The Friday Update - Mt. Rushmore

Happy Friday,

After Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter from the dead, he instructed her parents to keep the miracle a secret. He also told them to get her something to eat. In the past, I’ve wondered about the secrecy. I’m now intrigued by the sandwich. Why? Because it fits a pattern. After healing a paralytic, Jesus told him to pick up his mat and walk. After cleansing a leper, he told him to report to a priest. After preventing a stoning, Jesus told the woman to “go and sin no more.” Jesus didn’t demand people develop a life plan. Nor did he leave them alone. Instead, he directed them to do the next right thing. It was an immediate and simple step forward. What is a next step you can take down the path of faith? Dear Lord, show me my next-right-thing and give me the courage and energy to do it today.

IS2M (It Seems 2 Me)

1) The fact that students of all ages are embracing school-wide cell-phone bans shows how exhausting modern tech has become.

2) The crisis among young men has been fueled, in part, by their lack of heroes.

3) Set aside Amazon’s decision to extend Prime Day from 24 to 96 hours, the fact that a company has been able to create such a notable secular holiday underscores how consumeristic our culture has become.

4) The debate about porn has changed dramatically. Ten years ago, there were still people claiming that it wasn’t harmful. Very few still make that claim.

Question

Which four people would you place on your personal Mount Rushmore?

WOTW

Honorable mention goes to the tech-adjacent terms I saw this week – digital masculinity (developed in this article), scanxiety (obvious enough), and catastrophic forgetting (when artificial neural networks “suddenly and drastically” forget previously learned information). I feel the need to recognize a few oldies that made a recent splash – e.g., sensucht (a German term — and C.S. Lewis favorite — that describes an intense longing for something unattainable in this material world), and burnout (which some are claiming is up 32% this year over last). I’m giving full honors to liquid culture (a period of rapidly changing norms that erodes societies, leaving them susceptible to political and cultural polarization). BTW, I engaged in catastrophic forgetting long before it was cool, and I did so without the aid of AI.

Without Comment

1) 10% of US households hold 67% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% hold 2.5%.

2) With more evening emails and 16% more meetings scheduled after 8PM, Microsoft data suggests we’re working longer and later than last year.

3) Nearly one-third of Gen Z students consider politics when choosing a college.

4) WNBA viewership was down 55% during Caitlin Clark’s injury hiatus.

5) Marital researcher John Gottman has found that when our heart rate exceeds 100 beats/minute, effective communication is nearly impossible.

6) This presentation on global fertility suggests that those predicting a demographic winter may have underestimated the severity of the challenge.

7) In the 1960s, it was possible to attend a four-year college debt-free, but impossible to purchase a flat-screen television. By the 2020s, the reality was close to the reverse. (From the recent book Abundance)

SNL vs Reality

Although comics suggest marriage is a death trap that robs both men and women of their freedom and happiness, in Get Married, UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox argues the opposite. Per his book: 1) Sixty percent of married couples rate their union as “very happy,” with only 4% rating it as “not too happy”; 2) Happily married couples are 545% more likely to be happy in life than everyone else (i.e., a happy marriage is a far greater predictor of overall happiness than either work satisfaction or income); and 3) Even those married couples who do not rate their marriage as “happy” are twice as likely to be happy compared to the unmarried. There’s more, but I’ll stop for now.

Quotes Worth Requoting

1) “The more modern, the more alone.” — David Goodhew

2) “Sin lives late at night.” — Ashton Hall, an influencer arguing that the 4 A.M. wake-up is not just for “Superman CEOs anymore.”

3) “The more we hide, the less we heal.” — John Mark Comer 

TWT (This Week’s Theory)

This week’s winner is the Bread and Circus Theory, which claims that the last building projects a society undertakes before collapsing tend to be sports and entertainment complexes (e.g., the Roman Empire’s construction of hippodromes and coliseums). Archeologists suggest the record is a bit more mixed, but given Chicago’s debates about building a new stadium, I feel the need to give it some ink.

Dates, Worms and Lights

A story is told of a monk who woke up hungry in the middle of the night. After lighting a candle, he reached into a bowl of dates next to his bed, picked up one and took a bite of it. Glancing down at the half that remained, he noticed a worm, so he threw the date away. He took another. Held it to the candle, noticed another worm and threw it away. He took another. Same. Another. Same. Finally, frustrated, he blew out the candle.

63% 4%

In the US, 63% of Americans identify as Christian. But according to Barna, the percentage of Americans actively following Jesus with a Christian worldview hovers around 4%. If you are reading this, you likely fall into the 63%. Do you fall into the 4%?

Resources

1) Last Sunday, I preached on Psalm 128 which outlines how to live a blessed life. Its approach may surprise you. It surprised me.

Closing Prayer

“We pray you, Lord, purify our hearts that we may be worthy to become your dwelling-place. Let us never fail to find room for you, but come and abide in us, that we also may abide in you, for at this time you were born into the world for us, and live and reign, King of kings and Lord of lords, now and forever. Amen.” (William Temple - 1881-1944)