Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
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🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow'
- kudos:Some interesting reflections (and reasons to up one’s baseline existential terror) in here. link to “Pluralistic: Battery rationality (06 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Gender Is Determined by God, Biology, and the Highest Governing Body of Some Random Sport'
- kudos:Listen, The Onion is great, but sometimes McSweeney’s is where it’s at. link to “Gender Is Determined by God, Biology, and the Highest Governing Body of Some Random Sport”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Six hours under martial law in Seoul'
- kudos:I’ll admit that I haven’t read much on all of this, but I can’t imagine any coverage better than this article. link to “Six hours under martial law in Seoul”
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This is a friendly reminder that DRM sucks and that corporations have perverted the digital technologies that should make things easier for libraries and their patrons into ways to squeeze more money out of us while giving us less control.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why'
- kudos:Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product. link to “Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump Doubles Down on Defiance After the Collapse of the Matt Gaetz Selection'
- kudos:Here’s hoping the Senate shows some spine. Gift link. link to “Trump Doubles Down on Defiance After the Collapse of the Matt Gaetz Selection”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff
- kudos:Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways. I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this.
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Some Sundays, you cancel your church plans so you can Zoom into a relative and her girlfriend’s spur of the moment “let’s at least get legally married now in case things get bad before our September wedding” service.
communion, tarot, and Lavina Fielding Anderson: some thoughts on sacraments
- kudos:My kid is being raised by a mother who is entirely done with anything that smacks of religion and a father who is very non-literal and not very exclusivist, so it’s unsurprising that she tends to pick and choose when she wants to do church stuff with me. If I’m driving over to Louisville to attend church in person, she’ll usually come with me. If I’m attending church via Zoom because Louisville is over an hour away, she tends to read or play in her room instead.
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I (someone who doesn’t really believe in a literal resurrection) have been scheduled to preach in February on Paul’s “if there’s no resurrection, this is all in vain” in 1 Cor. 15. Gonna have to think about this one.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Spill, by Cory Doctorow
- kudos:I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price. '
- kudos:Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions. link to “The Twitter Board made a historic mistake and the World will pay the price. “
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'The Redbox Removal Team'
- kudos:What a wild story. The unceremonious end of Redbox is a reminder of how much stuff we make and buy, and how, when companies fail to plan for end-of-life or go out of business, they often leave a bunch of devices that suddenly become e-waste behind. link to “The Redbox Removal Team”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web'
- kudos:Lots of interesting reflections here. link to “Bluesky, AI, and the battle for consent on the open web”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X's Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts'
- kudos:This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web. link to “X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Looking for the Answer to the Question, Do I Really Own the Digital Media I Paid For?'
- kudos:This is a question that everyone should ask—and then be infuriated by the answer. link to “Looking for the Answer to the Question, “Do I Really Own the Digital Media I Paid For?””
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge'
- kudos:Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up. link to “Inside Bluesky’s big growth surge”
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Whenever I put this shirt on for a November jog, I wonder what the Venn diagram is between those who believe gender is biological and immutable and those who believe we have to show one turkey jogger with lipstick, eyelashes, and a pearl necklace so that we know she’s a woman.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, by Jonathan Alter
- kudos:I am too young (and was for too long too disconnected from politics) to know much about Jimmy Carter except for a vague understanding of the common wisdom that he had been a poor president and of the progressive reclaiming of him in recent years. I’ve had my eye on this biography for a while: I nearly bought it at full price from my local bookstore, but when a used copy was on sale at the library for $3, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.
proposing legislation on Creative Commons for the 2025 Community of Christ World Conference
- kudos:Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.
John Hamer on Star Trek and the afterlife
- kudos:Leandro Palacios from the Beyond the Walls ministry out of the Toronto Community of Christ congregation gave me a heads up yesterday that they would be using a clip from the most recent sermon I gave for them as part of today’s service. I forgot about this until well after the service, but I visited the recording later in the afternoon to see what clip they’d used and to see what else I could catch from the service.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'I’m a Good, Normal Family Man Who Just Wants to Inspect Your Genitals Before You Pee'
- kudos:McSweeny’s strikes again. link to “I’m a Good, Normal Family Man Who Just Wants to Inspect Your Genitals Before You Pee”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Don't call it a Substack. - Anil Dash'
- kudos:Some strong arguments from Dash here. link to “Don’t call it a Substack. - Anil Dash”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ for The Future, by Naomi Alderman
- kudos:This book has everything: critiques of tech billionaires, a crazy heist, and some fantastic riffing on Abraham and Lot that could make it into a sermon one day. I regret not reading it earlier and look forward to my next read of it!
