That Was The Week That Was
June 8-14, 2025
This week I thought through the state of AI in higher education, tried to explain some professorial vocabulary, and celebrated Pentecost. Elsewhere:
• The same week the Southern Baptist Convention again came close to barring churches with women pastors, SBC abuse survivor Jennifer Lyell died at age 47.
• Wherever you stand on contemporary debates about women’s ordination, women have undeniably served the church in positions of spiritual authority in the past.
• Church history can also remind us that white Christian nationalism hasn’t always been a right-wing phenomenon.
• Are evangelicals more prone than their mainline cousins to giving too much power to individual pastors?
• Since 2008, American Baptists, National Baptists, and Seventh-day Adventists have become much more likely to vote for Republicans, while the GOP has lost a decent number of non-denominational Christians.
• Most of them are fine deporting undocumented immigrants without due process, but even Republicans and white evangelicals think that it’s a bad idea to spend tens of million dollars on today’s lavish military parade in Washington, which celebrates the 250th birthday of the U.S. Army — and just so happens to coincide with the 79th birthday of its commander-in-chief.
• That’s not the only way that Donald Trump put our military in a difficult position this week: he used ostensibly non-partisan soldiers as props for a political rally, needlessly federalized National Guard units, and deployed Marines in the middle of protests, potentially trapping their officers between the obedience to civilian authority and rejection of unethical orders that their oaths require of them.
• As American democracy seems to lurch closer and closer to an inflection point, there are plenty of mass protest options today. But perhaps worship should proceed protest…
• Right now just “carving out some normality feels like defiance.”
• If you want to do something beneficial for our fraying civil society, pay for local news.
• Are faith-based media making American culture more conservative?
• Firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among American children — and the more permissive the state gun laws, the higher that number climbs.
• The fact that advances in artificial intelligence might make work more efficient and productive is not necessarily a good thing.
• How might A.I. impact Christian higher education — not at the level of individual use for paper-writing, but in starting to replace professors and tutors?
• One of the strongest predictors for student success in college: simply showing up to class.
• There’s both bad and good news when it comes to the mental health of college students.
• Finally, I was fascinated to read the obituary of the woman who helped invent the audio book — among other things, it’s a story of what you can do with a humanities major.