable of the Sower (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:00:02 -0400

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.

I’ll be thinking about this for a long time!

🔗 linkblog: How Marco Rubio Runs Venezuela From Afar

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:22:38 -0400

🔗 linkblog: How Marco Rubio Runs Venezuela From Afar https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-11-every-word/

🔗 linkblog: Adults Broke The Internet, And They’re Trying To Fix It By Kicking Kids Off

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:24:31 -0400

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.

🔗 linkblog: The Party That Screams About The Evils Of Socialism Wants To Nationalize AI Companies

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:09:58 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The Party That Screams About The Evils Of Socialism Wants To Nationalize AI Companies https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-09-bookmarking-in/

podcast interview about recent Dialogue article

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:42:02 -0400

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!

🔗 linkblog: Meta is reportedly working on smart glasses that would be recording all the time

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:06:05 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Meta is reportedly working on smart glasses that would be recording all the time https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-08-just-so/

🔗 linkblog: Lawsuit: Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:06:33 -0400

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

🔗 linkblog: Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:06:21 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-07-self-driving-cars/

🔗 linkblog: A New Battle Hymn

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:32:56 -0400

🔗 linkblog: A New Battle Hymn https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-06-this-is/

🔗 linkblog: Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:13:36 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-06-so-gross./

🔗 linkblog: These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:05:35 -0400

🔗 linkblog: These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled. https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-06-how-cruel/

🔗 linkblog: JD Vance Brags About Being Able To Do Lots Of Watergates, Compares Himself To Nixon

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 06:58:05 -0400

🔗 linkblog: JD Vance Brags About Being Able To Do Lots Of Watergates, Compares Himself To Nixon https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-07-01-wait-what/

🔗 linkblog: Supreme Court Upholds Temporal Gerrymander That Would Cost Democrats 1932 Election

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 09:59:55 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Supreme Court Upholds Temporal Gerrymander That Would Cost Democrats 1932 Election https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-30-this-is/

🎙️ radioblog: La Commune de Paris : Page maudite ou page glorieuse de l'histoire ? (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:18:17 -0400

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.

new exegetical article on Jacob 2

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:33:53 -0400

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.

This particular idea has been bouncing around my head for a while: In fact, thanks to my recent import of my old Twitter archive, I can say with authority that this essay began its life as a Twitter thread from March 2020. I spent years wanting to expand it into something bigger, and I am thrilled that it found a home at Dialogue.

sermon on idols and certainty

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:20:44 -0400

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:

A couple of months ago, John wrote to me to tell me about today’s passage and theme and to say that he thought I might like them. To be honest, I wasn’t sure at first. Our passage today features Paul in Athens. There are a lot of different religious beliefs in Athens, but Paul is very certain about his own beliefs. This leads him to explain to others why they should all believe like him.

This feels familiar to me. When I was a young adult, I was very certain that the church I then attended was “the one true church.” This led me to take two years off from university to travel, like Paul, to another place full of diverse religious beliefs and explain to others why they should believe like me.

I think I was sincere in wanting to share my beliefs with others, and I’m sure that Paul was, too, so I can appreciate what he’s doing. However, the fact that I’m preaching today for a Community of Christ congregation and not in the denomination I grew up in shows that the certainty I once had in my beliefs eventually disappeared.

While I am very happy to have found a new spiritual home in Community of Christ, I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced that same certainty again. I have friends, co-workers, and family members who have many different religious beliefs—or even none at all—and while I know that a place like Beyond the Walls is where I find spiritual meaning, I’m just not ready to be like Paul and argue with others about what they ought to believe.

Here’s the thing, though: John’s a pretty smart guy, so it’s not a surprise that I have turned out to really like this passage. I think there’s a way of reading this story that invites us all to challenge our certainty—and even to find God in uncertainty—and that’s what I’d like to share with you today.

Let’s start by remembering what Paul’s main motivation was when he argued with others in Athens. In the first verse of today’s passage, we read: “While Paul was waiting… in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Then, in the last verse of today’s passage, Paul argues that: “‘Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.’”

So, Paul’s arguing with other people seems to be motivated by a concern about idols. This makes sense: Anyone who’s spent even a little bit of time with the Bible probably knows that its authors just do not like idols. Paul is drawing on generations of tradition in his arguments. However, even this tradition is not as straightforward as it seems. Yes, the Bible insists that idols are bad, but that insistence might be hiding something.

Imagine that on your first Sunday attending a new congregation, the pastor stands up, gives some announcements, and then says “in this congregation, people of all genders are valued.” You might be excited to hear that—it might come off as a sign that this is a truly inclusive congregation.

Imagine, though, that every Sunday for the next six months, the pastor stands up, gives some announcements, and then says “in this congregation, people of all genders are valued,” maybe with added insistence each time. If the pastor feels the need to repeat this phrase every week, it could instead be a sign that there are actually problems with inclusion in the congregation, and that the pastor is trying to change the congregation, not describe the congregation.

Many scholars have suggested that something similar is going on in the Bible, that the repeated insistence that God’s people do not worship idols is a pretty good sign was an effort to change things, not describe how things were. In other words, these authors may have been trying to shift from a religion that valued idols to a religion that firmly rejected them.

I don’t bring this up to criticize our spiritual ancestors but rather to ask some important questions: What value did they once find in idols, and if they did find value in idols, why did they eventually reject them in the way that Paul does in Athens?

To explore these questions, let’s go to one of the most famous stories about idols in the Bible. In Exodus 32:1, we read: “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’”

Notice the uncertainty that drives this question. Moses is supposedly up on the mountain talking to God, but Moses is late getting back, and the people don’t know what has happened to him. Rather than this uncertain God whom they can’t see and who apparently can’t stick to a schedule, they long for a God who is more visible and more certain.

So, let’s read what happens next, in verses 3 and 4: “all the people took off the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took these from them, formed them in a mold, and cast an image of a calf, and they said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’”

This last sentence is a little bit funny. The Exodus story tells us that God’s people made a single golden calf but for some reason talked about it as though there were multiple of them. Is this a simple grammar error, or is something else going on here? To puzzle this out, we need to remember that the stories in the Hebrew Bible—or Old Testament—were often written in a different order than the order they take place in. Like a prequel that is written after a book or movie that it takes place before, the stories in Exodus sometimes include references to stories that we will not read until later in the Bible.

So, let’s take a look at 1 Kings 12, which will help us better understand some of the golden calf story in Exodus. In this chapter, a man named Jeroboam has led a revolt that has led to the splitting off of the northern kingdom of Israel from the southern kingdom of Judah. Jeroboam is now king over the new northern kingdom, but he still faces one important limitation to his power: The holy site of his people’s religion is still in the southern kingdom. Let’s read verses 26-27: “Then Jeroboam said to himself, ‘Now the kingdom may well revert to the house of David. If this people continues to go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, the heart of this people will turn again to their master, King Rehoboam of Judah; they will kill me and return to King Rehoboam of Judah.’”

Jeroboam understands that as long as his people are looking elsewhere for religious leadership, he does not have full power over them. (As a brief tangent, this may also help us understand why high ranking politicians in the United States have recently tried to fight with the pope about what Catholicism teaches). We find Jeroboam’s response in verse 28, which should feel very familiar to us after reading the famous story in Exodus: “So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. He said to the people, ‘You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.’”

The strange grammar in Exodus, which refers to a single calf as though there are at least two of them, is probably the result of a direct quotation of this story, where Jeroboam creates two golden calves.

Now, in both of these stories, we may be used to understanding these figures as rejecting God by turning to a golden idol (or idols). However, that’s not the only way of understanding what’s happening here. We can also understand them as worshipping the same God but preferring a visible, certain version of that God that is under their control to an unseen, uncertain version that they have no control over. Aaron just wants to reassure the people that God is present and predictable. Jeroboam just wants to ensure that God does not distract from his political agenda. They don’t need a different God so much as a more convenient version of the same God they have been worshipping.

We might be proud of never worshipping a golden calf, but can we really say we have never tried to reduce God into something more visible and certain than what the divine really is? During my own faith journey, I have often built golden calves, not in the sense of trying to replace God but in the sense of trying to make God fit within the narrow scope of my own expectations and desires. However, while certainty is comforting, it is also more fragile than it seems.

During much of my life, I kept God contained within the walls of a single church and its specific teachings, and I could not fully recognize the divine except when it aligned with that perspective. Several years ago, I was confused when I felt the divine calling to me from beyond those walls toward some “new teaching” I did not recognize. I was terrified when the visible, certain, controllable God that I had constructed for myself began to fall apart and revealed itself for what it had always been, what Paul describes as “an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” I was awestruck when I came face to face with a very different version of God whom I did not understand but who had a much larger world to show me.

So it was with our spiritual ancestors, who also traded their familiarity with a visible, certain God for trust in a God who is harder to understand but is present in a much larger world. I have already mentioned today that the stories of the Bible are not always written in the order that they take place in and that earlier stories are often written with later considerations in mind. Perhaps the biggest of these “later considerations” was around 586 BCE, when the southern kingdom of Judah, its capital of Jerusalem, and the temple in Jerusalem were all destroyed by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar. Remember that this is the same temple that was so important to our spiritual ancestors that the Bible earlier describes Jeroboam, king of the northern kingdom, as trying to replace it with golden calves so that he could keep God under his control.

Yet, it’s also important to recognize that even if the temple was the “true” place of worship, it also represented an effort that tried to contain God within the realm of certainty. Our spiritual ancestors understood that temple as the home to a powerful, unmatchable God who would never allow the kingdom of Judah to be defeated. When that kingdom was defeated, and when that God’s home was destroyed, they were faced with a crisis of faith that makes my experience pale in comparison. In fact, some scholars believe that the temple contained a physical representation of God never mentioned in the Bible that might have been destroyed or carried off by Nebuchadnezzar’s armies. How does a believer respond when their God is literally destroyed or captured by an enemy?

Our spiritual ancestors responded by recognizing that God as yet another “image formed by the art and imagination of mortals” and embracing a “new teaching” of God as something less visible and less certain but also much less fragile. We can understand the biblical authors’ rejection of idols as an embrace of a God who may not always protect our nation but will be accessible from any place on the planet, a God who may not be visible but who can never be destroyed, a God who may feel uncertain but who always has a bright future prepared for us.

So, yes, Paul brings some religious certainty to Athens with him, and yes, I feel a little uncomfortable with that certainty. But Paul’s certainty is in an uncertain God, and that is something that speaks deeply to me.

Today’s theme—which I am finally getting to at the end of my sermon—is a question: “What Is This New Teaching?” This is not just a question that Athenians asked Paul as he challenged their gods of “gold or silver or stone.” It is also a question that Paul himself asked as the risen Christ challenged everything he thought he knew about his faith. It is also a question that his ancestors asked generations earlier as they built a new faith out of the ruins of all they had taken for granted. It is also a question that we must repeatedly ask ourselves if we want to set aside our golden calves and embrace the fulness of the divine, even though it is unseen and uncertain and out of our control.

Thank you.

🔗 linkblog: Are frontier models really too dangerous?

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:38:31 -0400

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.

🔗 linkblog: BYU professor's novel 'A Short Stay in Hell' explodes in popularity — 17 years later

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:28:02 -0400

🔗 linkblog: BYU professor's novel 'A Short Stay in Hell' explodes in popularity — 17 years later https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-24-this-book/

🔗 linkblog: Podcaster John Dehlin’s answer to the LDS Church’s lawsuit: You don’t own the word ‘Mormon’

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:35:41 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Podcaster John Dehlin’s answer to the LDS Church’s lawsuit: You don’t own the word ‘Mormon’ https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-22-mormon-stories/

📚 bookblog: Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:15:26 -0400

I like John Hodgman, and I liked this book. It’s well-written, nerdy and funny in the right places, and does a good job (or at least I think so) of valorizing his own lived experiences while also candidly acknowledging the mountain of privilege that serves as their foundation. Listening to him narrate the audiobook was even better.

🔗 linkblog: President Dallin Oaks announces the LDS Church is poised to set a new record

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 09:23:10 -0400

Discourse in the modern American right often understands free speech as protecting the right to say objectionable things but not the ability to criticize people who say objectionable things. While a “one true church” mentality is less problematic than racial slurs or transphobic language (though there’s also some of the latter in Oaks’s full remarks, according to the Church Newsroom release), this excerpt strikes me as embodying a similarly selective view of religious freedom:

Oaks said the “fashionable opinion of this age is that all churches are true. If that is so,” he added, “then all religious messages that identify differences in religious doctrine, like ours, are unimportant. That conclusion can cause us and others a serious loss of religious freedom.”

The idea that religious freedom is threatened by (rather than protects) the idea that there is no “one true church” is just bonkers to me. First of all, my current church is very capable of describing differences in religious doctrine and why they matter without claiming a monopoly on religious truth. Second, Oaks’s take seems to value evangelical exclusivism (which has famously and recently been exercised at Latter-day Saints’ expense) above a more pluralistic approach. And yet, Oaks surrounds the discussion of threats to religious freedom with a claim that Latter-day Saint doctrines remain superior to others. It really, really feels like a “religious freedom for me but not for thee” approach, and it makes me angry.

🔗 linkblog: BYU professor’s book about a Latter-day Saint stuck in hell now numbered among greatest works of fiction

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:19:23 -0400

🔗 linkblog: BYU professor’s book about a Latter-day Saint stuck in hell now numbered among greatest works of fiction https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-12-had-no/

🔗 linkblog: Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:40:02 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-11-important-update/

🔗 linkblog: Why Google’s New AI-Saturated Search Page Will Be A Disaster

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:30:09 -0400

Pretty compelling example of digital labor issues (both subtle and explicit) related to AI. Surely letting Google shape our questions and provide all the answers won’t be an issue?

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 6 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:51:07 -0400

Cette série continue à faire des bêtises que je trouve gênantes: Il n’y a que quelques personnages « importants » qui doivent vivre toutes les expériences d’un.e Français.e de cette époque, et il y a plein de choses qui se passent pour des raisons dramatiques et non logiques.

