This headline is a real downer for me because why else am I enduring Michigan winters if not in part for the promise of the vanquishing of ticks, mosquitos and other invertebrate pests:
‘Expert: record-breaking winter temps won’t be enough to hamper Michigan’s tick season‘
I’ve used an M1 iPad Air as my main casual portal to the internet, and I use it heavily for reading and annotating research literature (through Zotero). The deeper I’ve gotten into dissertation life vs. coursework life the prospect of a sub-$700 macbook with an iPhone chip starts to sound appealing.
During my daily reading encountered Psalm 17:10 and it got me thinking back to several recent @johnfea1.bsky.social “Evangelical roundup” posts.
Scenes from a journey home
Cold bridge
“The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.” - Adam Sewer
‘A protester had laid a rose on a makeshift memorial to Good. As Knutson watched, an ICE agent took the rose, put it in his lapel, and then mockingly gave it to a female ICE agent. They both laughed.’ Yeah sure–better training can totally fix this.
Reporting from Robert F. North ‘Welcome to the American Winter:’
Children were a moral fault line for many of the people I met in the Twin Cities—not just the children of immigrants, who are at risk of losing their parents or being deported themselves, but also their white peers in schools and day-care centers.
I met a couple in their 70s who told me they had never considered joining a political protest until ICE came to town, and they realized that their granddaughter was at risk of witnessing a violent immigration raid just by going to school. Dan and Jane (like many others, they asked that I shield their full names) live in a large house in a comfortable suburb, where they welcomed me with tea and cookies.
“When a child witnesses violence or crime, it’s profoundly different from adults,” Dan said. “It leaves scars.”
Dan and Jane resisted the idea that they had become political. A better word, Jane said, was humanist. Their anger was unmistakable as they told me that the Trump administration was violating basic Christian principles. “It became clear very quickly that ICE is the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo boys. They’ve given them uniforms and let them run wild,” Dan said. He attended a legal-observer training—which happened to have been on the day Good was killed—and now the couple delivers groceries regularly to immigrant families in Minneapolis. This past Friday, Dan joined thousands of others at a protest in Minneapolis, where his fingers were frostbitten in the –9 degrees Fahrenheit weather.
I remember first following @bellingcat.com back during the ‘little green men’ drama of Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea in 2014. What I couldn’t have imagined at the time was that a valuable source of news on foreign authoritarianism would need to turn their gaze homeward.
With @zotero@fosstodon.org announcing the release of Zotero 8 I would like to once again marvel at the fact that this software is completely FREE TO USE.
Announcing Zotero 8
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/
Ryan Burge articulating a concern I’ve held for a long time about the “doctrine is destiny”1 argument for Church growth:
Burge: I just think there’s a certain number of people who are drawn to certainty, and there are certain people who are repelled from certainty. And what does church look like for that second group, those doubtful people versus those certain people?
The mainline’s always been the refuge of the doubters, who try their best to believe these things but just can’t get over the hump sometimes. And if that goes away, if you’re Protestant, your only option is the evangelical pastor who pounds the pulpit and says: “If you don’t believe what we believe, you’re going to hell.” And the person sitting there goes: “Yeah, but how do you know that?”
That’s what we’re missing: This huge chunk of people who were open to the idea of belief are not going to have an outlet to go to a place where they really do feel like people like them are welcome and the conversation’s worthwhile, because it’s going to be: “Unless you believe what we believe, you are less than us.” And why would you want to go to a place where you feel like you’re less than, voluntarily? I certainly wouldn’t.
I would put an emphasis on the connection between certainty and ‘Unless you believe what we believe you are less than us.’ I think that sentiment manifests most frequently as communal subtext more often than being explicitly stated. This sentiment can go to really warped places when paired with a popular/shallow understanding of the doctrine of predestination. Having grown up in congregations that leaned or were populated predominately by conservative fundamentalists–even if there were statements meant to gesture rhetorically towards “your doubts are welcome here”–in practice what was communicated through the weekly preaching, statements of congregants, and broader of teaching was “your doubts are welcome here, but we’re going to work to excise them as quickly as possible or we may perceive you as a threat.”
Certainty can be a short term growth strategy. It will draw in people hungry for that mental/emotional/psychological security blanket. But I don’t think instilling certainty in doctrinal beliefs is the same as setting someone up for a life WITH God. If the good news (Gospel) is “you can be certain of what happens to you after you die if you believe what I believe” instead of “the Creator of the universe is restoring creation from its decaying state, and They want to do it WITH you” then what you may actually end up worshiping is the certainty, not the Creator.
framed succinctly: the argument goes that liberal or progressive Churches decline because they don’t hold firmly enough to core (Protestant) doctrines such as Scriptural inerrancy, salvation by confession+faith alone, or Jesus’s divinity. ↩︎
Max Weber described bureaucracy as a form of rational authority in which rules and procedures, rather than personal whims, govern outcomes. We trust institutions, at least in part, because they promise nonarbitrary decisions. But the LMS era has given us something stranger: systems in which the appearance of personal judgment—the professor’s name on the grade—masks a deeper reality in which judgment is distributed across software defaults, drop-down menus, automatic “late penalties,” and back-office interventions.
