Historian Giada Pizzoni uncovers how Catholic women in 18th-century Italy resisted sexual harassment in the confessional—reminding us that, tragically, abuse in religious circles is nothing new and has always demanded courage to confront. theconversation.com/how-catholic...

Son of God, Son of Mary (art by Jose Luis Marin) h/t Karen Swallow Prior

Gen Z’s “performative male” trend shows young men awkwardly—but revealingly—experimenting with softer masculinity in a culture that demands change yet mocks those who try. theconversation.com/the-rise-of-...

Great post by Alan Hirsch. The quiet spiritual discipline underneath all of this is trust: trust that God has embedded resurrection logic into the very DNA of his people. open.substack.com/pub/alanhirs...

What if the most hopeful character in It’s a Wonderful Life is the one we barely notice? Essay out today. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Most of us picture Jesus born in a stable after being turned away from an inn—but a Middle Eastern biblical scholar suggests the Gospel of Luke tells a quieter, more human, and more radical story. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Let AI serve your tools and tasks, but guard the irreducible human work—presence, promise, judgment, and faithful response—because the divine image lives not in efficiency or creativity alone, but in your unrepeatable, committed way of being human. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Las Vegas isn’t a hollow simulacrum. It's a brutally honest mirror of American life—where desire, work, nostalgia, and grit collide. Will we cling to a dying past or use this strange desert city to imagine a more democratic, creative future?

Mr. Gower barely appears in It’s a Wonderful Life, but his story may be its quiet moral heart—new Substack essay out Tuesday.

Colleges are sleepwalking into an AI era where students outsource their work & professors pretend not to notice. Yascha Mounk says they must double down on teaching real thinking & real AI fluency by separating no-AI assessments from AI-enabled ones. www.persuasion.community/p/why-ill-en...

As people increasingly get their news from AI, even factually accurate summaries can subtly shape opinions through biased framing, raising new concerns about trust, transparency, and who controls information. open.substack.com/pub/theconve...

If there’s a real “deep we” in Christianity, it begins with the Trinity; today’s piece traces how Father, Son, and Spirit still hold the center. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Proof that network television as we have known it is dead. And anyone who can’t stream from YouTube to their TVs is out of luck. www.cbc.ca/news/enterta...

Alicia Kennedy argues that today’s “foodie” must evolve from aesthetic posting to informed advocacy—caring not just about flavors, but the systems and inequities behind every bite. yalereview.org/article/alic...

Across Christian traditions, no one claims to know Judas’s final fate. Today’s Substack piece reflects on judgment, mercy, and what Scripture’s silence invites. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Judas’s story is more open-ended than we pretend. Tomorrow’s essay examines how Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions handle that silence.

Comments on the People website indicate the hatred that seems to come so easily to some.

Should we treat animals and even future AIs with moral concern in proportion to the probability that they can suffer—meaning you don’t have to save every ant, but you should probably save the one drowning in front of you? aeon.co/essays/an-an...

The 21st-century version of Salem is the ChatGPT Witch Trials. Being accused of using AI when you didn’t. Heavens forbid you use an em-dash, parallelism, or follow the rule of three. — Jordan Vale

Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community. Let him who is not in community, beware of being alone. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Before the internet, theme parks routinely did everything Leavenworth says it can’t do now, just more manually & locally. In trading resilience & human discretion for efficiency, many organizations lost their analog backups, so when the digital system goes down, everything does.

A daughter realizes her Boomer mom’s constant “…” isn’t confusion or menace but a generational way of adding tone, hesitation, and humanity to a medium that flattens everything. granta.com/connecting-t...

What if Christian nonviolence isn’t naïve idealism or a policy proposal, but the church’s most radical witness in an age when faith and nationalism are increasingly confused? www.plough.com/en/topics/ju...

A thoughtful overview of the annihilation debate that takes John Stott seriously—reminding us, especially amid reactions to figures like Kirk Cameron, that careful biblical humility is not the same thing as theological compromise. www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/ar...

A thoughtful overview of the annihilation debate that takes John Stott seriously—reminding us, especially amid reactions to figures like Kirk Cameron, that careful biblical humility is not the same thing as theological compromise. www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/ar...

“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.“ — Roger Scruton

Before our loud disagreements, there is a deep and stubborn Christian “we” worth noticing again. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

A Tewa writer contends that Georgia O’Keeffe’s beloved “O’Keeffe Country” sits on Indigenous and Hispano homelands—so while her art inspires, its possessive, colonial framing also erases; honoring the work means restoring the people and names it left out.

“Tools are absolutely never truly neutral. All tools shape us somehow, whether we realize it or not. We would do well to choose tools that shape us toward what we want to become, rather than away from it.” open.substack.com/pub/cobydoll...

Australia’s world-first social media ban for under-16s is now live, and governments worldwide are watching closely as they weigh their own mix of bans, age checks, and parental-consent models to keep kids safe online. theconversation.com/australias-s...

Blurry, low-quality videos are becoming AI’s favorite disguise—so until detection catches up, don’t trust what you see online without verifying the source. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

A forgotten network of magical women may have secretly shaped Aradia—and with it the origins of modern Wicca. publicdomainreview.org/essay/roma-l...

New today: an exploration of why we reuse tea bags but treat reused coffee pods like an act of despair. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Just published: a look at why tea gets multiple steeps but coffee pods get only one shot at glory. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

A water leak at the Louvre in Paris has damaged hundreds of books, exposing further issues at the world’s largest museum after a spectacular heist in October. cnn.it/4rI3nMX

Did Martin Luther’s own anti-semitism, arguably based on anti-Judaism and not anti-semitism but undeniably wrong, contribute to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis? Expound.

The archdiocese's $300 million fund was less than the settlement reached w/the Diocese of Rockville Centre. In 2024 a judge approved a bankruptcy settlement for the Diocese to pay $320 million to 600 victims of clergy sexual abuse. www.usatoday.com/story/news/n... via @USATODAY

Publishing tomorrow: a reflection on the strange double standard between re-steeping tea and re-brewing coffee.

We used to read to think; now we scroll to obey—the decline of literacy isn’t about technology, it’s about class. thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

CRISPR-powered de-extinction (hello, “dire wolves”) promises ecological wonder but raises hard questions about animal welfare, authenticity, and playing God instead of protecting the species we still have. philosophynow.org/issues/170/D...

The essay is up: a birthday, a feast day, and the surprising ways their light overlaps. open.substack.com/pub/judsonta...

Posting tomorrow: a Substack reflection on St. Nicholas Day and the daughter whose life keeps his virtues close to home.

The modern tea bag was accidentally invented in 1908 when a merchant's packaging was mistaken for an infuser. New Substack coming Tuesday.

Ancient Athenian ideals of equal voice and courageous truth-telling offer a roadmap for restoring healthier, more democratic discourse in today’s algorithm-shaped social media world.

Dorian Gray endures because its themes—youth worship, hidden desire, moral repression, and the cost of living a divided life—speak even more loudly to our tech-saturated, beauty-obsessed, and LGBTQ-aware modern world. www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/1...