Pourtant, cette saison en particulier montre la saleté de la guerre, et je suis impressionné par combien on ose critiquer les Français.e.s même au lieu de croire que tout le monde a été des héros pendant la guerre.

🔗 linkblog: Elon Musk is encouraging race riots on the eve of SpaceX’s IPO

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:06:33 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Elon Musk is encouraging race riots on the eve of SpaceX’s IPO https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-11-walking-disaster./

🔗 linkblog: People Living Near xAI’s Dirty Data Centers Are Pissed About the SpaceX IPO

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:18:10 -0400

I concede that appeals to the environmental costs of AI sometimes feel knee-jerk and lacking nuance. However, you can always count on Musk to provide a clear example of the harms of AI, and this is a particularly compelling one.

🔗 linkblog: Hackers likely hijacked over 20,000 Instagram accounts with Meta’s AI chatbot

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:49:19 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Hackers likely hijacked over 20,000 Instagram accounts with Meta’s AI chatbot https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-08-20000-accounts/

on extemporaneous speaking and writing sermons

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:41:29 -0400

One of the best things I did for my future self when I was in high school was to follow a friend’s advice to join our school’s forensics (speech and debate) team. Joining the team let me discover something I was good at, and I developed some skills that are tremendously useful to me personally and professionally, not least when teaching or presenting my research.

Lately, as I’ve been putting together some sermons for my local Community of Christ congregation and the Beyond the Walls ministry in Toronto, I’ve thought about another way that competing in forensics decades ago has shaped me. One of my particular strengths was competitive extemporaneous speaking, which involved having half an hour to write and memorize a seven-minute speech on a semi-randomly chosen topic related to domestic and foreign affairs. (I also did fairly well in impromptu speaking, which involved slightly shorter speeches with drastically shorter prep time).

These events have affected the way that I prepare sermons. This is a bit unintuitive: Both of those competitive events involved memorizing key points and then learning to expand them on the fly into a full speech. This is how I used to prepare remarks for Latter-day Saint worship services, but in Community of Christ, I’ve taken to preparing remarks word-for-word. Given that shift, you wouldn’t think that I’d be relying on the skills I developed during extemporaneous and impromptu speaking at all.

However, one thing that I’ve noticed is that within a few minutes of being assigned a scripture passage to speak on, I usually have the overall thesis of a sermon planned out in my head. (This is notably not true for a sermon I’m giving in July, and I need to do some thinking there). Of course, the specifics take days, weeks, or even months to draft, edit, and finesse, but it’s uncommon for the finished product to change drastically from the initial idea that I form off the cuff. Of course, there are downsides to that: It’s not difficult to imagine that I could miss important ideas that I could only come through by research and reading simply because I form an initial impression quickly. However, it’s also helpful to have an initial impression in the moment that I agree to give a sermon, and I have no doubt that I owe a great deal of that to three years of practice in quickly developing outlines for speeches.

📚 bookblog: The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:11:39 -0700

After watching several seasons of Un village français, it was inevitable that I would want to learn more about De Gaulle, someone I certainly already knew about, if not at the level I would have liked. At some point, I remembered that I had bought this biography about 15 years ago but never read it, so I pulled the forgotten ebook up on my phone and made my way through.

I’m going the book credit for being so thorough, and if Fenby is not always as critical as I might have been (his “De Gaulle proves the great man theory of history” conclusion to the book raised an eyebrow), he does not shy away from the problematic aspects of his life and career. Yet, I was irritated by a lot of small things in the book: inconsistent terminology and translation, a shift in format for day-by-day accounts of particularly important events, that sort of thing. As an academically oriented reader, I also would have preferred a more explicit working of sources into the text, even if I know most readers appreciate the more subtle way it’s done.

🔗 linkblog: Steam Sends Boilerplate Message To Gamemaker For Angering Russian Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigots

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:18:39 -0700

🔗 linkblog: Steam Sends Boilerplate Message To Gamemaker For Angering Russian Anti-LGBTQ+ Bigots https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-06-02-pretty-disappointing./

📚 bookblog: Anarchy in Action (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sun, 31 May 2026 10:35:37 -0400

This was fine? I really enjoyed the introduction and conclusion: They got at what I find interesting about appeals for anarchism. The rest of the book got at what I find tedious about (some) appeals for anarchism, though: A lot of anecdotalism, seemingly speaking to the already converted (or at least the already insider), and big claims without walking me through them. I’m glad I bought it, and I’m glad I read it, but it wasn’t as amazing as I’d hoped.

🔗 linkblog: AI avatars in digital blackface want to sell you this belt buckle

Sat, 30 May 2026 12:32:16 -0400

🔗 linkblog: AI avatars in digital blackface want to sell you this belt buckle https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-30-scale-and/

🔗 linkblog: How AI Can Lead To False Arrests & Wrongful Convictions

Sat, 30 May 2026 07:25:58 -0400

I don’t mind being a broken record when pointing out Ellulian vibes. Check this paragraph out:

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

🔗 linkblog: The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

Fri, 29 May 2026 17:55:36 -0400

Very gross stuff here. I remember downplaying the connection between “alien” as an immigration term and “extraterrestrial” in a conversation in college, chalking it up to etymology and dismissing the idea of ill intent. This is definitely ill intent, and it’s all kind of dumb and gross,

🔗 linkblog: Amazon Is Making an AI-Animated ‘Good Advice Cupcake’ TV Show. Its Original Creator Is Furious

Fri, 29 May 2026 17:36:52 -0400

Digital labor is, imo, the fundamental problem with AI, and I think this story shows why: It’s not just the AI use here that’s exploitative, it’s kind of everything.

Fri, 29 May 2026 15:50:54 -0400

Look, I enjoy that I get to study the weirdness of online Mormonism in all its breadth, but I was still not expecting a genAI Ghibli rendition of the Short Creek raid as a thumbnail for a Warren Jeffs recording on a fundamentalist Rumble channel.

🔗 linkblog: This AI startup will clean your home for free to train future robots

Fri, 29 May 2026 09:08:03 -0400

🔗 linkblog: This AI startup will clean your home for free to train future robots https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-29-uh-no./

🔗 linkblog: Utilities report as many as 30 data centers under discussion in Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern

Fri, 29 May 2026 07:12:08 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Utilities report as many as 30 data centers under discussion in Kentucky • Kentucky Lantern https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-29-dont-love/

🔗 linkblog: Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags

Thu, 28 May 2026 14:05:53 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Cities Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-28-do-lexington/

🔗 linkblog: Clavicular Wakes Up As Hideous, Jawless Monster After Rating Old Crone A 4

Thu, 28 May 2026 09:22:17 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Clavicular Wakes Up As Hideous, Jawless Monster After Rating Old Crone A 4 https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-28-i-hate/

🔗 linkblog: US law enforcement warns of 'anti-tech extremism' as AI hatred grows

Wed, 27 May 2026 07:06:38 -0400

One of the things I’ve had to wrestle with while engaging more and more with Jacques Ellul is that Ted Kaczynski thought he was pretty cool, too.

This Mauro Lubrano quote in the piece sums up a lot of my same feelings:

While anti-technology violence is unacceptable, it should not be used as an excuse to securitize AI and emerging technologies, thereby silencing those who are critical of the current trajectory.

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: AI and a world without migrants (27 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Wed, 27 May 2026 06:59:13 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: AI and a world without migrants (27 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-27-this-piece/

🔗 linkblog: Pope Leo Schooled the Tech Bros on Tolkien

Tue, 26 May 2026 19:48:29 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pope Leo Schooled the Tech Bros on Tolkien https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-26-another-good/

🔗 linkblog: Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote? An investigation.

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:52:27 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Is Peter Thiel the target of Pope Leo's Gandalf quote? An investigation. https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-26-what-wild/

🔗 linkblog: She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help.

Tue, 26 May 2026 07:53:01 -0400

🔗 linkblog: She Faced a Life-Threatening Miscarriage. Under Arkansas’ Abortion Ban, Even Calls to the Governor’s Office Didn’t Help. https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-26-necessary-reading./

🔗 linkblog: Pope Leo calls for being ‘profoundly human’ in the age of AI

Mon, 25 May 2026 12:20:46 -0400

Check this guy out:

He compared the current era of AI to the Tower of Babel, saying society must “avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’” which he defines as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

🔗 linkblog: In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few

Mon, 25 May 2026 10:59:27 -0400

🔗 linkblog: In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-25-i-think/

🔗 linkblog: The FDA Takes Its Turn Burying Studies Showing The Safety Of COVID, Shingles Vaccines

Sat, 23 May 2026 07:47:20 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The FDA Takes Its Turn Burying Studies Showing The Safety Of COVID, Shingles Vaccines https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-23-there-are/

🔗 linkblog: This Week in the World: The Cascading Harms of US Aid Cuts | Friends Committee On National Legislation

Fri, 22 May 2026 21:08:28 -0400

🔗 linkblog: This Week in the World: The Cascading Harms of US Aid Cuts | Friends Committee On National Legislation https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-22-weve-got/

🔗 linkblog: SpaceX’s IPO Filing Shows Elon’s Twitter ‘Business Genius’ Was A Fantasy

Fri, 22 May 2026 18:52:47 -0400

🔗 linkblog: SpaceX’s IPO Filing Shows Elon’s Twitter ‘Business Genius’ Was A Fantasy https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-22-hate-reads/

🔗 linkblog: Amazon Gets Into The AI Podcast Slop Business

Fri, 22 May 2026 17:58:58 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Amazon Gets Into The AI Podcast Slop Business https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-22-ugh-gross./

🔗 linkblog: The Science Is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence Is Fueling A National Push To Ban Social Media For Youth

Fri, 22 May 2026 06:21:23 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The Science Is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence Is Fueling A National Push To Ban Social Media For Youth https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-22-bookmarking-this/

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: Shopping isn’t politics (21 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Thu, 21 May 2026 19:38:55 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: Shopping isn’t politics (21 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-i-definitely/

🔗 linkblog: In desperate times, graduates find hope in humiliating tech CEOs

Thu, 21 May 2026 18:27:27 -0400

The purported inevitability is one of the most frustrating things for me about AI, and I think this shows that I’m very much not alone in that feeling. (Also, mandatory Ellul reference).

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI Announces Construction Of New Data Center On Top Of Sick Child

Thu, 21 May 2026 13:38:00 -0400

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI Announces Construction Of New Data Center On Top Of Sick Child https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-i-apparently/

🔗 linkblog: How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

Thu, 21 May 2026 11:49:16 -0400

🔗 linkblog: How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-stories-like/

🔗 linkblog: The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech

Thu, 21 May 2026 11:23:07 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-good-for/

🔗 linkblog: Trump Sued Himself And Walked Away With A $100 Million Tax Debt Erased

Thu, 21 May 2026 09:38:23 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Trump Sued Himself And Walked Away With A $100 Million Tax Debt Erased https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-i-hate/

🔗 linkblog: 4chan’s Misogynist ‘Wizards’ Are Nudifying Women by Request

Thu, 21 May 2026 07:07:51 -0400

🔗 linkblog: 4chan’s Misogynist ‘Wizards’ Are Nudifying Women by Request https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-21-i-will/

🔗 linkblog: US Senate votes to advance resolution limiting Trump war in Iran as Cassidy flips • Kentucky Lantern

Wed, 20 May 2026 09:22:45 -0400

🔗 linkblog: US Senate votes to advance resolution limiting Trump war in Iran as Cassidy flips • Kentucky Lantern https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-20-its-telling/

🔗 linkblog: Hey Platforms: Add TAKE IT DOWN To Your Transparency Reports

Wed, 20 May 2026 07:36:42 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Hey Platforms: Add TAKE IT DOWN To Your Transparency Reports https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-20-helpful-thinking/

🔗 linkblog: Bill Cassidy Loses Primary; RFK Jr. Will Be His Legacy

Wed, 20 May 2026 06:27:27 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Bill Cassidy Loses Primary; RFK Jr. Will Be His Legacy https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-20-harsh-but/

🔗 linkblog: The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers

Tue, 19 May 2026 17:57:09 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The FBI Wants to Buy Nationwide Access to License Plate Readers https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-19-absolutely-terrifying./

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 5 (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Tue, 19 May 2026 15:06:46 -0400

Elle n’est pas parfaite, cette série : On nous impose de croire qu’un tout nouveau personnage est évidemment un chef naturel, et il a plusieurs éléments qui sont là pour être là, même s’ils ne sont pas fondés sur l’histoire de la série ou sur la logique en général.

Pourtant, je lui donne 5 sur 5 car j’apprécie beaucoup la série, et cette saison en particulier. En avant !

🔗 linkblog: America’s dangerous, messy deepfakes crackdown is here

Tue, 19 May 2026 14:33:47 -0400

To echo a comment I made earlier today, I will always hold tech companies morally responsible for the harms they cause, but I get a lot less sure about legal responses. Do we trust this administration to handle NCII properly?

🔗 linkblog: We Need A More Serious Discussion About Suicide And AI Chatbots

Tue, 19 May 2026 08:28:54 -0400

This post is hard for me. I am deeply resentful of commercial AI products, and I don’t like the idea of letting companies off the hook (at least in moral terms—I get a lot more hesitant when we start talking about specific legal responses). That said, I know the post is written in good faith, and I do think it makes some productive points. I dunno.

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: There’s no such thing as “age verification” (19 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Tue, 19 May 2026 07:10:17 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: There’s no such thing as “age verification” (19 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-19-doctorow-has/

sermon on the Ascension and fleeting joys and hopes

Mon, 18 May 2026 19:20:39 -0400

I got the chance to preach in my home congregation yesterday and wanted to post the text here. In high school, I competed in extemporaneous and impromptu speaking (these were two different competitions with two different formats in Kentucky speech and debate, so I’m not just rattling off synonyms). This is something which has really impacted my life in terms of teaching me how to think on my feet. In the context of giving sermons, I usually know more or less what I want to say within a few minutes of reviewing the passage that I’m assigned to, though over the days and weeks that follow, I spend a lot of time figuring out the details of what I want to say. I really felt that with this sermon: The text I used on Sunday morning was the third draft of a sermon, and I even made some last minute changes over breakfast. I’m fairly happy with how it turned out, though there are parts of previous drafts that I missed, too.

