Q Marks the Spot 152 (June 2021 Treasure Map)

There’s just so much going on these days, so much that is discombobulating, disturbing, and downright dysfunctional. Trying to get one’s head around it all is hard. We need helpful voices in the midst, such as these…

• Johana Katanacho is a Palestinian Christian who wrote a helpful if all too brief introduction to praying for the current crisis in the Middle East
• Russell Moore on the alarming stats in the US (alarming, that is, to those in ministry especially) of rising ‘Nones’ and ‘ex-vangelicals’ – very powerful. “What this demands is not a rebranding, but a repentance—meaning, as the Bible does, a turnaround.”
• Michel Houellebecq isn’t normally a voice I’d normally include here: a contrarian and challenging public voice in France. I’ve only read one of his novels – brilliant and disturbing in equal measure. But hard to fault his anxiety about Euthanasia in this piece.
• It’s quite salutary to ready this critique from the late John Richardson, a  2007 critique of UK evangelicalism – has much actually changed since?
• It’s not my world at all, but there are resonances… Rod Dreher (another I don’t often read) writes that Steve Skojec has had enough after years of being a traditionalist Catholic defender.
• Nick Spencer at Theos gives a really helpful response to the Dyson report into the BBC, Martin Bashir, and Princess Diana business.

Something a bit more optimistic:

• Long-term environmental activist, sceptic, and even (at one point) Wiccan, Paul Kingsnorth has come to faith and been baptized. The Cross and the Machine is fascinating and prophetic