I still struggle to put into words what this year has been like. From March through September, my family dealt with a health crisis and experienced two sudden deaths. The past six weeks have been calm, but part of me waits for another shoe to drop.

Meanwhile, I have found myself with a rare opportunity to focus on one thing: my book manuscript. I have an aggressive timeline to meet through the end of the year, and I need to ensure that this project is completed in that timeframe. I am not a speedy writer, so this takes considerable attention (something I struggle with anyways).

That means that as far as output here, grist for the content mill so to speak, things will (continue to) be sparse here.

What I would love to know from you, my regular readers and supporters, is what you would like to see me write or podcast about, or make available via Notes or in paid threads, etc. in this stretch through the end of the year. I am brainstorming around ideas for upcoming features and regular posts, but those will not be put into action until later this year or early next year.

So please chime in, and let me know if there is anything in particular you enjoy about my writing that you’d like to see more of.

I don’t normally post things like this - letting people know of sales - but this book in particular was very helpful in the reckoning with white supremacy as part and parcel of white American Christianity part of my “deconstruction journey.”

(Aside: “Deconstruction,” for former white evangelicals at least, often just means educating yourself out of white ignorance. Ignorance is only a shield for white people; for everyone else, it’s a liability.)

If you want to maintain some semblance of Christian belief or identity, this book could both challenge and affirm that choice. It will make you recognize the ways that early white settlers incorporated their racism into their theology and church practice, well before modern white evangelicalism came to be.

Throughout the book, which tracks the history of racist thought, Kendi takes time to point out when various people could inhabit both racist and anti-racist beliefs. This is helpful, especially when addressing attempts by evangelical historians to deflect from the racist aspects of white evangelical practice & belief by relying on individuals like Blanchard & Finney.

Pair this book with White Evangelical Racism from Anthea Butler & White Too Long by Robert P. Jones.

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Further listening:

New_ Public

🐾 A social network taxonomy.

True stan confession time: I am a huge fan of Ethan Zuckerman and his work. His piece on social media logics from two years ago was my first introduction to New_ Public, actually! Last month, Ethan got together with our co-directors to construct a new matrix for the ownership and ruling of today’s social networks. Very grateful to Ethan for his clarity a…

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3 years ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Ethan Zuckerman

This is a long read that makes some useful distinctions around different forms of social media.

From the article:

“You might say that you are working on a history of Egyptian arithmetic. You know a bit of Sanskrit, you are qualified in German, and you are a good mathematician. They said, it will be right over. And they at once, Xerox, with the help of computers from the libraries of the world, all the latest material just for you personally, not as something to be put out on a bookshelf. They send you the package as a direct personal service,” McLuhan said.

“This is where we are heading under electronic information conditions. Products are increasingly becoming service. This is where we’re heading under electronic information conditions—products increasingly are becoming services,” McLuhan continued.

McLuhan is an influential thinker (he’s certainly influenced me), but many have built on his work. Check out the book Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan.

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A Public Witness

Christian Nationalism Invades Brazil

A violent mob, full of people who refuse to believe their presidential candidate lost, stormed their nation’s capital on a January day of fury. But this time it wasn’t in Washington, D.C. On Sunday (Jan. 8), thousands of supporters of now-former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro ransacked multiple government buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Co…

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3 years ago · 9 likes · Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood

This piece from here on Substack has some good initial facts about the presence of Christian nationalism in Brazil’s J8 insurrection. It’s important to recognize this as well as not conflate Brazilian Christian nationalism with its American counterparts.

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If you’re an exvangelical who has been scrolling through TikTok lately, you may have stumbled across a duo singing what sounds suspiciously like evangelical worship music.

Until you hear the lyrics.

“Anyone who is captured will be cut down and run through with a sword,” they sing in harmony, guitar strums in sync. “Their little children will be dashed to death before their eyes.”

A nice feature of a couple that have certainly popped up in my FYP.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/08/1062886/heres-how-a-twitter-engineer-says-it-will-break-in-the-coming-weeks/

I’ve been using it this past week, and today we’re talking about the election.

I’ve been doing link-blogging type posts here under the site section Marginalia, but now that Twitter has an uncertain future and Substack has built this function natively - I may move that over to this section.

To join our chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app (messages are sent via the app, not email - and it’s iOS only right now, but Android support is coming soon). Turn on push notifications so you don’t miss a chance to join conversation as it happens.

How to get started

1. Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.

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2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

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If this is the first time you’ve stumbled across The Post-Ev Post, subscribe here:

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The ruling followed on the heels of another judge blocking Indiana’s draconian new abortion ban from being enforced while court challenges continue. I would have expected neither outcome, and they further strengthen my hope that the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down abortion rights is widely perceived as severe overreach, to the point that the public has been galvanised to fight back.