My practice with public speaking also came in handy when I showed up at the church building on Sunday morning to find that we had a few guests, including a couple of high-up church leaders I’d never met before. Even after setting aside the leader worship that I acquired in Mormonism, it could have been easy to get thrown off by having important guests in the pews while I spoke, so I’m glad for all the practice I got in high school (and have had in the years since) about focusing on the speech and not the audience.

introduction

“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” (Luke 24:44)

These first words from Jesus in today’s passage are a reminder that Christianity has always been about waiting. Waiting for the fulfillment of the promises of scripture. Waiting for better times to come.

The New Testament authors, like many Christians today, saw Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection as the fulfillment of prophecies that had been included in the scriptures that they grew up with. They saw their people as having waited for years, decades, centuries for better times to come, and their experience with Jesus represented a major step forward in that experience.

Now, this is not necessarily as straightforward as we may have learned growing up—often, these passages of scripture didn’t originally have a Christian purpose, but they have acquired new meaning for Christians as we try to understand all of scripture and all of life through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Whatever the details of what is prophecy and what is reinterpretation, one thing is sure: As long as there have been humans, we have been hoping and waiting for better times. As long as there have been Christians, we have believed that that those better times have come and will come through Jesus Christ.

Seventh Sunday of Easter

Today, we celebrate the seventh Sunday of Easter. One of the great joys I have experienced in the last few years of my faith journey has been to better learn the Christian calendar: Not just the big days like Christmas or Easter Sunday, but the small observances and the whole seasons that are there to guide our faith if we will let them.

As I’ve been preparing this sermon, I’ve been thinking about what it means to have seven Sundays of Easter—to have 49 days of Easter, which started all the way back on Easter Sunday and go all the way until next Saturday. What does it mean to have a whole Easter season?

I know about Easter Sunday, about having one, big, exciting day to think about the better times that we hope for as Christians. It’s a day for shared meals and energetic singing, to listen to one of Karen’s great Easter sermons and to look forward to the day that everything is finally made better than it is now. We need that day every year, because things aren’t better yet, and having at least one day every year to exercise our hope that it will be is really important. What does it mean to have 49 of those days?

ups and downs

Maybe it’s because sometimes one day isn’t enough. Maybe we need 49 days to build up enough hope for the rest of the year. And that’s important, because while Easter is the promise that better times are coming, it is certainly not a promise that those better times are already here. Because they aren’t. And that, too, is part of today’s scripture passage.

Today is not just the Seventh Sunday of Easter. It is also the Sunday that we celebrate Jesus’s ascension into heaven. This is a real celebration of a story that is worth celebrating. Today’s scripture tells us that after the Ascension, the disciples returned to Jerusalem “with great joy.” But! I’ve been surprised over the past few weeks to find myself wondering if that story could have turned out differently—if the Ascension could have been a moment of disappointment for the disciples.

Let’s put ourselves in their shoes. The disciples have just lived through a very busy time with a lot of ups and downs in their journey of faith. This time begins with Jesus’s triumphal entry. He enters Jerusalem riding a colt, and the disciples are there shouting:

“Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” (Luke 19:38)

They are convinced that the better times they have been waiting for are almost there. They’re not totally wrong, but they have no idea what is coming. They spend a few days enjoying Jesus’s presence and listening to his teachings, but then the unthinkable happens: Jesus is arrested, tried, and executed. Now they realize that they are still living in the not-yet-better times—maybe they even ask themselves if times could possibly get worse than they are right now. They spend a few days mourning Jesus’s absence and remembering his teachings, but then the unthinkable happens: Jesus rises from the dead.

Let’s remember how this all plays out, though—at least in the Gospel of Luke. The women go to the tomb and find it empty. The women go back and they tell Peter. Peter runs to the tomb and finds it empty. Peter goes back and is a little bit confused. Two disciples walk the seven miles to Emmaus and meet a stranger on the road. They invite him to dinner and realize that he is the risen Lord. They walk the seven miles back to Jerusalem (a nice after dinner stroll) to share what just happened to them. The eleven disciples are all there, and they have stories to share, too: Peter has seen the Lord just like they have seen the Lord.

Over the course of a few days, they’ve gone from the highest hope to the lowest despair, and now their hope is higher than where it started. And then Jesus appears to them and eats with them, and the hope is even higher still. Now they wonder again if those better times are around the corner—maybe they even ask themselves if times could possibly get better than they are right now.

the unfair Ascension

But then comes the Ascension. Now, it’s important to remember that sometimes the Bible tells us the same story in two different ways. That’s true of the Ascension of the Lord, which we can read about in Luke and in Acts. Just about everyone who studies the Bible agrees that Luke and Acts were written by the same person, but for whatever reason, that author tells the story of the Ascension in two different ways. In Acts, the disciples get to spend 40 days with the resurrected Jesus before He returns to heaven. In Luke, they don’t even get 24 hours.

In Luke, all of these Easter stories happen on the same day. Early in the morning, the women find the empty tomb. It’s a couple of hours after dinner that the disciples return from Emmaus to Jerusalem just in time for Jesus to appear to everyone. But after some talking and some broiled fish, Jesus takes everyone on another walk all the way out to Bethany. It’s got to be late, but they’re all so excited because those better times are on their way—but then Jesus “[withdraws] from them and [is] carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:51).

So, I’m glad that the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy, but my reaction might have been a little different. Lord, you just got here. We thought you were gone, we thought we had lost everything, we thought those better times would never come. We just found out that you’re still with us, we just found out that we haven’t lost anything at all, we’ve just remembered that those better times are going to come after all. Why do you have to go, Lord? Why can’t you bring about the better times now? Why do we only get one day with you?

I’m sure most of us can think of Easters that have felt like that. Last year, I had a wonderful Easter Sunday with all of you and then with my family, but then my Easter Monday was awful—my mental health was in a bad place, and for that day, I thought that better days might never come. Other years, I’ve enjoyed spending time with someone on Easter Sunday only to unexpectedly attend their funeral before the 49 days of Easter were even up. 49 days to build up Easter hope is better than just one Sunday, but sometimes the not-yet-better times don’t wait for the Easter season to be over to crash down on us.

So maybe it’s not about having 49 straight days of Easter to build up hope for the rest of the year—maybe it’s about giving ourselves Easter moments throughout the entire year to keep us going. To keep us hoping for better days even while we’re living through the not-yet-better days.

bringing each other Easter hope

And, of course, there’s one more lesson that we can learn from today’s passage. Mareva Arnaud Tchong, our denomination’s presiding evangelist, had this to say in a story posted to the World Church website this morning:

In Luke 24, before ascending to heaven, Jesus blesses his disciples. He could have left in silence, but he chose to pass on to them what he carried within himself: peace, love, and mission. He did not promise them a life without hardship, but rather a constant presence—a living blessing that would go with them.

What if we are called to do the same? To be living blessings, even in uncertainty? To offer peace and hope, instead of waiting for life to be perfect?

With this in mind, let’s pay attention to some of Jesus’s words that I skipped over earlier:

“repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in [the Messiah’s] name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” (Luke 24:47-48)

Jesus isn’t just assuring his disciples that better times will come; he is asking them to be witnesses of those better times, to be ready to proclaim those better times. Think about it. Our Easter hope as Christians today is not because we were present for that one very busy day where Jesus rose from the dead and then ascended to heaven, our Easter hope comes because generations of Christians have shared that story and shared that hope.

Maybe it’s important to have our Easter moments—whether it’s 49 days in a row or scattered throughout the year—not to build up hope and joy for ourselves but so that we can find those who are going through not-yet-better times and we can make things a little bit better for them.

So, I can’t promise you that your last six days of this Easter season are going to go perfectly, that all of them will be filled with hope and joy in the way that we’d like. But these last six days of the Easter season are an invitation to look for hope and joy whenever we can, to build ourselves up on the foundation of Easter promises of better time to come. And as much as we do find that hope and joy, as much as we are able to build ourselves up, these last six days are an invitation to look for those who are struggling to believe in better times to come, and to lift them up through our love and our words and our actions, just as generations of Christian witnesses have done before.

Thank you.

🔗 linkblog: Meet the Sad Wives of AI

Wed, 13 May 2026 06:50:46 -0400

Embarrassed to say that this gender dynamic of AI had never really occurred to me before. Interesting read.

📚 bookblog: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Tue, 12 May 2026 16:59:41 -0400

I’m being hard on this book, so I want to emphasize that: I think it’s important, I pre-ordered it and have been looking forward to read it for a long time, there are parts of it that I deeply enjoyed, and it is likely to get cited in a couple of papers I’m working on.

That said, while I think there are a lot of good ideas and bits in here, it feels more like a collection of ideas than a cohesive book. I think a stronger throughline and more aggressive structure would have made it even better. I know it started off as essays/blog posts, and I think the individual components are great, but I’m not sure it’s more than the sum of its parts.

I also acknowledge that I read a lot of Doctorow and that his ideas tend to be repeated throughout his writing. Someone coming fresh to his ideas probably wouldn’t have the same nitpicks that I do, and that’s the main, well-deserved audience for this book, so I’m fine with a little bit of “meh” in my own reaction.

it sure looks like David Kloiber is creeping on University of Kentucky employees to send them personalized mailers for the KY-6 primary

Tue, 12 May 2026 15:33:53 -0400

Kentucky primaries for the 2026 elections take place a week from today, so it’s not surprising that we’ve been getting some political mail over the past couple of weeks. Today, though, something came in the mail that really took me aback. David Kloiber’s campaign sent us something that was clearly more than a regular mailer, since it came in a letter-style envelope and was addressed to both me and my spouse.

Both of us are employees at the University of Kentucky, a public institution, so there’s a fair amount of publicly available information about us floating in the ether. That’s to be expected, but it doesn’t mean that someone can’t be creepy about it. The first paragraph of the letter that we got addressed one of us by name, listed their exact employer within the University, and had some personalized text in there that was clearly a riff on a publicly listed position title before pivoting into a “you work for this kind of institution, so this is why you should vote for me” spiel.

In response to Kloiber’s speaking directly to us, I’d like to speak directly to him for a paragraph: This is weird, my dude. Super weird. I don’t know who on your campaign thought this would make your outreach feel more personalized and be more effective, but you should see the number of 🤢 emojis, “creeeeppyyy"s, and “maybe I would have expected this from a GOP mailer"s that we’ve texted each other in the 45 minutes since I checked the mail today. This doesn’t say “I know who you are and I care about you” so much as “I looked you up and want to use what I learned for my personal benefit.”
Of course, it arguably gets better from here. I do a bit of web scraping myself, so there’s a (small) part of me that’s technically impressed with how this might have all worked. Here’s my best guess: Scrape the hell out of the UK website to identify employees, compare that list of employees with public or purchased voter info to identify folks likely to participate in a Dem primary, and then develop personalized mailers for all of them. Good so far, but: Even assuming that you can script the first two steps of that (which doesn’t strike me as terribly hard, even if I don’t know if I could do it easily myself), the level of personalization that’s in here (again, specific riffs off of specific job descriptions) is not something that would be easy to automate.

At least, it wouldn’t have been before 2023 or so. I’m pretty confident that there’s some LLM work going on here, and the awkward phrasing of some of the personalized language only makes me more confident. So now I wonder how much of this is good old fashioned web scraping (which, to be clear, can be plenty creepy on its own) and how much of this is a carefully massaged LLM prompt. Because nothing makes the appropriation of publicly available information for private gain (this mailer) worse than using a tool that is fundamentally built on the appropriation of publicly available information for private gain. Bravo.

Anyway, I’m going to be honest: I didn’t vote for David Kloiber in 2022 because he struck me as someone with more money than ideas. That impression has stuck enough in my head that although I haven’t done all my primary homework yet, I don’t know that I was all that likely to vote for him in the first place. That said, I take pride in being an informed voter, so I would genuinely have tried to read up on his policies and give him a fair evaluation before next Tuesday. Not now, though—I am not very interested in reading up on a candidate who thinks he can win my vote by creeping on me online and feeding the results into an LLM.

🔗 linkblog: Data center guzzled 30 million gallons of water and nobody noticed for months

Mon, 11 May 2026 20:45:02 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Data center guzzled 30 million gallons of water and nobody noticed for months https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-11-shouldnt-be/

🔗 linkblog: Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

Mon, 11 May 2026 14:33:03 -0400

Long before I ever knew what generative AI was, I was grumpy about the idea of Grammarly because I was suspicious of deferring to a computer on what “good writing” looks like. I appreciate Koebler’s thoughts here for the way it shows how generative AI—including Grammarly now, apparently—is doing something similar on an even larger scale.

🔗 linkblog: I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

Mon, 11 May 2026 07:08:20 -0400

🔗 linkblog: I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-11-its-digital/

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: Bubbles are REALLY evil (07 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Thu, 07 May 2026 06:50:56 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: Bubbles are REALLY evil (07 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-05-07-i-have/

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 4 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 04 May 2026 16:36:28 -0400

J’ai fait une grosse pause au milieu de cette saison, car comme j’ai déjà dit, je m’intéresse plus aux détails historiques, et les intrigues dramatiques de la série peuvent m’ennuyer au bout de plusieures épisodes. Pourtant, j’aime bien regarder, et j’en apprends beaucoup—il m’arrive même de m’investir dans le drame.

🔗 linkblog: Utah’s New Law Targeting VPNs Goes Into Effect Next Week

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:00:53 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Utah’s New Law Targeting VPNs Goes Into Effect Next Week https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-30-wait-u.s./

what is the authoritative text of the Book of Mormon?

