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.

Over the past several months, I’ve noticed something funny about what kinds of video recommendations I get when I watch something on YouTube. I have watch history turned off on both my personal and professional Google accounts, so if I’m logged in to Google in the browser where I’m watching the video (usually on a desktop/laptop), I get pretty generic recommendations, with an obvious connection to the video at hand but no awareness of my past viewing. On my phone, though, I’m not logged into Google in my main browser, so if I bring up a video there, I get way more personalized recommendations that are very tied in to what I’ve previously watched on my phone.

En fin mars 2025, craignant l’arrivée des taxes douanières, j’ai commandé un exemplaire d’un livre de Jacques Ellul d’une maison d’édition à Genève. Quelques jours après ma commande, j’ai reçu un courriel avec le message suivant :

Je vous remercie pour votre commande passée sur notre site. Afin de vous éviter des taxes douanières, j’ai enregistré votre colis en “cadeau”.

En fin de compte, mon livre est arrivé avant l’annonce des taxes, et ce n’était donc pas nécessaire, mais je me souviendrai toujours de ce brave employé qui savait que je vivais sous une présidence de folie et de cruauté et a voulu m’en épargner un toute petite chose.

One of the most interesting recurring themes in Jacques Ellul’s writing is one that contrasts reality (or facts) with truth. As Ellul distinguishes them, facts are what are and—implicitly—what must be conformed to, whereas truth is what ought to be. Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word explores this distinction at length, but it crops up in plenty of his other writing. In fact, I’m currently reading his Présence au monde moderne (or rereading it, depending on what one considers reading the original French after reading the English translation last year), and I’m delighted to see that he makes this distinction as early as this 1948 book.

As with many of my posts, I don’t know if anyone reads this except me; as with many of my posts, I enjoy putting together this end-of-year recap even if I’m the only audience. I didn’t realize that it was only this year that I watched The Princess Bride with kiddo, and it’s fun to see the personal challenges I set for myself, like rereading all of Saga, finally listening to all the Terry Pratchett radio dramas I bought years ago, making my way through a bunch of IDW Star Trek comics of mixed quality, etc. I am kind of bummed that I didn’t finish my way through the Brief Theological Introductions to the Book of Mormon series before the end of the year, but I also confess that I’m having a mixed experience with the series, and trying to force my way through hasn’t been super helpful.

This morning, while getting ready for the day, I spent some time catching up on podcasts, including Nilay Patel’s interview of Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekhar on a recent episode of Decoder (a podcast I’ve spent a lot more time listening to since it went ad free for subscribers). I ditched the Stack Exchange network a year and a half ago over digital labor concerns—I was literally being prevented from deleting my own content from the site, which is bonkers—and I’m honestly not sure why I bookmarked the interview for listening a few days ago. I think it was more than a hate listen, though: For all of my own feelings about generative AI, I make an effort to be open minded, and I was interested in the headline for the interview: “Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway.”

For over 7 years now, I’ve been using the Day One app on iOS and macOS to keep my journal. Journaling has been important to me since I was a teenager, and being able to do it on a phone or a computer just makes it more likely that it’s going to happen. My dependence on Day One isn’t without issues: I’ve gotten warier of Automattic over the past couple of years, I’d like to one day extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem altogether, and I do think that there’s something I miss by typing rather than handwriting my journal entries. Nonetheless, it’s a good app, and I’m not likely to jump ship until I’ve finished digitizing all of my older journals and memorabilia so that I can have some PDF, Markdown, and JSON exports of all of my journals to convert into something more homebrew and platform-independent.

J’écoute souvent Les Cowboys Fringants, et j’ai déjà écrit au sujet de combien je trouve de l’importance dans les paroles de leurs chansons. En plus, il m’arrive souvent de critiquer le « Black Friday » et toutes les façons dont on gâche le week-end de Thanksgiving avec le commercialisme (s’il n’est pas déjà gâché par les mythes colonialistes qu’on lui attribue, bien sûr).

