That Was The Week That Was
July 6-12, 2025
This week I belatedly celebrated three years on Substack, warned new college students about the dangers of depending on AI, shared my summer reading list, and gave virtual tours of three World War I battlefields. Elsewhere:
• The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia has committed “manifestly unlawful conduct… on a massive scale” since first invading Ukraine in 2014.
• At least for those of us who came of age in the Nineties, it’s hard to believe that it’s been thirty years since the Srebrenica massacre.
• Historian Randall Balmer looked back at the 100th anniversary of the Scopes Trial, whose fundamental issues “are still contested today.”
• There are strong arguments to be made for progressive positions in politics, ethics, and other fields, but simply asserting that you’re on the right side of history is not one of them.
• At Chris Armstrong’s Substack, my former Bethel colleague is revisiting one of our favorite topics: the history of Pietism.
• Not a new question for my readers, but one that’s worth revisiting: what’s the value of denominations when more and more Christians attend non-denominational churches?
• It’s hard to believe that Christianity in America is going to be helped by the IRS making it easier for churches to involve themselves in partisan politics.
• The latest target for MAGA anger: The Man of Steel (not Stalin).
• Maybe not surprisingly, morale is low and frustration is high among Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
• One of the most important warnings against presidential aggrandizement came from an FDR appointee to the Supreme Court who concurred in a ruling against Harry Truman.
• Despite the policies of the current administration, the push for renewable energy does continue, with solar power taking particularly impressive strides forward.
• Like many Americans, “today’s Texans expect to live relatively comfortably in a volatile environment—a human triumph over nature,” but as the terrible floods there remind us, “human activity seems to be tipping that balance in the opposite direction.”
• Elsewhere in the Lone State State, Baylor University decided to rescind a grant from a Baptist foundation meant to support study into “the disenfranchisement and exclusion of LGBTQ individuals and women within congregations….”
• I’ve often described
as one of my go-to analysts for Christian higher education, but he also pays attention to what’s going wrong in public universities.• One more sector of higher ed negatively affected by federal spending cuts: ROTC.
• How can AI go wrong? Take a look at what’s become of Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.
• Finally, nine-year old Chris (who played a Middle Ages-themed board game called Crossbows and Catapults) would have loved to see a trebuchet in action.