But here’s the kicker about the ‘foetal disposition’ case. The judge who ruled on it, Richard L Young, based his decision on religious freedom grounds. This challenges those who defend the Christian Right’s ‘religious freedom’ rhetoric, which has been a key driver of so much anti-democratic lobbying, legislating and legal manoeuvering in recent years.

“Stephenson is now entering the marketplace with his own take on how his fictional concept might become a real-life make-believe world. He’s partnering with a crypto guy—Peter Vessenes, who heads the Bitcoin Foundation—to start Lamina1, a company hoping to create a scaffolding upon which creators can build an open metaverse.

“It’s like Neal is coming down out of the mountains like Gandalf, to restore the metaverse to an open, decentralized, and creative order,” says Rony Abovitz, the former CEO of Magic Leap, who is a strategic adviser to Lamina1.”

I have no idea what to make of this. Stephenson’s fictional work has included notions of both blockchain-style currency for a long time. Books like The Diamond Age feature digital currency that pre-date the invention of Bitcoin, and people even openly speculated that Stephenson was Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, which he denied.

Stephenson was previously involved with Magic Leap, another audacious company that received breathless WIRED cover story coverage but has scaled back its ambitions. He’s also worked for Blue Origin.

This is an interesting move because Stephenson is both thoughtful and technical. His writing signals that he thinks about the social and technical roles that technology plays in contemporary life. That he is participating in these metaverse/blockchain spaces may turn other heads, too. We’ll see.

“The nonprofit will fund six sessions of counseling for abuse survivors through a partnership with Thriveworks, a counseling practice that provides in-person and online therapy. Survivors can get assistance through the Help;Hear;Heal website, which will link them to Thriveworks.

Abuse survivors often face challenges in getting the help they need, said Todd McKay, founder and CEO of Help;Hear;Heal. There’s often a great deal of shame and trauma when they come forward about abuse and the headaches of navigating the health care system, where insurance doesn’t always pay for counseling.

Some survivors, especially younger people still on their parents’ insurance, may not be ready to reveal that they have been abused, he said.

“Our model is, we’ll deal with insurance later,” said McKay. “Let’s give you the support you need immediately to help.”

“NATHAN COPELAND CONSIDERS himself a cyborg. The 36-year-old has lived with a brain-computer interface for more than seven years and three months. As of today—August 17—that’s the longest anyone has had an implant like this. An electrode array the size of a pencil eraser, surgically installed in his motor cortex, translates his neural impulses into commands that allow him to control external devices: a computer, video games, and a robotic arm he can move with just his thoughts.

A car accident in 2004 left Copeland paralyzed from the chest down, unable to move or feel his limbs. In 2014, he joined a study at the University of Pittsburgh for people with major spinal cord injuries to see whether a brain-computer interface, or BCI, could restore some of the functionality he’d lost. He didn’t hesitate to sign up, even though it would require brain surgery—and nobody knew how long the device would keep working. “When I started, they said, ‘Oh, it’ll probably last five years.’ And that five years was based on monkey data, because no human had ever done it,” he says.”

The full AP write-up was published by WaPo here.

“ NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention said Friday that several of the denomination’s major entities are under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The SBC’s statement gave few details about the investigation, but indicated it dealt with sexual abuse. The SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., has been plagued by problems related to clergy sex abuse in recent years.”

"You used to be able to say that Instagram was a photo app. Way back in the early 2010s, an Instagram spokesperson told me that it was a “museum for your life” 🙄. But you simply cannot say that about Instagram in 2022. In fact, there is only one word for what Instagram now currently is: It’s a portal. It is a slightly more mobile-friendly Facebook for people who are currently under the age of 45, but over the age of 26.

The question of what Meta should actually be doing to respond to the now-rapidly shifting tectonic plates of the social web is, unfortunately, trickier to diagnose than all the mistakes they’re making at the moment. Historically, the decision to become a large internet portal also means you can’t pivot away from the radically different future coming over the horizon. But I’ll end with this interesting little tidbit. AOL was a wholly different company to Meta, both in scale and impact, but in 2015 it was acquired by Verizon and it tried a bunch of weird pivots. It invested in video, actually won a couple of Emmys, and tried to get a mobile video service off the ground. But you know what AOL’s last big move was before it was merged with Yahoo! in 2016? It acquired a VR company that specialized in "immersive video content” 🤷🏼‍♂️.

Read the whole entry here:

Garbage Day

Building a new Titanic on the deck of the old one

Portal Theory The internet, both as a whole and also individual corners of it, is constantly cycling through two phases: consolidation and decentralization. You can see this at a macro level by looking at how we, in the 2000s, went from large internet portals run by companies like AOL and Yahoo! to an internet of smaller social networks, blogs, and peer…

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4 years ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Ryan Broderick

Thanks for reading - be sure to subscribe, at $4, $6, or $8/month to receive ad-free podcast feeds & more. I donate 25% of net proceeds to White Homework & The Religious Exemption Accountability Project.