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:33:40 -0400

I’m working on a couple of projects right now (one professional, one personal) that have me asking the question that makes up the title of this post. While working on one of those projects last night (the personal one), I came across the verse that is Alma 5:5 in Community of Christ versification and Alma 7:12 in LDS versification. For this project, I’m reading out of the 1830 text of the Book of Mormon, as captured on WIkisource, and when I read over the verse, something felt off to me:

and he [Jesus] will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to suffer his people acccording to their infirmities.

Besides the three c’s in “according,” the phrase “how to suffer his people” felt wrong to me. Not only does it not make much sense, but I remembered the phrase reading as “succor his people according to their infirmities,” which frankly makes a lot more sense. I checked Royal Skousen’s Analysis of Textual Variants, and sure enough:

Here the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition read suffer. The 1837 edition replaced suffer with succor, probably intentionally (although this change was not marked in P by Joseph Smith in his editing for the 1837 edition). All subsequent editions have retained succor.

Here, “P” is the printer’s manuscript, distinguished from “O,” the original manuscript, which is not fully extant. The existence of two separate manuscripts before the Book of Mormon even went to print (and the knowledge, based on surviving fragments of the original manuscript, that there are differences between them) raises the question of which of them ought to be authoritative. This question is further complicated by the existence of 1830 and 1837 editions, the latter of which involves a number of changes to the text introduced by Joseph Smith himself. Are Smith’s edits in 1837 more authoritative than his original dictation in 1830?

Of course, as Skousen also points out, the introduction of this specific change in the 1837 edition can’t quite be pinned down:

It is quite possible that the original manuscript read succor and that scribe 2 of P miscopied the word as suffer, especially since succor and suffer are orthographically similar. We should note that in one place in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery spelled succor as succer (Alma 57:12). If the original manuscript had the same spelling of succer here in Alma 7:12, then the conjectured misreading as suffer by scribe 2 in the printer’s manuscript would be all the more plausible. Indeed, a spelling such as sucker would be even more susceptible to being misread as suffer (but there are no instances of that misspelling in the manuscripts).

Another possibility is that the scribe in O misheard Joseph Smith’s succor as the phonetically similar suffer and thus wrote down suffer in O. It’s also possible that Joseph himself misread succor as suffer as he dictated the text.

I want to draw attention to the last sentence here, because it takes for granted that Joseph was not merely dictating a text but reading it aloud off of words that appeared in the seer stone he typically used for the “translation” process. Skousen’s Critical Text Project is a veritable goldmine for engaging with the Book of Mormon, but it’s important to note that this is functionally an apologetic argument, that the Book of Mormon was divinely revealed to Smith—to the extent that he was provided the text word for word as he peered into a stone.

In my other, academic project related to the Book of Mormon text, I’m drawing off of authors like John-Charles Duffy (and using frameworks provided by Jacques Ellul, perhaps to no one’s surprise) to make the argument that this “word for word” understanding aligns with a desire to make a clearly authoritative text that must be conformed to by its reader. However, for all of Skousen’s apologetic commitments, the uncertainty of the suffer / succor change in the text points out just how difficult it is to determine which of the differing texts of the Book of Mormon ought to be understood as the authoritative one. Can it be the one purportedly read off of a seer stone by Smith if Smith later made changes to that text? Can we agree that succor is the authoritative reading if we don’t have a provenance for that change?

Skousen and I (and countless others) would surely disagree as to the ultimate significance of these ambiguities, but it’s important to recognize that there are ambiguities. The Book of Mormon is famously held by LDS-flavored believers to be “the most correct of any book on earth,” but even if that were true, it woiuldn’t mean that there aren’t questions that need to be resolved. In this particular case, which of the texts available to us is that “most correct” book? Latter-day Saint authorities have turned the exact wording of particular verses into theological observations before, and that assumes a word-for-word correctness to the book that is not always clear.

📚 bookblog: Apos (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:51:34 -0400

I backed this book on Kickstarter, intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel that documents and collects difficult experiences on Mormon missions.

When it arrived, I knew that actually reading it would be either healing or triggering for me, and I was happy to find that it was the former. There are a few improvements that could be made, but it met my hopes of being something that captured the Mormon mission experience as I know it (though there were a lot of COVID-19 stories, and how are these RMs so young!) but also spoke to the complex feelings that I and so many others have about those experiences.

📚 bookblog: The Cost of Discipleship (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:46:43 -0400

I first tried reading this in 2024 and kind of stalled out after a while. It’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, though! The guy who was executed for resisting Nazis! I felt like I really needed to give this another go, and so I did.

I like what the book is going for: The idea of radical devotion to Christ is something that speaks to me on a deep level. However, for me to be fully comfortable with that, I need “devotion to Christ” to be defined (and mapped onto other values) in a clear, specific way, and I don’t know that this book does that.

I occasionally see copies of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Bonhoeffer when browsing religion sections at bookstores, and I feel like that’s a bit indicative of what’s going on here. I don’t know much about Metaxas except that I would surely disagree with his views on Bonhoeffer and his views on what “radical devotion to Christ” mean.

I don’t think it’s necessarily Bonhoeffer’s fault that a right-wing evangelical author would find him as compelling as I hope to, but I didn’t find that The Cost of Discipleship was specific enough to preclude those other readings of Bonhoeffer’s thinking than the one I hoped to find to motivate me in the year of this mess that is 2026.

on disregard for heresy and the unrealized queer potential of Mormonism

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 15:31:19 -0400

As I’ve noted a few times before, I’m a de facto Trinitarian, but I can’t say that I’m tremendously invested in the Trinity as an orthodox doctrine of Christianity. I know that some of this has to do with my Mormonism—growing up in a non-Trinitarian tradition has surely shaped my thinking about this—but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on here. Yes, I’m often sympathetic to the beliefs of the tradition I spent so much time in, but I’m also a non-theist who tends to see God as more of a metaphor for humans’ fleeting experiences with the ultimate than as someone whose nature and consubstantiality can (and must) be understood in distinct terms.

However, this doesn’t mean that I reject the Trinity either. I confess that I get impatient with an insistence on Trinitarian thinking, but I can be brought on board. A friend of mine who also made the jump from Mormonism to Community of Christ has told me that as a gay man, he finds the Trinity to be particularly meaningful. Now, that was a fast-moving conversation, and I confess that I didn’t catch the connection between his identity and the meaning this teaching brings him, but at the risk of being flippant, that doesn’t really matter to me. If the doctrine of the Trinity is doing my friend some good in his religious life, I think that’s just great; in fact, I think that matters to me much more than whether the doctrine is orthodox or heretical.

I feel this way about a lot of traditional Christian doctrines, it turns out. I don’t know much about Gnosticism, and I don’t find the teachings of Gnosticism very useful, but that absence of utility matters a lot more to me than whether or not Gnosticism is heretical. If the Gnostics were teaching some cool things, I probably wouldn’t care what early Christian authorities had to say about them; in contrast, I don’t find dualism to be helpful or useful, so I’m not interested in defending them either. Returning us to Mormon views of deity, I’m not particularly invested in Latter-day Saint teachings that challenge monotheism, but other than “monotheism = good, polytheism = bad,” I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a compelling case for why those are problematic views for Christians to have (I’m open to such an argument, and I’m not an apologist for the Mormon views, I just don’t see what the issue is). Likewise, while I think the incarnation does a much better job of emphasizing the divine present in the mundane and material, I think that Mormon views on theosis can have similar benefits despite not holding those beliefs any more, and so I’m willing to go to bat for them on those grounds, no matter how much they clash with Christian orthodoxy.

This last week, I got myself a copy of Taylor Petrey’s Queering Kinship in the Mormon Cosmos from my employer’s library. I’ve only made it a few pages in so far, but there’s a passage from Petrey’s introduction that really spoke to all of this thinking I’ve been doing over the past few years:

This is no apologetic for Mormonism as a historical force. Mormonism, as we will see, is deeply imbued within its contextual values of patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism. But Mormonism’s emphasis on an embodied, material, sexual God; its history with plural marriage and kinship experimentation; and its theory of the human as a divine being are all places to challenge the ontology, sexuality, and emphases in contemporary heterosexualist culture. Notwithstanding Mormonism’s ongoing, active participation in such a culture, the tradition is unable to be reduced to and caricatured by this description. This is not a reclamation but a resignification.

I love how Petrey puts this: Mormonism as it currently exists is problematic for the way that it treats queer people. Full stop. But that’s more important than the purportedly problematic nature of Mormon theology. Conversely, there exists in Mormon theology the (largely dormant!) potential for those heterodox—even heretical—theologies to become queer-affirming in very powerful ways. If that ever happened (or to the extent that it is happening for individuals and groups within the broader umbrella of Mormonism), I would always value that theology above a more orthodox Christian approach that failed to stand up for queer identities, practices, and people.

I don’t really care about heresy—I care about whether theology is meaningful, useful, and healthy. I don’t mind pivoting from Mormon theological views to more orthodox ones so long as those orthodox ones are just as (or, often, more) meaningful, useful, and healthy for me. But in cases where Mormon (or other) theological views remain meaningful, useful, and healthy, I really don’t care how heretical they are according to Christian tradition.

📚 bookblog: Exploring Community of Christ Basic Beliefs: A Commentary (❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤)

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:47:01 -0400

Like the last Tony-authored book I reviewed, I want to concede that there’s a bit of unfairness coming into my review. In some ways, I think it’s an important work that just isn’t what I’m looking for right now. What’s more, it’s kind of a reference work that I tried to read cover to cover, and that affects my thinking, too. However, I also have some grumps about it that I think are valid.

I think a shorter, tighter version of this project would have been more helpful, for one. There’s lots of good information here, but trimming down to the most important stuff might have made for a more accessible read.

I also have questions about the journey this volume took (this is the third version of it that I’ve read, and all of them hint at a mysterious behind the scenes process). I get the impression that it started off as more of a clearly multi-authored work, and I think I might have appreciated that more. While the single voice that comes through this final version is interesting, it also sometimes feels repetitive, with certain key scriptural and theological references repeated at multiple points. I’m not interested in hearing crazy takes on Community of Christ Basic Beliefs (I can get those on Sunday if I want them), but especially since we’re not a dogmatic denomination (as the volume helpfully points out), I’d love to hear different voices all within the range of responsible representations of denominational beliefs.

I’m glad I own it, I’m glad I read it, and I expect I’ll consult it for a project I’m working on (which is why I read it now anyway), but I feel like it could have been a better (perhaps more multivoiced and more concise) volume than what it is. Or maybe it’s just not what I needed at this point of my theological self-education.

📚 bookblog: The Future of Another Timeline (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:59:34 -0400

The story itself didn’t captivate me much. I felt like there were sudden developments for the sake of the plot moving forward, and even an twist that comes partway through the book felt like [insert sudden development here] rather than the surprise it was supposed to be. I also didn’t catch some of the character connections and payoffs at first, though I suspect that’s due in part to my own inattention.

I can forgive this book a lot despite these grumps, though. It has the most interesting time travel worldbuilding I’ve ever encountered, and it’s even better for the way it uses time travel as a metaphor for social change. I appreciate its careful reflection on whether/when violence is justified in the name of social change (even if the final payoff of that subplot didn’t quite land for me), and I learned a lot about Anthony Comstock and thought a lot about collective action.

So, I have quibbles, but I appreciate what the book is going for.

🔗 linkblog: Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:11:49 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Trump Pardoned a Nursing Home Owner Who Owed Almost $19 Million to a Grieving Family https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-20-heartbreaking-story/

🔗 linkblog: Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:10:26 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Trump Is Literally Negotiating With Himself Over How Much Taxpayer Money He Gets Because His Taxes Were Leaked https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-18-what-a/

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:31:50 -0400

Wait, is Open AI naming a science-oriented product after a researcher whose work was famously appropriated by others for their personal benefit?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:02:05 -0400

Just posting to say how much I love the way that Creative Commons licenses are allowing publications (say, Techdirt or States Newsroom) to repost good writing from other sources (say, The Conversation or ProPublica).

🔗 linkblog: The Right Wing Origins Age Verification Laws Don’t Disappear Just Because They’re Going Bipartisan.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 06:53:40 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The Right Wing Origins Age Verification Laws Don’t Disappear Just Because They’re Going Bipartisan. https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-17-some-important/

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: A Pascal’s Wager for AI Doomers (16 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:27:31 -0400

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

🔗 linkblog: Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman’s “unconstrained” relationship with the truth

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:13:07 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Ronan Farrow on Sam Altman’s “unconstrained” relationship with the truth https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-16-this-was/

🔗 linkblog: The Senate is voting to save free IRS Direct File today

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:06:51 -0400

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

🔗 linkblog: Apple quietly threatened Grok to curb sexual deepfakes or get pulled from App Store

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:40:17 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Apple quietly threatened Grok to curb sexual deepfakes or get pulled from App Store https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-15-tim-cook/

🔗 linkblog: Trump picks fight with Pope Leo as Iran peace talks dissolve • Kentucky Lantern

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:27:17 -0400

I know we live in ridiculous times, and I have a print subscription to The Onion, and this is still one of the most bewildering articles I’ve read recently. I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief to make it on to each successive paragraph.

🔗 linkblog: The Strait of Hormuz blockade is causing a slow-moving food crisis

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:00:34 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The Strait of Hormuz blockade is causing a slow-moving food crisis https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-13-hashtag-winning/

🔗 linkblog: Trump Threatens CNN For Very Basic Reporting On His Shitty, Unpopular War

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:26:47 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Trump Threatens CNN For Very Basic Reporting On His Shitty, Unpopular War https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-10-dumb-indefensible/

🔗 linkblog: Police corporal created AI porn from driver's license pics

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:23:26 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Police corporal created AI porn from driver's license pics https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-09-so-gross./

🔗 linkblog: Money for War, But... | Friends Committee On National Legislation

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:40:24 -0400

Shameful spending priorities:

Roughly 5.5% of that $200 billion could fund universal meals to all U.S. public school students for the year. The whole package could feed millions of children for decades. As Sen. Adam Schiff (CA) has pointed out, “A hospital costs about $100 million… If we’re spending a billion a day in Iran, we’re effectively dropping 10 hospitals a day on Iran.”