The professor’s no becomes just one input among many—and not necessarily the decisive one.
When I asked who had changed my grades and why, I did not get a straight answer.
Hat tip to @ayjay whose feed I found this article on:
Emir J. Phillips:“It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong. A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did… social.ayjay.org
Anyone able to blend Postman and Huxley is worth sharing IMHO:
This is why, to me, these last weeks have been particularly unmooring, even after the endless chemical train wreck of 2025. The media and technology critic Neil Postman famously argued that the incipient American dystopia wasn’t the blunt overpowering fascism of 1984, but rather Huxley’s intoxicatingly mediated brave new world—we were all on the brink of amusing ourselves to death. It turns out they’ve both arrived, in tandem; the state is booming obvious falsehoods in our face and demanding we accept them, and they are simultaneously being packaged into infotainment to delight the converted and enrage the opposed. It’s a feelie that tells us 2+2=5.
The Trump administration has never been fond of NATO, and there are problems with it. But many of those problems are creatures of its success. NATO is like a vaccine; it has worked so well at its core purpose that people now have trouble understanding why it is necessary to continue it. It’s insanely cheap at the price we pay; no one in 1935 would even believe it possible…
…I also doubt that Trump has any intention of a serious trade war over this. It almost seems like the perfect time to go long on a TACO trade. What I think Trump never accounts for is the cost of bluffs. This isn’t poker, where you play hard at the table and when you get up everyone is friends. The whole thing is endogenous, and every action colors every future relationship.1
Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon arguing for what they think the modern humanities are addressing:
The modern humanities address not disordered desires, unruly passions, or the presence of evil but historical changes: industrialization, new technologies, natural science, and capitalism. This permanent relationship to the present links the modern humanities to the temporality of crisis. Whereas the temporality of change or development is ongoing, observable, and slow, that of crisis is decisive, exceptional, and particular. (p. 6)
Civic holidays like the one that commemorates Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday provide an opportunity for me to reflect on what I think about the big stories we (U.S. citizens) tell about our nation, and how my views have changed as I’ve aged and the world has evolved. I find myself increasingly aggrieved by how significant portions of my faith community choose to interpret the significance of Dr. King’s legacy, and whether it does or doesn’t influence our mass voting behavior.
As a child of late 20th century U.S. schooling (both public and parochial), when taught about Dr. King and his legacy the artifact of choice was typically his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech and the March on Washington it accompanied. The speech and event were framed as one additional wrung on the ladder of the U.S.’s inevitable ascent towards liberty.
As I got older Letter from a Birmingham Jail took a place of greater prominence. Having spent most of my life participating in predominately white, conservative Christian communities, it wasn’t until college that I was awakened to the many complications and half-truths found in the K-12 narrative I was taught about U.S. history. The letter’s pointed message towards white moderates (like myself) remains an important and bracing critique.
Now, I’ve entered a stage of life where my civic/public consciousness has me turning more frequently to King’s Mountaintop speech. The speech’s charismatic (pentacostal) prophetic edge, and dogged determination to hold the U.S. to our highest stated ideals feels particularly relevant in an era when Federal policy is defined by cruelty and antagonism towards the most vulnerable members of our social fabric. The speech spends time reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, with a small excerpt here:
And so the first question that the Levite asked was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
That’s the question before you tonight.
I remain committed to practicing the faith (and still hold many of the doctrinal markers) engendered by my upbringing in evangelical Christianity. To our collective shame, many of my fellow white Evangelicals remain the bedrock supporters of a Federal administration that sees an increasing number of its citizens, other residents, and sojourners as threats to be neutralized rather than people who deserve to be treated with the equality demanded by our laws. I was told growing up that character is destiny when it comes to political leadership, and to see this principle abandoned for political expediency leaves a bitter aftertaste I can’t fully rinse out. I (perhaps naively) still believe the character axiom was basically correct.
May the parable of the Good Samaritan and the public witness of Believers like Dr. King–in partnership with the Holy Spirit–work like seeds sown into the hearts of my fellow evangelicals. I pray they not walk the same path as the Pharoahs in the book of Exodus and instead stop their hearts from hardening further.
Find a key excerpt of the Mountaintop speech here:
Kid #2 has enjoyed this book as much as their older sibling: Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell 📚
We Found More Than 40 Cases of Immigration Agents Using Banned Chokeholds and Other Moves That Can Cut Off Breathing
I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think its hyperbolic to say that unless discouraging these tactics is rigorously embraced by DHS ASAP, that at some point in the next three years someone will be killed by a federal agent because of their use.
Dust-to-Digital now has a 24/7 streaming radio station.
Found through Brad East. The 4 Horsemen of New Theism:
I’m assuming these 4 were chosen because of the presumption they speak towards an academic/literati audience, and their publishing world prominence. I think you could have had Elizabeth Oldfield or Lisa V Fields on that list too.
