A Book is a Book, No Matter How Big

Weekend Digest #1

Today I’m happy to roll out a small new feature called Weekend Digest. In this brief Saturday posts I’ll give you:

One Opinion to Consider

One Thing to Read

One Comment That Got Me Thinking

One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember

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One Opinion to Consider

The last couple of weeks, nearly all of my social media feed has been preoccupied with Megan Basham’s book Shepherds for Sale (which I reviewed here). The book is selling a bazillion copies, and it’s the kind of explosively controversial book that’s guaranteed to create a news cycle, so this isn’t really surprising. But I do wonder if at this point we’re past the phase where constructive reflection is possible.

Shepherds for Sale is a provocative book. It gets some things right and some things wrong. There is good reason for folks to take it very seriously, considering its claims and its target audience. But there is such a thing as overestimating the importance of litigating the claims of a book. In fact, with a book like Shepherds for Sale, the more these particular debates dominate evangelical conversation, the more its most provocative points are at some point likely to appear (or even become!) true.

A book is a book no matter how big. Yes, books can be enormously influential. But no book is ever more influential in a person’s life than the things that occupy that person’s attention on a regular basis. And most books, even the ones that make big splashes, have a very short and finite reach. It would be a massive mistake for anyone to devote a lion’s share of their attention, energy, and work to being either for or against a book like this. I’m not saying this because Shepherds for Sale is inconsequential. It’s not. I’m saying it because some of the things Basham gets right in the book are, in fact, related to the evangelical inability to look beyond The Current Thing (look for a forthcoming piece from me on this).

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One Thing to Read

This is an absolutely horrifying glimpse into the future.

I have written before that Christians are not currently thinking hard enough about the ways that AI will completely weaponize pornography. One of those ways is by taking advantage of freely uploaded photographs—selfies, prom pics, even just family candids—and creating pornographic versions of them that will look utterly convincing to most people.

From the article:

[Deepfake] technology first gained national attention when it was used to create misleading and false political content, such as a doctored video that Donald Trump shared on Twitter in 2019, which featured footage of Nancy Pelosi apparently slurring her words. In recent years, though, the bulk of deepfake material online has become pornographic. Though information was scant, Javellana found articles warning about the increasing threat of deepfakes. Artificial intelligence was advancing so rapidly that anyone with a computer or smartphone could access a number of apps to easily create images using individuals’ likenesses. One study cited by the Department of Homeland Security noted that, at one point, more than 90 percent of deepfake videos featured non-consensual, sexually explicit images, overwhelmingly of women.

Parents of preteens and teens need to be thinking of their children’s online presence with this in mind. The more broadly available anyone’s photos are, the more likely it is that those photos are available for deepfake pornographers to use.

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One Comment That Got Me Thinking

From Mel Bjorgen, on “Following Jesus in the Desert of Mental Illness.”

I do feel like the conversations [around Christians and mental illness] have happened fast. I think that some of that has to do with the fact that people in my generation from the late 70s to early 80s never had those conversations before in their youth. Whereas generations like Gen Z are familiar with conversations around mental health. In my generation, our emotions were held captive, therapy for children was only used for those who were exhibiting extreme signs of mental distress. In fact, therapy at that time in Christian communities was disparaged.

Now there are a bunch of us who are learning about taking care of our mental health. We are going to therapy and sharing our experiences (perhaps over sharing) because we feel free, like we never did before, to express our emotions. With that, comes an over-abundance of information as well as some misinformation or misunderstanding of mental health disorders. For example, trauma and PTSD are often used synonymously. However, there’s a distinction between the two. Quite often people loop their traumatic experiences into also having PTSD, when this is not always the case.

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One Song, Poem, or Picture to Remember

The Waiting, “Hands in the Air.” A CCM gem from a band few people remember, and another reminder the industry enjoyed a truly golden stretch in the 90s.