🔗 linkblog: What the heck is wrong with our AI overlords?

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:17:41 -0400

I wrote recently about how my concerns about (generative AI) are probably more about the broader Ellulian system of technique than the specifics of the technology. Here’s a passage from this article that makes a similar point better:

For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.

🔗 linkblog: When the President threatens to commit a genocide

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:14:07 -0400

🔗 linkblog: When the President threatens to commit a genocide https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-07-i-follow/

🔗 linkblog: The New York Times Got Played By A Telehealth Scam And Called It The Future Of AI

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:08:16 -0400

Masnick’s fierce critique is all the more notable for how public he is that AI is good for some things, pushing back against grumpier folks (e.g., me).

Check this paragraph out, though:

What we actually have here is a marketing operation that used AI to automate the production of deceptive advertising at a scale and speed that would have been harder to achieve otherwise. Snake oil salesmen have existed forever. What AI gave Matthew Gallagher (and, I guess, his affiliates) was the ability to crank out fake doctors, fabricated testimonials, and deepfaked before-and-after photos faster than any human team could — and to do it cheap enough that a guy with $20,000 and no morals could build it from his house. That’s the actual AI story the Times should have written.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:28:50 -0400

I think this will always be my favorite panel from all of Dumbing of Age.

🔗 linkblog: America is exceptional — in its addiction to violence and war

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:15:03 -0400

Lots to think about here. In the context of Trump’s proposed budget, this stood out in particular:

Our military spending is not a partisan issue. Obama raised Bush’s military budget. Trump raised Obama’s budget. Biden raised Trump’s budget. What would King say to that? Probably exactly what he said in 1967: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching a spiritual death.”

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: EU ready to cave to Trump on tech (04 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:10:21 -0400

Doctorow has been arguing for a post-American internet/tech industry for a while, but this passage really landed for me:

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won’t give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world’s majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world’s supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

🔗 linkblog: Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:04:36 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Senators Ask Tulsi Gabbard To Tell Americans That VPN Use Might Subject Them To Domestic Surveillance https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-03-ugh-this/

🔗 linkblog: DOGE Goes Nuclear: How Trump Invited Silicon Valley Into America’s Nuclear Power Regulator

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:54:30 -0400

So much about this that I don’t like. The article makes a good case that there may be good reasons to ease up on nuclear power regulations, but the language of AI and VCs suggests to me that those good reasons aren’t the top priority.

🔗 linkblog: Anthropic says its leak-focused DMCA effort unintentionally hit legit GitHub forks

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:49:42 -0400

So Doctorow already said this in the essay I linked to this morning, but it’s very striking how much this leak highlights Anthropic’s willingness to use our creative labor while simultaneously cracking down on any effort for others to do the same to them.

🔗 linkblog: Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 07:16:08 -0400

Didn’t expect from the headline that this would turn into an essay on copyright, but I’m glad it did:

Expanding copyright will gain little for creative workers, except for a new reason to be angry about how our audiences experience our work. Expanding labor rights will gain much, for every worker, including our audiences. It’s an idea that our bosses – and AI hucksters – hate with every fiber of their beings.

🔗 linkblog: Sam Altman: ‘If I Don’t End The World, Someone Far More Dangerous Will’

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:44:56 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Sam Altman: ‘If I Don’t End The World, Someone Far More Dangerous Will’ https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-01-the-depressing/

🔗 linkblog: The World Would Not Know Jesus Christ

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:00:36 -0400

🔗 linkblog: The World Would Not Know Jesus Christ https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-04-01-some-good/

🔗 linkblog: I Asked ChatGPT What WIRED’s Reviewers Recommend—Its Answers Were All Wrong

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:23:25 -0400

Interesting article here. I don’t read WIRED (or The Verge, or…) for the product reviews, but it’s not hard to see how generative AI can create issues for them in that way.

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:57:02 -0400

Gotta admit that I was tempted to put “Brendan Carr is a dummy” on my protest sign today so I could find the other Vergecast listeners in town.

🔗 linkblog: The United States router ban, explained

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:19:50 -0400

This is the first thing I’ve bothered reading about the router ban, and it is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to read.

🔗 linkblog: Jessica Foster, la citoyenne-soldate 'parfaite' du camp MAGA qui n'existe pas | RTS

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:19 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Jessica Foster, la citoyenne-soldate 'parfaite' du camp MAGA qui n'existe pas | RTS https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-25-histoire-fascinantemais/

🔗 linkblog: Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 11:46:10 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-20-uh-this/

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 3 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 09:18:39 -0400

Cette série continue à m’engager—et à me faire réfléchir. Il faut quand-même que je me rappelle que c’est un drame et non un documentaire, car j’ai tendance à trouver les détails historiques plus intéressants que les conflits interpersonnels.

📚 bookblog: More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:42:11 -0400

Cory Doctorow’s end of year recap of books he reviewed always puts a few titles on my list, and this was one of them. The history of energy is not inherently the most interesting topic ever, but once I got past the fact that I was reading in translation (which only bugs me with French, since I can read that pretty well) and trying to figure out how the translation was done (worried about AI, to be honest), I really enjoyed this book.

Well, enjoyed as much as one can: It’s a sobering read that challenges narratives about energy transition as overly simple—not to downplay the importance of the climate catastrophe but instead to emphasize that more radical steps than “wait for solar to fix everything” (or, I would add, wait for AGI to fix everything) are necessary if we’re going to respond responsibly. It will impact my thinking for quite some time, I imagine.

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:17:15 -0400

That Marc Andreessen clip about having zero introspection sounds like it’s straight out of an Ellulian critique: There is no good or bad, there is only technique.

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:26:57 -0400

The Martian is a fun reread—except when its casual references to a functioning federal government and US media ecosystem briefly take me out of the narrative.

🔗 linkblog: House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 07:27:45 -0400

🔗 linkblog: House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-14-reprehensible-comments/

🔗 linkblog: Pete Hegseth Questions What Girls Were Doing In School To Begin With

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:42:18 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Pete Hegseth Questions What Girls Were Doing In School To Begin With https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-13-terrible-but/

🔗 linkblog: Trump Defends Wearing Fruit Hat, Samba Dancing During Dignified Transfer

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:44:21 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Trump Defends Wearing Fruit Hat, Samba Dancing During Dignified Transfer https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-12-the-last/

🔗 linkblog: 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:37:58 -0400

🔗 linkblog: 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-12-required-reading/

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:39:08 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-11-oh-okay/

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly says it will stop using AI to clone experts without permission

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:33:29 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly says it will stop using AI to clone experts without permission https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-11-oh-look/

🔗 linkblog: A DOGE Bro Allegedly Walked Out Of Social Security With 500 Million Americans’ Records On A Thumb Drive And Expected A Pardon If Caught

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:30:51 -0400

🔗 linkblog: A DOGE Bro Allegedly Walked Out Of Social Security With 500 Million Americans’ Records On A Thumb Drive And Expected A Pardon If Caught https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-11-terrifying-stuff./

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly will keep using authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:35:07 -0400

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly will keep using authors’ identities without permission unless they opt out https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-10-opt-out/

exploring grace and generosity (and the recalcitrant rich) through two translations of a psalm

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:48:46 -0400

Over the past few months, one of my afternoon traditions has been to take a short break to read through the day’s passages in Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro’s Common Prayer: Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. I bought this book after being impressed by Claiborne’s work in Jesus for President (which is much more radical than the title sounds) and with the hopes that it would be another resource for me as I continue to learn about the liturgical calendar. I didn’t stick with it long during the 2024-2025 liturgical year, but I’ve been having more luck with the 2025-2026 liturgical year. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I just go through the motions, but every once in a while, something really stands out to me.

This afternoon, I was impressed with the psalm passage (Psalm 49:4-8) that was included with today’s readings, the translation apparently taken from the Book of Common Prayer. Here’s how it reads:

Why should I be afraid in evil days : when the wickedness of those at my heels surrounds me the wickedness of those who put their trust in their goods : and boast of their great riches? We can never ransom ourselves : or deliver to God the price of our life; for the ransom of our life is so great : that we should never have enough to pay it, in order to live for ever and ever : and never see the grave.

To be clear, there are some very obviously toxic ways that the idea that “we owe everything to God” can be interpreted, and I’m not interested in any of those. Yet, passages like this (and King Benjamin’s sermon in the Book of Mormon) really work for me in combatting my own tendency to think that I’ve pulled myself up by my bootstraps and that I deserve through my own hard work every good thing that comes my way. (This post from a few years ago is a non-scriptural exploration of that same question). Whether I attribute it to God, the universe, or dumb luck (and as a non-theist, it’s usually the latter two in a trenchcoat with the trappings of the first), I (and so, so many others) need a reminder that I will never earn enough to pay the ransom of my own life. I always owe who I am and what success I’ve had to good luck and others’ grace, and this language encapsulates that reality for me.

I was so taken with the psalm that I decided to open up Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible to take a look at how he rendered it. To my surprise, it was pretty different (and not just in versification)!

Why should I fear in evil days, when crime comes round me at my heels? Who trust in their wealth and boast of their great riches— yet they surely will redeem no man, will not give to God his ransom. To redeem their lives is too dear, and one comes to an end forever.

Alter notes that “pronoun reference is confusing” in Biblical poetry, which might go some way toward explaining the difference between his rendering and the one in the Book of Common Prayer. Yet, Alter argues:

> the meaning of this verse is not in doubt. Those who trust in their wealth but are unwilling to put up money for those in need find it too expensive to redeem the lives of the needy. Before the recalcitrant rich can be prevailed on to help, the poor man in straits will perish, will be gone forever.

At first, I was disappointed to see that Alter’s translation differed so much from the one that had really connected with me (for what it’s worth, the NRSV seems to chart a middle ground, resembling the BCP translation but acknowledging the possibility that it could be interpreted more like Alter). After some brief reflection, though, I feel that the two translations work pretty well together. The rich who believe that they can ransom their own lives are also frequently those who refuse to ransom others. We need reminders that we are not fully responsible for our own successes so that we will be more likely to help lift up others who are waiting for success to come their way.

In short, this wrapped up neatly to be an interesting exploration of Community of Christ’s enduring principle of Grace and Generosity—it is in recognizing that grace that we have received that we prepare ourselves to be generous to others.

on anarchist themes in Pluribus

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:07:31 -0400

This post takes for granted that one is familiar with the first season of the Apple TV+ show Pluribus—I don’t make any effort to explain the premise of the show or to avoid any spoilers about it.

As I concede just about every time I write something related to anarchism, I don’t claim to be a serious student of this political philosophy, and I don’t know if I’m ready to declare my allegiance to it. Yet, there are two basic beliefs of anarchism that I find attractive and that keep me coming back to anarchist writing (both fictional and philosophical):

anarchism believes in the possibility of a better world than the one we live in
anarchism is very skeptical of any concentration of power—it insists that that better world must be collectively decided on rather than imposed on us

Ever since finishing the excellent tv show Pluribus back in December, I’ve been thinking about how both of those themes are implicitly present in the show. I doubt that this was intentional, and yet the show does an excellent job of not only representing those two themes but also of playing with the tension between them.

On one hand, the most attractive thing about the global hive mind in the show is that it has the “better world than the one we live in” more or less figured out. Granted, there are some horrifying undercurrents to that better world, but one could imagine a slightly different, less horrifying take on this hive mind—one that was less doctrinaire about not eating meat or picking fruit but that was still capable of achieving a kind of responsible, “everybody lives” degrowth (in full disclosure, that link is a Doctor Who reference, not a philosophical argument) that sounds pretty appealing from an anarchist point of view.

And yet! Even if the Pluribus hive mind were less horrifying in terms of what it was willing to sacrifice and what lines it’s willing to cross in terms of its food supply, the show would still do an excellent job of interrogating whether that better world was truly something that individual members of the hive mind had consented to or something that had been imposed upon them. In Kōhei Saitō’s book calling for degrowth, he is as frank about the dangers of “climate Maoism” as he is insistent that something needs to be done to respond to the climate crisis. Even if we were to set aside the most horrific elements of the Pluribus hive mind, I’m not convinced that the better world that they’ve achieved justifies the lack of autonomy and agency that it cost (I am somewhat surprised to find myself acknowledging that “Superman: Red Son” also plays with these themes, though I don’t think it does so as well as Pluribus does).

I appreciate that both of these themes are present in anarchism, even as their combination puts us in a bit of a pickle! Even that pickle, though, has an attractiveness on its own. Part of what draws me to anarchism is its insistence on the necessity of a better world, but perhaps the bigger part is the belief that we can achieve it without needing to resort to a hive mind of dubious consent (or even worse methods) for doing so. That last part is very hopeful, and that’s something I really need these days.

📚 bookblog: Autonomous (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:50:49 -0400

The beginning of this book felt like a bit of a slog, which felt tragic because I knew the book had all the elements I like in sci-fi! It eventually won me over, though, and I’m glad I stuck with it.

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly is using our identities without permission

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:34:14 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Grammarly is using our identities without permission https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-06-wild-escalation/

🔗 linkblog: Anthropic’s Statement To The ‘Department Of War’ Reads Like A Hostage Note Written In Business Casual

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:20:29 -0500

Good observations here. My respect for Anthropic was solely based on their seeming willingness to stand up for something, because otherwise, I have a lot of issues wirh them. This groveling makes that respect disappear.

🔗 linkblog: Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:50:48 -0500

Hate this so much. The company statements are weaselly and gross. This also demonstrates one of the worst things about this whole issue. I would never buy Meta smart glasses, but I know two people in my life who own them, and the privacy burden of this product isn’t borne by the owner of the device so much as by those around them. Barf, barf, barf.