personal and theological reflections after a minor bike wreck
- kudos:After six years and over 6,000 miles1 of bike commuting without any real incident2, I took a corner too fast this morning, hydroplaned, and slid a few feet on the road before picking myself up to get back to the sidewalk and out of the way of the cars whose path I was blocking. It wasn’t a huge wreck: I didn’t hit my head, my bike seems to be fine3, and three scrapes (one bigger than others) and some torn-up clothes are the worst of the damage.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Trump’s Historically Small Victory'
- kudos:I’ve seen this argument floating out there, but this is the first time I looked at some of the numbers. link to “Trump’s Historically Small Victory”
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'In France, a family reckons with World War II Allies' legacy of rape and murder'
- kudos:If there were such a thing as a good army fighting a good war, it would be the Allies in World War II. It’s wildly irresponsible to overlook the awful things done by that army in that war for the sake of holding both up as “good,” though. link to “In France, a family reckons with World War II Allies’ legacy of rape and murder”
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I expected Naomi Alderman’s The Future to be good, but I didn’t expect an interesting, responsible reading of the destruction of Sodom to be a throughline of the story.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Refuge In Kakistocracy'
- kudos:Interested by Ken’s take here, even if it doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about gestures at everything. Also, this line cracked me up: Pete Hegseth’s chief qualification to be Secretary of Defense is that Trump saw him on the teevee a lot and his tattoos are not, technically, Nazi symbols. link to “Refuge In Kakistocracy”
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus for President, by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw
- kudos:I’ve seen a newer edition of this book on the shelves of my local indie bookstore and been curious about it for a while. So, I decided to look it up when searching for a new hoopla audiobook. It’s a breathtakingly radical book in its aspirations, and I loved that. It captures the kind of nonviolent radicalism that I want to explore more in this period of personal faith and world politics.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, by Colin Ward
- kudos:I have Ward’s Anarchism in Action waiting for me on my nightstand while I work through a Jimmy Carter biography, so I thought I’d listen to this on hoopla in the meantime (since I regularly do an ebook, an audiobook, and a print book in parallel). It’s an interesting and helpful overview of a political philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Lots more to be read, but this gives some context.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People, by Terry Stokes
- kudos:I enjoyed listening to this book: Stokes writes well and reads his own writing well, too. It’s funny and (mostly) accessible, and it has a lot of ideas I can get behind. I also have a list of nitpicks, though. Stokes wants to have it both ways with critical Biblical scholarship, accepting (for example) that the Garden of Eden story is allegorical rather than literal but then also running with traditional interpretations (e.
🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'And Yet It Moves'
- kudos:I don’t agree with Ken on everything, but I always appreciate his perspective. I could quibble about some of his finer points here, but I think this is worth a read. link to “And Yet It Moves”
books I want to reread after this particular Election Day
- kudos:Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, because it’s a story of radical hope in the face of bleak reality The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, because I’m going to need to keep up my frustration with self-enriching amoral tech bros The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, by Jeffrey Lewis, because it compellingly portrays the danger of entrusting nuclear weapons in the hands of any president but especially one who is particularly petty and impulsive The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, because it so compellingly describes the soft edges and semi-plausible deniability that American fascism would inevitably be draped in Superman Smashes the Klan, by Gene Luen Yang, because it’s unapologetically pro-immigrant and anti-racism (and implicitly argues that churches should be, too) Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, by Scott Branson, because it advocates for solving problems of care and support on our own when it’s clear that the government won’t do it for us The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy, because it argues for loyalty to all of humanity over loyalty to any country the March trilogy, by John Lewis, because reading it the first time made me realize that I might well have been a “surely it’s not that bad” bystander during the Civil Rights movement, and I refuse to be that guy over the next four years There are, of course, a number of books that I want to read for the first time in response to last night, and I probably need to prioritize those for a number of reasons.
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I’ve been scheduled for a while to preach on hope during Advent. It was always going to be about hope in the face of bleakness, but I can see the tone changing a bit now anyway.