Pourtant, j’ai été étonné ce week-end par combien la chanson « L’Amérique pleure » semblait évoquer directement le Black Friday et tous les problèmes de la culture américaine auxquels je suis particulièrement sensible pendant le Thanksgiving. Les personnes qui doivent travailler pendant les fêtes pour permettre aux autres de fêter (tiens, on pourrait invoquer aussi « Santé » de Stromae), les « excès de [notre] époque », les bouchons sur les autoroutes, et ainsi de suite. En voici la vidéo :

There’s a used bookstore near my in-laws that I enjoy stopping by when we’re visiting. One of the best offerings of this store (at least in kiddo’s mind) is the bin full of Pokémon cards up near the comics. The deal is that you can stuff a provided plastic bag (the kind that comes in board games to hold components) as full as you dare, take it up to the register, and they’ll just charge you a flat five bucks, no matter how many cards you fit into the bag. (You can also fill a larger box for a higher fee, or you can stuff a bag full of Magic cards from the next bin over, but our interest has always been in bagging our own Pokémon cards).

Over the weekend, I decided to plunge back into following a bunch of social accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky that I had previously removed from Reeder to avoid information overwhelm. Sensitive to the possibility that information overwhelm would come back with all of these new follows, I tried using Reeder’s filter feature to do something I’d never thought about before: organizing feeds by genre instead of by content.

That is, I’ve previously used folders in Reeder (and plenty of other RSS apps) to organize feeds into the different subjects that I’m interested in and then catching up on feeds one subject at a time. However, this time, I used Reeder’s filters to organize by feed type—or genre. That is, I have all true RSS feeds accessible through one filter and all social feeds accessible through another. The idea here is that I’m more interested in at least reviewing all of the true RSS feeds (blogs, news sites, etc.), but with social, I’ll be more willing to hit Reeder’s “go to top” button and skip over a bunch of posts that I missed overnight or during a busy day.

I had the opportunity to preach yesterday for Reign of Christ Sunday. Reign of Christ Sunday is one of those liturgical moments that admittedly makes me a little nervous: I like the idea of putting Jesus first, but it really, really depends on what we understand by Jesus. (I’ve been writing on this for a while, it looks like.) So, I decided to take the opportunity to invite members of my congregation to reflect on who Jesus is for them and what it means to put that Jesus first. Here’s the sermon text:

One of the great “be careful what you wish for” stories is The Monkey’s Paw in which a family receives a magic item that grants wishes but discovers to their horror that all the wishes are granted in terrible, horrible ways. I can’t remember when I last read the story (though I’m confident I have—maybe in high school?), but monkey paw has stuck in my brain as the metaphor for this idea that wishes can go terribly, terribly wrong, so you really ought to think them through.

Ever since blogging twice about the Liahona and Jacques Ellul’s technique six months ago(!), I’ve been thinking a lot about this story in the Book of Mormon as a possible starting point for a Book of Mormon-based theology of technology. As I first wrote then, I think this story is particularly interesting for the implicit tension in the story: Why would an all-powerful God need a mechanical(?) device in order to communicate their divine will to their followers?

Un peu par hasard, j’ai fini récemment ma lecture de deux livres différents par Jacques Ellul : Théologie et technique ainsi que Humiliation of the Word (la traduction anglaise de La parole humiliée, car je vais devoir en écrire en anglais, et j’avoue en plus que mon français n’est pas toujours à la hauteur d’Ellul « en V.O. »). Ça fait plusieurs jours que j’ai envie d’écrire quelque chose sur la relation image-parole qu’il établit dans les pages de La parole humilié, et je compte toujours écrire ce post-là, mais en terminant Théologie et technique, j’ai été frappé par un passage qui ressemble beaucoup ce dont j’avais envie d’écrire dans l’autre livre.

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.

A few months ago, I announced a new publication from Dan Krutka and me based on our study of a teacher’s group on far-right social media. I’m happy to share that Renee Hobbs’s Media Education Lab has taken interest in the research, and that Dan and I will be giving a webinar for them next month.

The webinar is called “When Teachers Talk Politics Online: The Dark Side of Online Spaces for Teacher Professional Learning” and will take place on October 6th at 4pm EST. It is free, but you need to register here to get the Zoom link.

I love it when different books I’m reading come together in interesting ways. That happened recently while rereading Joseph Spencer’s 1st Nephi: A Brief Theological Introduction and restarting (this, time, in English) Jacques Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word. In this post, I want to take up a distinction that Spencer makes in his book, suggesting that:

Question’s about the Book of Mormon’s truth tend to be of two sorts. First, we want to know whether it all really happened. Second, we want to know whether it really shows us who God is.