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 2 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:51:46 -0500

On commence à voir pourquoi Andor s’est inspiré de cette série ! Au bout de douze épisodes, je commence à mieux connaître les personnages et à choisir des préférés parmi eux. En avant !

📚 bookblog: France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:47:43 -0500

As soon as I saw this in a bookstore, I knew I’d need to read it, and I was happy to find an audiobook through hoopla (even if ew, hoopla). The details of the trial itself weren’t always easy to follow, but it was fascinating to learn more about a historical figure I was only loosely familiar with—and the final part of the book tracing Pétain’s continued significance was especially interesting.

🔗 linkblog: Trump Wins $60 On Kalshi Betting He’ll Bomb Iran

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:40:43 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Trump Wins $60 On Kalshi Betting He’ll Bomb Iran https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-02-vicious-and/

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:19:55 -0500

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI’s ‘Red Lines’ Are Written In The NSA’s Dictionary—Where Words Mean What The NSA Wants Them To Mean https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-02-masnickwho-is/

🔗 linkblog: With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:00:43 -0500

🔗 linkblog: With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-02-good-observations/

🔗 linkblog: Anyone Else Have Those Weird Dreams Where Sobbing Future Generations Beg You To Change Course?

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:56:53 -0500

Pretty sure The Onion accelerated the web publication of this deliciously vicious skewering of Sam Altman after last weekend’s making nice with the Pentagon.

thinking about (French) resistance

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:01:38 -0500

The year or so that I spent living in France (alongside another year or so in French-speaking Switzerland) was under very particular circumstances—working with a group of mostly Americans doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based church—that led to some idiosyncratic experiences in the country. Perhaps one of the oddest was a small, shared, and superficial obsession with Marshal Ferdinand Foch of World War I fame. This grew out of the fact that the church we were working with rented an apartment on the boulevard Maréchal Foch in Grenoble; those of us who had been assigned to work in that area and live in that apartment had really fallen in love with Grenoble, which translated into constantly talking about Foch (the street) as a superior place to live. We didn’t know much about Foch (the person), but we knew he must have been pretty cool to have a street named after him, and we knew—with all the confidence of Iraq War-era Americans—that he must be better than Marshal Pétain, since Pétain had been a coward who surrendered to the Germans. (That Foch had been dead for nearly two decades at this point wasn’t really on our minds).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly making my way through Julian Jackson’s France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, which has in no way turned me into a Pétainist—but has challenged the naïve views that I held while living on bd Maréchal Foch. For one, it’s repeatedly mentioned Foch’s post-war reactionary politics, which I’d like to learn more about (but that I suspect wouldn’t do anything to dent his reputation among some of those I knew who were most Foch-obsessed). The book hasn’t been as gripping as I hoped when I started it, but it did inspire me to finally get around to watching Un village français, a 2009-2017 TV series about a fictional French village under German occupation but very close to the line separating the occupied zone from Pétain’s Vichy France.

The show is further reinforcing an idea that further began in my head while listening to the book on Pétain: If I had lived in occupied France, it’s hard to say whether I would have been fully engaged in resistance, if I would have consented to collaboration, or if I would have tried to find an uneasy balance between the two. I think I could have done better than Pétain did, but as I watch the fictional characters of the TV show decide whether to take German contracts at their sawmill, how to respond to German demands as mayor of the town, and otherwise wrestle with trying to make a life under German occupation, I honestly don’t know what lines I would draw and where I would be willing to compromise. Of course, this is more than just a hypothetical exercise—there’s lots happening in this country right now that I don’t approve of, and I know I’m unlikely to totally avoid total “collaboration” with the powers that be.

I’m reminded of when I first read the late John Lewis’s March trilogy of graphic novels recounting his experiences during the Civil Rights movement. It occurred to me while reading them that in hindsight, it was very easy for me to be on the side of the protestors—but that if I had been living at that time, there was a strong chance that I would have been the kind of white moderate that Martin Luther King excoriated in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Now, as I watch the characters of Un village français make choices that I feel uneasy about, I wonder how I am, too, conceding to the powers that be for pragmatic reasons instead of being the kind of pure, resistant hero that seems the most in the right. Of course, watching the show also makes me more sympathetic to those who made those choices, so I don’t think it’s helpful to berate myself for every small concession. I just hope that when things become really important, I have the courage to make the right choice.

🔗 linkblog: How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:16:09 -0500

🔗 linkblog: How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-03-02-an-important/

🔗 linkblog: Trump Says Iran War Could Last Weeks and Gives Competing Visions of New Regime

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 20:18:30 -0500

I nearly completed a degree in international relations (traded it for a political science teaching minor near the end), and what impressed me about that experience is how less sure I was about knowing what I was talking about the longer that I studied things. Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be bothered by that same concern and is happy to insist that things will go a certain way just because he says so. Gift link.

Polymarket as the ultimate unethical abstraction game

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:00:20 -0500

About nine months ago, I wrote about abstraction being on my mind and my thinking about how games abstract human life in potentially problematic ways. Abstraction is still on my mind, not least because I’m continuing to read Jacques Ellul, whom I referenced in that post (among so many others). In particular, I think a lot about Ellul’s argument that efficiency and efficacy are the ultimate value in the technical society, and that everything essentially gets ground down to that. I also think a lot about how “efficiency” so often comes down to “less money for others, more money for me,” turning complex policy and other decisions into a single, self-interested abstraction.

Since at least December, I’ve been thinking about Polymarket, a so-called “predictions market” in this context. At 404 Media, Matthew Gault wrote about an incident where:

A live map that tracks frontlines of the war in Ukraine was edited to show a fake Russian advance on the city of Myrnohrad on November 15. The edit coincided with the resolution of a bet on Polymarket, a site where users can bet on anything from basketball games to presidential election and ongoing conflicts.

Note that Gault describes what’s happening on Polymarket as “betting”—Polymarket itself rejects this terminology, insisting that it’s not about gambling but about using the pure power of the market to accurately predict the future. (I think that lends itself to other Ellulian critique, but that’s a post for another time). Whatever Polymarket’s claims are, Gault succinctly describes what’s so problematic with what’s going on here:

Practically every town and city along the frontlines of the war between Russia and Ukraine has a market and gamblers with an interest in geopolitics can get lost in the minutia about the war. To bet on the outcome of a war is grotesque. On Polymarket and other predictive gambling sites, millions of dollars trade hands based on the outcomes of battles that kill hundreds of people. It also creates an incentive for the manipulation of the war and data about the war. If someone involved can make extra cash by manipulating a map, they will. It’s 2025 and war is still a racket. Humans have just figured out new ways to profit from it.

Polymarket is back in the news with the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, and with suspicion that a small number of people made a lot of money using insider knowledge to make money off of the Iran strikes. So, it’s also back in my thoughts about the dangers of abstraction and the way that “efficiency” so often comes down to personal gain.

📺 tvblog: Un village français Saison 1 (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:41:18 -0500

Ça fait des années que j’ai envie de regarder cette série, et apprendre qu’elle a inspiré Andor ne fait que renforcer cette intention.

Je la trouve intéressante, et j’en apprends beaucoup. En fait, je dois avouer que c’est grâce à un livre que j’écoute au sujet du Maréchal Pétain que j’ai enfin décider de commencer la série. Je risque de ne pas finir le livre, mais pour la série, je crois que je vais continuer jusqu’à la fin.

🔗 linkblog: Meta won’t let morality get in the way of a product launch

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:04:13 -0500

Don’t think I’ve posted anything on this story yet because as the article points out, it’s hard to focus on this evil with so many other evils distracting us.

🔗 linkblog: Trump announces 'major combat operations' in Iran

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:41:50 -0500

It’s not even March, and it’s the second time this year I’ve woken up to Trump treating the military like his plaything to do something reckless while I was asleep.

This line made me laugh-to-keep-from-crying:

Trump said the U.S. had “sought repeatedly to make a deal” but Iran “rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions.”

Hey, what happened to the deal we already had with Iran?

🔗 linkblog: Anthropic Hits Back After US Military Labels It a ‘Supply Chain Risk’

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:31:15 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Anthropic Hits Back After US Military Labels It a ‘Supply Chain Risk’ https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-28-it-takes/

📚 bookblog: Where the Axe is Buried (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:08:21 -0500

Lots to love in this book, and I am tempted to give it full marks. It’s just clunky enough in its plot to dock it a few points, but the ideas in the book are powerful, and its message of hope is great. It also rewards the reader for knowing a bit about geopolitics, which I’m a sucker for.

🔗 linkblog: Anthropic refuses Pentagon’s new terms, standing firm on lethal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:59:42 -0500

Anthropic is weird, and their conscience is focused in some directions at the expense of others (Claude is trained on pirated copies of my research), but at least they have a conscience.

🔗 linkblog: Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making?

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:41:20 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-24-very-clever./

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:31:01 -0500

Look, I have complicated feelings about my Latter-day Saint mission experience, but I’d be silly not to take joy from learning that Ardis Parshall served in the same mission as me (and Lavina Fielding Anderson). Wish I’d read Keepapitchinin more regularly.

📚 bookblog: Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:19:22 -0500

I liked this, but I’m predisposed to like it. It makes a compelling argument that may not convince those who really need to be convinced but that will further open the minds of the already open minded. It made me angry in a good way, but I still don’t know what the right next steps are for me to help make a difference.

🔗 linkblog: The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:48:55 -0500

Love that I get to worry about deepfake nudes, scramble to change the way I assess, and now pay more for tech—if it’s even available.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:28:29 -0500

I’ve been sour on Ring for a long time, but literally everything their CEO is saying to Nilay Patel in these interview clips I’m listening to makes me even angrier at the company.

🔗 linkblog: Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn't Offer Much Proof

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:56:56 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Big Tech Says Generative AI Will Save the Planet. It Doesn't Offer Much Proof https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-18-important-helpful/

🔗 linkblog: Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:54:12 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Leaked Email Suggests Ring Plans to Expand ‘Search Party’ Surveillance Beyond Dogs https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-18-who-could/

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:26:19 -0500

“Lent starts tomorrow, I should go ahead and eat that cookie,” I said to myself, unwittingly reinventing Mardi Gras.

🔗 linkblog: Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:54:54 -0500

Like Dr. Strangelove, but dumber. Gift link.

📚 bookblog: The Terraformers (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:33:23 -0500

Loved this book as much as I did the first time around. It reads like Walkaway mixed with Braiding Sweetgrass, with a bit of The Disposessed for good measure. It’s bonkers but delightful, and I’m glad that I own a copy now.

on being glad BYU wasn't hiring when I was on the job market

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:49:45 -0500

I can’t remember why I had a version of this post bouncing around my head several months ago—maybe a Times and Seasons post? probably a message from an acquaintance at BYU who isn’t up to date on my religious situation?—but I never got around to writing it. With Clark Gilbert’s call to the Latter-day Saint Quorum of the Twelve Apostles today, it felt like a good moment to actually get those thoughts out of my head and into a text file.

My time as an undergraduate at BYU was mostly (maybe even overwhelmingly, with a few exceptions) good, but I didn’t bother applying there for my PhD program, and I can’t say that it was at the top of my wish list of places to work when I started applying for faculty positions near the end of that program. At the same time, though, I knew that as a practicing Latter-day Saint with academic aspirations, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I’d return there to start my career. Over the course of my graduate studies, I met a lot of the students and faculty in the program I could have studied in if I hadn’t gone off to MSU. If that program had been hiring when I was on the job market, I definitely would have applied. I had a strong research record coming out of grad school, and I had plenty of connections in that program—I don’t think it’s too self-serving to say that there’s a good chance I could have been offered a job there.

It was during my first year in my new job at UK that Mormonism started to crash down around me. This came as something of a surprise—I had been experiencing a slow and steady deconstruction over the course of several years, but I never imagined a life not as a Latter-day Saint who would fit the bill as BYU faculty. It’s not hyperbole to say that this was one of the most difficult and painful experiences that I’ve ever gone through. In January 2019, I wrestled with and ultimately turned down a calling as Young Men’s President of my ward. The night after I first received the call, I could hardly sleep, because I already knew that I wasn’t going to be able to continue on the path that I’d imagined my whole life following. I spent much of the next day on campus trying to nap at my desk but mostly just feeling lost and exhausted. So much of my life and identity was tied up in the church that I’d grown up in, and the idea that the rest of my life would not follow the rough outlines of the future I had so often imagined and expected was terrifying. I cried through a lot of church meetings and a couple of temple sessions, I repeatedly felt like a failure, and it felt like my whole life was being upended. It sucked.

It’s hard to imagine that experience being more difficult than it already was, but if I had been hired at BYU—where my employment would have been explicitly tied to my Latter-day Saint identity and practice—it’s clear that it would have been so, so much worse. Over the course of more than a year, while getting used to faculty life, I made the difficult-but-necessary decision to transition into another faith transition. It was a hard, painful decision, but there were two things I had learned during my life as a Latter-day Saint that convinced me that it was the right thing to do: to put the well-being of my family first, and to study and pray about difficult decisions. I’m not trying to be clever when I say that distancing myself from my Latter-day Saint upbringing is one of the most Mormon things I’ve ever done—I brought all of my Mormonism into that decision, even if it brought me elsewhere.

No matter how true to my faith that decision felt to me, it couldn’t have flown at a BYU where higher powers were becoming more and more insistent that to be a good faculty member at BYU was to toe the line on Latter-day Saint teachings and not show any deviation. It’s not impossible to imagine an alternate reality where 1) I did get hired at BYU and 2) the institution would be cool keeping me on even after my joining Community of Christ. In that alternate reality, I think I’d still be respectful of the faith tradition of the institution I was working for. I could even teach a class on the Book of Mormon and give it a different spin. Even setting aside that BYU wasn’t hiring when I was looking for a job, though, that’s clearly not the BYU that exists.

