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.

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.

Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions.

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.

Lots of interesting reflections here.

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.

This is a question that everyone should ask—and then be infuriated by the answer.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up.

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.

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.

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.

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. Before fast forwarding to my cameo, I actually ended up watching most of John’s homily, which I thought was excellent.

McSweeny’s strikes again.

Some strong arguments from Dash here.

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!

Love these digs at Twitter in the Kickstarter video for Mike Masnick’s new card game.

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. I rode back home, cancelled class, cleaned myself up, and am figuring out how to adjust my work day.⁴

I’ve seen this argument floating out there, but this is the first time I looked at some of the numbers.

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.

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.

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.

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. It also expresses the kind of commitment I wish I had but know I am still too cowardly to adopt.

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.

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.g., the serpent = Satan) without acknowledging that there’s not a lot of basis to them. I also find anarchist writing to make a lot of assertions without walking me through them; while I’m sympathetic to the conclusions, I feel like I can’t get on board without some more help.

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.