I’m a big fan of the 404 Media tech news outlet, and I also really enjoy their podcast. I especially appreciated an episode that I listened to yesterday, which I’m embedding below as a YouTube video (as an aside, I simply do not understand how YouTube has become a major podcast-listening medium, so it pains me a bit to do this, but I’m once again trying to write something quickly before getting to real work, and YouTube embeds are relatively easy to do in Hugo, so that’s what I’m going with.

I have ten minutes to rage-write this post before I join a meeting, so it may not be particularly nuanced—though I’d love to revisit these examples in the future. I recently got to listen to Cory Doctorow read the first hour or so of his forthcoming Enshittification, and I was struck by two things in the first couple of minutes. First, by the way that he tied enshittification to platforms, and by the way he loosely defined platforms as intermediaries. I think there’s something important in both of those.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a graduate student to examine the geographic and linguistic diversity in an online Community of Christ ministry that made an intentional effort to cross borders during the COVID-19 pandemic (and before and since, but for all of the obvious reasons, this was particularly pronounced during the pandemic). I was pleased with how the work went and was eager to get it to publication. I’m happy to announce that that’s finally happened, thanks to the Journal of Media and Religion.

For reasons I don’t have to get into here, summer is one of the hardest times of year in mental health terms, and over the course of the past few months, I’ve had my fair share of existential dread and feeling adrift. As I wrote last week, that meant that I was hesitant to start reading the comics series Ice Cream Man, because I was afraid that it would further fuel that dread.

I am very excited that Rosemary Avance is coming to one of the Mormon Social Science Association sessions at this year’s Society for the Scientific Study of Religion to speak on her book Mediated Mormons. I’ve just started the book in preparation for the session, and I was struck by the questions that make up the first two lines of the introduction:

What does it mean to be part of a religious community? Is it the same as claiming a religion?

Merci à Matoo, qui a vu combien j’écrivais sur Jacques Ellul sur ce site et qui m’a donc recommandé la petite série de cinq épisodes « Avoir raison… avec Jacques Ellul », qui est sorti il y a quelques semaines sur France Culture. J’ai écouté la première épisode ce matin en faisant de petites préparations pour mon premier jour d’enseignement pour cette année scolaire, et je le trouve déjà très utile.

J’ai déjà lu trois livres par Ellul et je suis en train de lire deux autres (bon, en théorie — j’avoue que ça va lentement). Ce week-end, je vais recevoir quelques nouveaux livres d’Ellul que mon beau-frère a acheté à la librairie new-yorkaise magnifique Albertine, qui est soutenue par l’ambassade française aux États-Unis. Mon beau-frère va à New York tous les étés et me cherchent toujours quelques bouquins francophones, et ça fait qu’en ce moment, j’aurai bientôt beaucoup plus à lire d’Ellul. C’est la première fois dans ma vie que je m’engage à ce niveau avec l’œuvre d’un seul écrivain académique, et je trouve qu’avoir des résumés comme celui de France Culture m’aide beaucoup à situer ce que je lis en un moment particulier dans l’ensemble de sa pensée.

In the beginning of the year, I wrote a post about noticing that hoopla had stopped allowing screenshots in its app, which is super dumb. While my chief regret in starting to read the surreal horror comic series Ice Cream Man on hoopla instead of with the physical TPBs available at my local library is because it’s a raw deal for the library, I remembered this morning another reason: That I couldn’t take pictures of panels that impressed me in the same way that I could with a TPB. This is dumb, and I regret the use I’ve been making of hoopla over the summer. I’ve also taken a break from writing this post to reserve the next several TPBs at a library, so I won’t be tempted to go back to hoopla when my borrows reset on September 1st.

I subscribe to the “Religion Watch” newsletter out of Baylor University but usually don’t do much more than skim it. The first entry in the June edition, though, immediately stood out to me for this excerpt:

Paul Seabright’s recent book, The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People (Princeton University Press, $35), is unique for its comprehensive treatment of the religious past and present as well as its novel use of the concept of “platforms” in explaining the economy of religion.