At the Intersection: Links for March 15, 2025
The end of social media edition.
It’s been a while since I’ve done the At the Intersection post. These posts are links of interest that you should look up. For those new to Church and Main, I do these posts to keep up an “old” tradition. In the age of the blog, there were tons of links to other blogs or articles of interest. When social media was in its infancy, they were great places for links to awesome articles. That has changed in the last few years. Blogs aren’t big anymore, and social media throttles links. But there is still a desire to read interesting articles and not just posting memes or s**tposting. So, I’m doing this. I’ve collected some links, both secular and religious for you to look at. It’s a chance to slow down and read and think instead of doom-scrolling. Have fun.
Social Media Death Watch: Since I was talking about social media, let’s start there. I’ve been working with social media in one form or another for over 15 years and in that time, I’ve seen the medium change and not for the better. I think what used to be a place where you could find out how friends are doing and also share interesting articles has become a place that is more focused on keeping you on the site no matter what. I have to wonder if social media, at least in its current form, will be around in the next decade or so. I see people and organizations leaving various platforms altogether. I used to believe social media was the future in 2010 and promoted it as such. Social media now looks like the past, a dangerous past that might infect the future.
Jeremiah Johnson shares his own past experience of the web and how the open web is fading away:
StumbleUpon eventually died, replaced by link aggregators like Reddit and Digg. But it was part of what I loved about the early web. The internet, at its best, feels like it has everything. It feels like a place where you can do anything, be anyone, and you might find the coolest, most interesting and most useful or bizarre stuff just around the corner. Like many old-timers I’m romantic about that sense of discovery and freedom. You used to hear metaphors like ‘the internet is the Wild West’, and that was true not because of people’s behaviors but because of the sense that the internet was an uncharted landscape there for you to explore.
I’m worried that world is disappearing. I’m worried that the sense of wonder that came with the internet as place-to-be-explored is going away.
Conservative commentator Richard Hanania talks about how Twitter under Elon Musk has become a hellish place where the truth doesn’t matter.
Ryan Panzer, an author and social media consultant, says something in his latest post on the Church Anew blog that would have been considered heretical ten years ago: that maybe it’s time for churches to consider alternatives to Meta and Twitter (or X) to build online community.
When Lies Come into the World: Our next set of links has something to do with the Trump Administration. First off is Tony Robinson's blog post about the fountain of lies coming from Trump and others in his administration about Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. He starts it off with the following quote, which is rather chilling: “The great danger of Donald Trump is that he creates his own reality. He does this through lies, partial truths, distortions and appeals to people’s fears and hopes.” If anything, you have to read it because he uses the late, great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s most famous quote, “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Robinson references a column by Eli Lake in the Free Press titled “Truth Mattered in the Cold War. And It Matters Now in Ukraine.” In it he chronicles the history of dissidents Russia and Eastern Europe who sought to tell the truth while living under regimes that spouted lies. This is in contrast to President Trump who repeats lies from the Kremlin about the war in Ukraine. “Once upon a time, honorable men went to the gulag for refusing to repeat the Kremlin’s lies,” Lake writes, “Now an American president is telling them for free.”
In more Trump-related news, Michael Wear reminds me how Trump's religious voters might have voted for Trump, but the president doesn’t respond with respect towards these voters. “But since Trump first ran for office,” Wear notes, “He has asserted himself with religious voters by promising to defend them—while undermining their moral and substantive credibility.”
Christianity Today reports Trump will “Make Bribery Okay Again.”
Lutheran pastor Charlene Rachuy Cox shares, in prose, the importance of liturgy for these times.
Mark Tooley says it is important for the US to support Ukraine through the lens of Christian Realism.
Do you think Trump is like Hitler? Jeff Giesea sees your Führer raise you, the Antichrist.
Don’t die DEI: DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion programs were all the rage in the late teens until recently. The Trump Administration is now going after these programs not just in the government but in private schools and businesses.
There are legitimate criticisms of DEI, but is it all bad? And what are its shortcomings when it comes to the church? Where is the role for grace when it comes to racial reconciliation? Loren Richmond Jr. has two strong articles on DEI, arguing for a “mend it, don’t end it” approach in light of the grace of God.
Noah Millman asks the question: Should Jews pray for Gaza? He answers yes, with an explanation:
Why, though, should we feel it? I think the answer is only partly: because we should always be mindful when we cause suffering, even if we believe that suffering is necessary. That’s true, but I think there’s a sharper reason. Gaza is not now part of the territory of the State of Israel, and perhaps it will one day become the territory of another sovereign state, such as a Palestinian state. But it is plausibly (though not unequivocally) part of the land of Israel as religiously imagined. And even if it isn’t, the Palestinian people more generally certainly are people who dwell in the land of Israel—both in the West Bank and within Israel’s generally recognized borders. So it seems to me that any prayer for the welfare of those who dwell in the land—prayers that are an uncontroversial part of the liturgy—implicitly includes the Palestinians under its ambit.
It’s been five years since the world shut down because of COVID. For pastor Jeff Gill, that time was a convergence of terrible events: the death of his father, the end of his last call, his mother’s mental confusion and more. In a moving essay, he talks about how all these events broke him and the road to healing.
Finally, we switched to Daylight Savings Time last weekend. Methodist Minister Teer Hardy writes a…ahem, timely prayer on what is the bane of many a pastor.
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