I have a certain amount of respect for BYU wanting its faculty to embody its mission—both in the abstract and as someone whose Mormonism still means a lot to him. At the same time, though, I think back to the incredible difficulty of my first couple of years on the UK faculty as I was trying to get used to my new job and also navigate a painful religious transition at the same time. If those had been the same thing instead of two different things, it would have been so much harder. Could I have been honest with my bishop or my co-workers? What charades would I have had to play so that I didn’t put my job in jeopardy? How much time would I have had to spend looking for other jobs simply because my religious views were changing?

Whatever respect I can muster up for BYU’s unique identity and mission, whatever real respect I have for the institution and so many of the faculty there, whatever lasting respect I have for what the institution gave me during my time there, I cannot find any respect for a set of policies about faculty conduct and loyalty that would have made one of the most difficult experiences in my life even more miserable. I wonder how many faculty there are now stuck in the hellish position that I could have been stuck in if a few things had been different the year that I was on the job market. I still have a lot of good feelings about BYU, but I am so, SO glad that they were not hiring when I was on the job market.

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:07:22 -0500

You know, I was just thinking of Clark Gilbert earlier today (or maybe yesterday morning?). It was while I was standing “the wrong way” in the elevator, something I do—and have perfectly good reason to do—every day I bike into work.

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI Introduces Premium Video Generator For White House Advisors Manipulating Trump

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:21:35 -0500

🔗 linkblog: OpenAI Introduces Premium Video Generator For White House Advisors Manipulating Trump https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-12-excellent-jokes/

🔗 linkblog: With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:21:28 -0500

Ring sucks and is creepy. Here’s the killer paragraph from this story;

Unlike, say, data analytics giant Palantir or some other high-profile surveillance companies, Ring is a surveillance network that homeowners have by and large deployed themselves, powered by fear mongering against our neighbors and unfettered consumerism.

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:23:56 -0500

My brain is fuzzy enough this morning that I read this as a Bible verse: The book of Linux, chapter 6, verse 19. Now wondering what that would read and whether I’d add it to my personal canon (which already includes Doctorow’s pro-open-source “Walkaway”).

a sermon in which I implicitly call Tim Cook a coward

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:07:58 -0500

It was last November that I signed up to preach on Isaiah 58:1-12 (“Bring an End to Oppression”) on February 8th, and it was depressing how much the universe gave me to work with over the course of the first few weeks of 2026. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to address the idea of the prophetic critique in Isaiah and invite those of us in the service to emulate that critique in our own day. What I had trouble figuring out—almost right up to the end—was what I wanted to use as examples.

I knew that I needed to reference contemporary events, but I struggled with which examples to use and how explicit to make them. I’m not proud of that last part—I think a more courageous sermon would have mentioned Alex Pretti (and so many others) by name instead of vaguely alluding to just one of them. Calling out Tim Cook by name would have been even easier to do, but I took the easy way out and will have to repent of that in future sermons.

I’m in the funny situation of not knowing the congregation where I was preaching as well as I’d like (long story), so I wasn’t even sure how well this “low courage” version of the sermon would go over, between explicitly breaking the news on Deutero-Isaiah and implicitly referencing ICE killing a man. Most folks are open-minded and are concerned about the direction the country is heading in, but I know that there are different perspectives within the group, and I was thinking a lot about that as I wrote things. It seems to have gone fine, and I know that some people liked it, but once again, I’m not sure that I’m focusing on the right things there. I think I’ll be wondering for a long time how to better follow the example of the prophetic critique myself.

Anyway, here’s the text of the sermon:

sermon text

Our passage today is from the book of Isaiah, chapter 58. When I was growing up, I knew two things about Isaiah: 1) the person Isaiah was a prophet from ancient times, and 2) the book of Isaiah was, well, kind of boring.

I grew up in a family and a church that always read out of the King James Bible. Everything in the Bible is a little harder to understand in that old timey King James language, but Isaiah felt especially hard to understand. It was only in the past 7 or 8 years that I’ve started reading other translations of the Bible, and it turns out that it’s a bit easier to understand Isaiah when it’s written in more modern language.

In fact, once you can really understand what the book is saying, it goes from boring to actually pretty interesting. That’s what I think anyway, but let’s put this to the test and see if you all agree. Let’s start at the very beginning of the book of Isaiah: Chapter 1, around verses 13 and 14. I say “around” because I’m going to read this from The Message, which is more of a paraphrase of the Bible than a translation of the Bible. It’s not the most reliable resource if we want to get into the exact words of a passage, but if we want to see how Isaiah can wake us up instead of put us to sleep, it will do the job nicely. Here we go:

“Quit your worship charades.
I can’t stand your trivial religious games:
Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings—
meetings, meetings, meetings—I can’t stand one more!
Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them!
You’ve worn me out!
I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion"

Wow. Did that wake us up? I’m awake, and I’ve got some questions. If Isaiah is God’s prophet, why does it sound like he’s telling people to stop going to church? Is that what a prophet does?

Now, in Community of Christ, we call the leader of our denomination a “prophet-president,” so we’re used to thinking about a prophet as the leader of a church. It would be rather odd for a leader of a church to tell people to stop attending that church, but prophets in the Hebrew Bible, what we usually call the Old Testament, often play a different role. They aren’t the leader of their religious community. It’s probably the king and some high-ranking priests who are the religious leaders, and as you can tell by the king being involved, the religious community and the national community were pretty tightly connected.

Now, the king and the priests might listen to what the prophet has to say, but they might not always like it. The prophet’s role is to stand outside of the religious and national leadership of the people… and to call them out if those leaders are failing to follow God. So, Isaiah isn’t necessarily saying “stop going to church.” What he’s really saying is “you are doing church wrong.”

In a community where national community and religious community are pretty tightly connected, it can be tempting to say that as long as you’re flying the right flag, God is happy with you. In a religious community that believes it is closer to God than other communities, it can be tempting to say that as long as you’re going to the right church, God is happy with you.

Isaiah’s response to that is “no.” It’s not enough to fly the right flag (if there is such a thing as “the right flag”), it’s not enough to attend the right church (if there is such a thing as “the right church”), God cares about more than that. So what else does God care about?

We can find an answer to that in Isaiah 1, but I’m not supposed to be preaching on Isaiah 1 today! I’m supposed to be preaching on Isaiah 58, so we really ought to turn our attention there.

Before we do, though, let’s talk a bit more Isaiah: the book and the person. Isaiah is a long book, and over the past 250 years or so, scholars of the Bible have noticed that it’s probably only the first 39 chapters that were written by the original prophet Isaiah. The rest of the book, including chapter 58, is most likely written by people hundreds of years later, who really appreciated the original Isaiah and wanted to kind of write a sequel—one that hit all the same notes, but was a bit more relevant for their time.

It can be awkward when we learn that parts of the Bible were probably not written by the authors that are traditionally associated with them. This happens with some of Paul’s letters, for example, and the Book of Daniel was probably written in a very different time and place than the story that is told in that book. We can respond to that awkwardness in different ways, but the reason I bring this up at all today is because I think there’s something special about Isaiah 58 not being written by the original Isaiah.

If people hundreds of years after the original Isaiah liked what they saw in Isaiah 1 and decided that they would follow that example to critique the religious and national leaders of their time, that gives us permission—right there in the Bible—to also follow Isaiah’s example, to consider how in our day, we and the people in our community might be settling for flying the flag and going to church, and ignoring things that really matter to God. Let’s turn to Isaiah 58 and see what those people in that time felt really mattered—I’ll bet that we find something relevant to us today.

Here, I’ll turn back to the NRSV instead of The Message. As I read, we’ll first hear the people speaking to God. They are fasting, going without food and water, in the hope of attracting God’s attention, but it doesn’t seem to be working. In the first part of verse 3, they complain:

“Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”

In the rest of verse 3 and through verse 4, God responds:

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
You fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.

“You serve your own interest on your fast day and oppress all your workers.” That, God says, is why those fasts do not count for anything.

Like most people these days, I have a little black rectangle that I keep in my pocket and that goes with me almost everywhere. It’s a really useful device. I can make calls on it, I can send messages with it, and I can access nearly all of the world’s information with it. This little black rectangle was made in a faraway country and then shipped here for people like me to buy it. It’s made in another country because you can get away with paying workers in that other country a lot less than you’d have to pay workers in the United States.

Those workers might move from rural areas, where farmers make even less money, to new industrial zones, where they can make a bit more. To make that extra money, they might sign up at factories on large campuses that have their own dormitories. They might sleep eight to a room in those dormitories, with a bed and a curtain making up all of their private space (and they might have to supply their own curtain). Their roommates might work in different areas of the factory, making it hard to chat about work, or come from different regions with different dialects, making it hard to chat at all.

At any rate, there might not be much time for chatting at all. There might be 12 hour shifts, and unpaid work meetings before every shift. There might be mandatory overtime. There might only be one day off every other week. You can make little black rectangles pretty cheap under those conditions, but the company that makes this kind of little black rectangles still charges a fair amount of money, and pockets a lot of that cost for itself. The company that makes this kind of little black rectangles is one of the richest companies in the world.

Recently, many of the employees at this company—and these were well-paid employees here in the U.S., not the employees in faraway countries who are paid poorly to do the actual work of putting black rectangles together—talked to their bosses about using their status as one of the richest companies in the world to stand up for something.

Law enforcement officers had recently shot a man ten times—six times while he was already wounded and motionless on the floor—despite the fact that he had done nothing illegal and nothing threatening. This event had sparked debates that might have been familiar to Isaiah. There were those who said that the event may be unfortunate, but because the shooting had taken place in the name of a particular flag, the officers couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. These employees of this wealthy company felt differently. They felt that flying the right flag (if there is such a thing as “the right flag”) wasn’t enough. More is expected of us, and they wanted their company to say so.

The top leaders of their company made some sympathetic noises but ultimately didn’t do much. Those top leaders knew that taking this kind of stand could anger people who have the power to make it much more expensive to have little black rectangles manufactured in faraway countries. It was more valuable to these leaders to continue getting rich thanks to their access to poor workers than it was to express any kind of moral concern. Those leaders knew that they were one of the richest companies in the world because they relied on some of the poorest workers in the world.

What about me, then, the person carrying around this black rectangle in my pocket? Am I a sinner for using this device that comes at the price of the sins described in Isaiah 58? I don’t know? I don’t think so? I hope not? I think the world is more complicated than that, and I think that God appreciates that. But as leave church today, I will remember that attending church is not enough—that it is good, but that God expects more of us, and that God expects me to do my part.

Let us finish with with Isaiah 58:6-9, which tells us what God wants us all to be working toward:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:09:26 -0500

A mail truck was abandoned at the bottom of our cul-de-sac after an ice-related accident a couple of hours ago, blocking traffic in and out. The tow truck sent to move it got stuck in the ice, and now a second truck is coming for it. If I were better at social media, this would be a viral thread.

🔗 linkblog: Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something Real Bad

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:45:56 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Ron Wyden Only Talks Like This When The Spies Do Something *Real* Bad https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-05-i-appreciate/

🔗 linkblog: ‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:00:17 -0500

🔗 linkblog: ‘In the end, you feel blank’: India’s female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-05-horrifying-stories/

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:19:40 -0500

I appreciate that The Verge is reporting on the government tear gassing kids, I appreciate the transparency of The Verge’s reporters as they do so, and I appreciate the nerdy details of this specific disclosure.

🔗 linkblog: Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 09:14:46 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Tim Cook is destroying his own legacy https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-02-01-tim-cook/

🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT isn’t the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk’s Grokipedia

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:39:53 -0500

🔗 linkblog: ChatGPT isn’t the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk’s Grokipedia https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-31-wish-i/

🔗 linkblog: ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 18:00:02 -0500

🔗 linkblog: ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-30-facial-recognition/

🔗 linkblog: Musk to Epstein: ‘What Day/Night Will Be the Wildest Party on Your Island?’

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:57:32 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Musk to Epstein: ‘What Day/Night Will Be the Wildest Party on Your Island?’ https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-30-unsurprising-i/

🔗 linkblog: After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:23:33 -0500

🔗 linkblog: After Minneapolis, Tech CEOs Are Struggling to Stay Silent https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-30-ceos-silence/

🔗 linkblog: How do I talk to my kids about Minneapolis?

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:47:17 -0500

🔗 linkblog: How do I talk to my kids about Minneapolis? https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-30-heartbreaking-read/

📚 bookblog: Présence au monde moderne (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:50:12 -0500

J’avais déjà lu la traduction anglaise en 2025, mais depuis que j’ai reçu un exemplaire du livre original, j’éprouvais le désir de le relire. Vers la fin, je trouve que je ne comprend pas tout à fait ce qu’Ellul essaie de dire (c’est peut-être une question de compétence linguistique, mais je crois avoir éprouvé le même sentiment en lisant en traduction aussi), mais il y a des idées bien fortes dans ce livre aussi. En fait, il est fort intéressant de relire ce livre après avoir lu quelques-uns de ses autres livres pour voir combien de ses idées sont déjà présentes en 1948.

🔗 linkblog: Apple says Patreon creators must switch to subscription billing by November

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 10:14:39 -0500

So, Apple will kick Patreon off the app store for not forking over 30% of its revenue, but it won’t do anything about Grok? Sounds about right.

🔗 linkblog: The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Gregory Bovino

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:43:15 -0500

🔗 linkblog: The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Gregory Bovino https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-27-the-onion/

🔗 linkblog: Police Told to Be ‘as Vague as Permissible’ About Why They Use Flock

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:47:57 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Police Told to Be ‘as Vague as Permissible’ About Why They Use Flock https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-27-surveillance-sucks./

🔗 linkblog: Trump Administration Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:21:43 -0500

Strategic ambiguity is as much an indicator of far right influences as any of these references. Gift link.

sermon on dreaming of a better world

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:04:43 -0500

Yesterday, I got another opportunity to preach for the Beyond the Walls online Community of Christ congregation based in Toronto, Ontario. I enjoy contributing to their services when I can, and I was glad that the winter storm here in Kentucky (and so many other places) spared our power and internet so that I could show up as planned. I got to work Jacques Ellul into my sermon (perhaps unsurprising, given how often I reference him these days), though I did oversimplify his thinking a bit and would appreciate the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into what he had to say at some point.