From Lyz Lenz’s latest, “Raising Up an Army for God:”

“Fear is ruling America again. A combination of backlash to the Black Lives Matter Movement and the 1619 Project has once again created a racist panic. There is a new push to homeschool, one tied to this current moment of racial and homophobic panic. The renewed effort to encourage families to flee public schools is finding fertile ground in parents frustrated with school closures, a lack of childcare, and exhausted and burnt-out teachers, women being forced out of the workforce, and parents afraid of gun violence in America. And it will destroy public education. Already the scaffolding is being built—states are seeking to cut school funding, are outlawing CRT and discussions of LGBTQ issues in the classroom.”

Read the rest of the post for a brief summary of the homeschooling movement, and a list of great resources on fundamentalism - including Empty The Pews and other familiar works.

Men Yell at Me

Raising Up an Army for God

This is the mid-week edition of Men Yell At Me a newsletter about politics and personhood written from red state America. This week’s newsletter analyzes America’s reactionary home school movement. If you value this work, subscribe…

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4 years ago · 29 likes · 22 comments · lyz

On Christian Reconstruction, Rushdoony, and homeschooling, be sure to listen to this Powers & Principalities episode with Julie Ingersoll:

I contextualized the importance of Ingersoll’s work in this recent post:

The Post-Evangelical Post

As white evangelical hegemony ended, white Christian nationalist minority rule began.

White evangelicals in America have been heavily scrutinized—and rightly so—since the 2016 election cycle. Their widespread support of Trump & Trumpism escorted an unqualified, megalomaniacal, corrupt, amoral real estate “magnate” and reality-tv “star” to the White House…

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4 years ago · 5 likes · Blake Chastain

For resources on white evangelicalism & Christian nationalism, check out the entire first season of Powers & Principalities:

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Thanks for reading - be sure to subscribe, at $4, $6, or $8/month to receive ad-free podcast feeds & more. I donate 25% of net proceeds to White Homework & The Religious Exemption Accountability Project.

“Williams frequently spoke of his desire to make Medium a place for high-quality writing, one that elevated the national conversation. His annual appearances in the New York Times proclaiming that the internet was broken and that he intended to fix it, became a running gag among a certain set of media obsessives. (OK, maybe just me.)

And yet by last year Williams was confronted by the fact that his revenues were being largely dictated by what performed well on search engines — the same business logic of the low-quality content farms of the late 2000s. It wasn’t a terrible business, exactly. But it wasn’t the business Williams had set out to build — nor was it the business he had hired for.

And so for the second time in his tenure as CEO — the first had been in 2015, when he laid off 50 people in a pivot away from advertising toward subscriptions — Williams upended the lives of dozens of journalists and flushed them off the platform.”

Read the whole thing here:

Platformer

Ev Williams gives up

Few tech CEOs can claim to have steered the course of online conversation more than Ev Williams. In 1999 he co-founded Blogger, which helped to take blogging mainstream with a well designed, free tool that sold to Google four years later. In 2006 Will…

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4 years ago · 31 likes · Casey Newton

¡Hola Papi!

I'm Looking for Awe

¡Hola Papi! is the preeminent deranged advice column from writer and author John Paul Brammer, now living on Substack! If you’ve ever wanted advice from a Twitter-addled gay Mexican with anxiety, here is your chance. Support this column by sharing it and subscribing below. Send Papi a letter at holapapiletters@gmail.com…

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4 years ago · 19 likes · John Paul Brammer

I love their response to a question from an atheist about whether one needs to participate in religion in order to feel something akin to awe (emphasis mine):

“There’s an architecture to holy things, isn’t there? When you enter an elaborate cathedral with its ornate pillars that lead you, an ant, to crane your neck up, up, up to the heavens, past the painted ceilings to a sky we don’t fully understand, heavens teeming with angels and gods and beings that defy logic, that’s glamor at work. 

This is the desired effect, meticulously planned by people who knew how to inspire it in you. The same effect, or something similar to it, can be achieved, for example, by a drag queen in a costume that looks like it was made by aliens from outer space. Though there’s a real person beneath the ensemble, the point isn’t to be a real person at all, but a vision, a gleaming spectacle meant to make you feel small in its presence. “Goodness,” one might think, “how strange, how beautiful.” 

Returning to your question: rituals are all well and good, but they are not the only route to experiencing the sense of awe you’re seeking. Because what is awe but a sublime sensation of smallness, a brief and exhilarating brush against the vast and the utterly incomprehensible? We build churches on top of mysteries because faith flows from the spring of the unknown. We worship, fear, hate, and tremble before what we don’t understand.” 

Religious traditions can add to our sense of reverence and wonder—but they aren’t required to feel them.

Religions can shed light and cast shadows. Our own histories, and the trauma we carry because of them, determines our willingness to bear both.

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