In short, Ellul’s encouragement for Christians to try to bring about a better world isn’t a naïvely optimistic take—he makes it clear that he doesn’t think that human beings are capable of bringing about that better world on their own and that it would be hubris for Christians to believe that they can do so without divine intervention. I appreciate that point, and I think there’s something to be done with it, but also: 1) I didn’t have the time/space to get into the details, and 2) as a non-theist, my belief in the reality of divine intervention is… complicated, and I especially didn’t have the time/space to get into that. Again, I think Ellul can be read through a non-theist lens, so I’m happy to keep using him as a reference point, but it got too gnarly to work out in a Sunday morning sermon. In fact, one of my main goals in this sermon (like the last one I wrote on a similar subject) was to figure out how to approach the idea of a Second Coming from a non-literal, non-theist perspective. I don’t know how well I succeeded, but it was good practice for myself at least.

Here’s the recording of the service, and I’ll place the sermon text below the YouTube embed:

sermon text

Between May 2008 and May 2009, I had the wonderful opportunity of living in French-speaking Switzerland, including the towns of Chambésy (near Geneva), Renens (near Lausanne), and Sion (which is surrounded by the Swiss Alps). I have lived in several places, and I have loved many of them, but few have captured my heart in the way that Switzerland did.

In fact, during my first year of doctoral studies, one of my classmates caught me reading something in French on my computer instead of paying attention to our statistics lecture. I admitted that I was reading about Swiss universities. I still had at least four years left in my training to become a professor, but I was already trying to figure out what my chances were of getting hired in Switzerland.

I now live in Lexington, Kentucky where I work at the University of Kentucky, so obviously, those chances were not very high. Of course, I wasn’t disappointed to move to Lexington. My family lives nearby, and my spouse’s family moved nearby shortly after we arrived. I love my local church community, and at least on most days, my job is good and fulfilling. On a long day, though, you still might find me watching YouTube videos filmed from the cabin of a train making its way through the beautiful Swiss countryside.

It’s silly, but in my mind, Switzerland represents the dream of a better world than the one I live in: one where I could travel by train instead of by car, one with gorgeous scenery, and one where I would have easy access to high-quality chocolate. This is silly because I know that Switzerland isn’t perfect. If I ever did get to live there again, the trains, the mountains, and even the chocolate would eventually lose some of their magic, and I would find myself once again dreaming for a better world than that one.

Dreaming of a better world is part of the human experience—and it has also been part of the Christian tradition since the very beginning. Many of Jesus’s disciples saw in him the promise of a better world—one even better than Swiss chocolate—and they were shocked when he was killed before that world could arrive. Yet, even faced with tragedy, many of those disciples reaffirmed their faith in a better world through Jesus. If his ministry had been suddenly interrupted by crucifixion, surely a resurrected Christ would return to bring the end times and establish a better world.

In fact, many early Christians, including the Apostle Paul, never met Jesus during his ministry. In some sense, their conversion was based less on what he had previously taught and more on the better world that they hoped he would bring in the future. We’re used to thinking of the four gospels as the first Christian documents because they tell a story that happened earlier, but it’s probably 1 Thessalonians that’s the earliest surviving Christian text. Isn’t it interesting that it has more to say about Jesus’s Second Coming than it does about Jesus’s teachings? In chapter 4, verses 16-18, just before today’s passage, you can feel Paul’s excitement about the better world that awaits him:

“For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”

Last year, my chance finally arrived. A Swiss university was looking to hire a professor who could teach and do research about online technologies. I teach and do research about online technologies! They needed someone who could speak English and French. I speak English and French! I poured my heart into that job application. I could imagine what was waiting for me and my family in Switzerland: trains, mountains, chocolate, and more besides. I looked up apartments where we might live, imagined what bus I might take to work, and considered which grocery stores we might shop at. I probably should have spent that time working on the job application, but I couldn’t help imagining the better world that I hoped would finally arrive—especially because the world that I was living in did not seem great. Then, as now, there were worrying political developments in the United States, and I wanted to escape to the better world I had been imagining for so long.

I am speaking to you today from Lexington, Kentucky, where I still work at the University of Kentucky, so obviously, things didn’t work out the way that I hoped for last year. I’m not that disappointed to still be in Lexington: I love my nearby family, I love my church community, and on most days, I love my job. But now, as then, there are worrying political developments in the United States, and I still find myself wishing that a better world would finally come.

The Second Coming of Jesus Christ is one of the oldest beliefs that Christianity adopted, and in many ways, it’s also one of the hardest beliefs for a Christian today to accept. Christians have been waiting for Jesus to come back for nearly 2,000 years, and so many generations of Christians have been sure that it was just around the corner, that Jesus was about to replace the disappointing world that they lived in with something much better.

Just as Paul was one of the first Christians to take up the idea of a Second Coming, he was one of the first to be convinced that it was about to happen—and one of the first to be disappointed that it did not. Look at the urgent and confident language in today’s passage: “the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (v. 2), “let us keep awake and be sober” (p. 6), “[God] will do this” (p. 23). We’re used to thinking of the four gospels, with their speculations about the end times, as the first Christian documents because they tell a story that happened earlier, but by the time they were written, Paul’s hope that the end times would arrive during his life had already been dashed.

One of the first times that I attended a Beyond the Walls service, on Easter 2020, I heard an important reminder from John that this very faith movement was also born in the hopes that the Second Coming was about to happen and that a better world was on the horizon. Many of our spiritual ancestors, living in the 19th century, were as convinced as Paul had been that a better world was just about to emerge, likely in their lifetimes. We are quickly approaching the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of this faith movement, and those hopes have been dashed just as thoroughly as Paul’s had centuries earlier.

If continuing to wait for a better world to emerge is a key part of Christianity, so is continuing to be disappointed that it has not yet happened.

It’s silly to compare my brief, shallow disappointment at not getting that job in Switzerland with our long-standing, deep disappointment that we still live in a world marked by racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, poverty, illness, and so much else. I must admit, though, that in the couple of days I spent moping after getting the bad news, I did think about some similarities between the two.

More specifically, I thought about some of the passages of a book that I had read earlier that year. Presence in the Modern World was first written in 1948 by the French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul and was the result of Ellul’s trying to figure out what it meant to be Christian at that time, as his country was emerging from the Second World War and beginning to enter a time of economic and technological change.

On the very first page of the book, Ellul writes:

Christians are in the world and… there they should remain. Christians are not meant to be separate or to set themselves apart. Such separation is for God to effect at the end of time, when he will gather the wheat and discard the chaff; it is never for human beings to decide their own election.

Let me be clear on the limits of the analogy that I have been using up to this point. It was helpful for me in my disappointment to think about my duties as a Christian living in a country that I was worried about instead of dreaming about escaping it for a land of trains, mountains, and chocolate. However, there are people—in my country and others—who have far more reason to worry than I do and who are entirely justified in leaving the dangerous place they live for another, safer one.

Ellul was not arguing that Christians should not separate themselves from dangerous places or situations; Ellul was reminding us that even the best this world has to offer will always fall short of the better world that Paul dreamed of and that every Christian since has hoped for. We will always feel that disappointment that Paul felt, and that every Christian since has experienced.

And yet, Ellul suggests, Christians should not try to escape that disappointment but rather to face it head on. The second chapter of Ellul’s book is called “Revolutionary Christianity,” and he describes two characteristics of Christianity that have the potential to bring about what he calls “a profound change, a radical transformation.”

First, “Christians belong to two cities.” Even if we do not separate ourselves from this world, we never really belong to it. We cannot neglect our responsibilities in this world, but they cannot be our highest priority. We must accept that we live in a disappointing world, but we can never accept its disappointments.

Second, and most relevant to our passage today, “Christians are essentially people who live in expectation.” Not only are we constantly looking forward to a better world, but it is our responsibility to try to make it happen. As Ellul explains:

“All Christians having received the Holy Spirit are now prophets of Christ’s return, and by this alone they have a revolutionary mission…. For prophets do not merely announce to some extent an event that will happen at some point. Prophets are those who live out the event now and who make it real and present to the world around them.”

Paul’s teachings in today’s passage don’t do much for me when I think about them in terms of just waiting and hoping for a better world to come. I have an easier time making sense of it when I think of things like Ellul does—that it is our Christian duty to live out that better world now and to make it present for those around us.

Of course, this is more easily said than done. When Paul calls his audience “children of the light,” he is expressing confidence that they would recognize the coming of Christ when others did not. It is interesting, though, that he does not take the time to teach them how to recognize the emergence of that better world.

Even if Jacques Ellul invites us to think differently about how that better world might emerge, he is also short on details. In fact, Ellul insists that there is no easy manual for Christian action—as far as he is concerned, being Christian means continually struggling to decide what is right—what will bring about that better world—in each situation that we are in.

Perhaps, then, being “children of the light” today is less about recognizing specific signs of that better world than it is about believing that such a better world is possible. It might seem silly to suggest that some people don’t believe that—after all, don’t we all dream of a better world? That’s true, but sometimes we are so used to our disappointing world the way that it is that we are incapable of seeing it in any other way.

You may be familiar with “The Blue Marble,” a famous 1972 photograph of Earth taken by astronauts on Apollo 17. What you might not know is that the original picture is taken with the South Pole near the top of the photograph—upside-down from how we are used to it. Of course, in space—and, honestly, even on earth—there’s no reason that we can’t think of south as up and north as down, but we are so uncomfortable with the idea of the world being upside-down that everyone adjusts the photograph so that it fits with the vision that we have of the world.

Let us have the courage to see the world upside-down. Let us have the conviction to turn the world upside-down. Let us borrow Paul’s hope and Jacques Ellul’s commitment, and let us work to bring about the better world that we have all dreamed of.

🔗 linkblog: An American Murder

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:45:03 -0500

🔗 linkblog: An American Murder https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-26-good-rage/

🔗 linkblog: Deepfake ‘Nudify’ Technology Is Getting Darker—and More Dangerous

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:43:16 -0500

Look, I’m open to the argument that there are legitimate, good uses of generative AI, but I think anyone making that argument needs to address stuff like this.

🔗 linkblog: A Mormon drag queen in the Queen City

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:17:08 -0500

🔗 linkblog: A Mormon drag queen in the Queen City https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-26-beautiful-interview/

🔗 linkblog: We mourn state killings and demand justice, not terror | Friends Committee On National Legislation

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 18:10:50 -0500

🔗 linkblog: We mourn state killings and demand justice, not terror | Friends Committee On National Legislation https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-25-fcnl-is/

🔗 linkblog: Videos Show Moments in Which Agents Killed a Man in Minneapolis

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:25:37 -0500

Not particularly interested in watching the video footage myself (don’t need those nightmares), so I’m glad for journalists providing descriptions of the footage and how it stands in tension with DHS accounts. Abolish ICE. Gift link.

🔗 linkblog: Detained by ICE, two women became first responders during agent’s seizure

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:11:48 -0500

What a story:

What stayed with Amundson most, she said, was not the adrenaline of the moment but the realization that came while she was holding the agent’s head in her hands and keeping his airway open.

“I was hit so hard with the fact that this man would not do this for me,” she said.

🔗 linkblog: White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says 'the memes will continue'

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:11:44 -0500

🔗 linkblog: White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says 'the memes will continue' https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-23-big-ellulian/

🔗 linkblog: ICE detains 5-year old Minnesota boy; school leader says agents used him as ‘bait’

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:49:06 -0500

There are lots of stories circulating on social media that I try wait to read a full article on before I get angry about them. Here’s the article, and it’s as bad (worse?) as every post I’ve seen about it on Bluesky.

The Columbia Heights Public School district says federal agents have detained four of its students in four separate incidents over the last two weeks. One child is a 5-year old boy who attends a district elementary school and was used as “bait” to draw family members out of their home.

What callousness. What cruelty.

🔗 linkblog: Elon Musk’s Grok A.I. Chatbot Made Millions of Sexualized Images, New Estimates Show

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:53:32 -0500

Holy crap, these numbers. This passage really stood out:

“This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which conducts research on online hate and disinformation. “There have been nudifying tools, but they have never had the distribution, ease of use or the integration into a large platform that Elon Musk did with Grok.”

🔗 linkblog: Trump Appears to Confuse Iceland and Greenland

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:38:23 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Trump Appears to Confuse Iceland and Greenland https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-21-i-dont/

🔗 linkblog: Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there's a plugin to avoid them.

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:43:33 -0500

A few thoughts:

First, it is almost comically mean to use the results of a project collecting AI tells to get LLMs to not sound like that. Like, of all the digital labor exploitations of AI, this might be the pettiest.

Second, AI detection is hard, and for all my concerns with AI, I think this is another good example of why policing its use can do more harm than good. I don’t blame the Wikipedia community for doing this project, but I would never recommend this approach in a classroom.

🔗 linkblog: ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:00:03 -0500

Another story that speaks to the power of Ellul’s “image vs. word” distinction. It must be trustworthy because it comes from a machine…

🔗 linkblog: Everyone Knows Our Mad King’s Greenland Obsession Is Insane. Why Won’t Congress Stop It?

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:34:20 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Everyone Knows Our Mad King’s Greenland Obsession Is Insane. Why Won’t Congress Stop It? https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-20-the-whole/

🔗 linkblog: Trump says he's pursuing Greenland after perceived Nobel Peace Prize snub

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:01:05 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Trump says he's pursuing Greenland after perceived Nobel Peace Prize snub https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-19-he-is/

🔗 linkblog: Remembering Beyond Vietnam on MLK Day

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 09:04:02 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Remembering Beyond Vietnam on MLK Day https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-19-good-read/

🔗 linkblog: Under Musk, the Grok disaster was inevitable

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:09:24 -0500

🔗 linkblog: Under Musk, the Grok disaster was inevitable https://spencergreenhalgh.com/communities/2026-01-18-good-overview/