Weekend Beacon 5/4/25

It's been a rollercoaster of a ride, to say the least. Many of us wondered if the chaos and uncertainty would ever end. But it did. At long last, Shedeur Sanders was finally drafted in the fifth round by the Cleveland Browns. Not that I was worried—after all, every dog has his day.

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Putting Self-Reflection on Paws

Americans are increasingly crazy about their pets. I don’t say this in a negative way—I count myself among the crazies. My old Golden Retriever Wally felt like the center of my universe during my years with him. Most American pet owners view their pet as part of the family "as much as a human member," according to the Pew Research Center. For all the brouhaha over "childless cat ladies" in the last election, there is some evidence that suggests Millennial women without kids outright prefer the company of their pets to children.

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The Pessimist’s Guide to Global Affairs

There was once a time in the 1990s when Robert Kaplan was rightly regarded as a prophet.

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Crime Fiction Goes Native

Marcie Rendon was in her mid-60s when her first novel, Murder on the Red River, was published in 2017. She had written for the theater, plus a couple of children’s books, and her bio line also describes her as a “community arts activist,” but nothing she’d done up to that point would have suggested she was about to embark on what Louise Erdrich—the doyenne of Native American novelists—has described as an “addictive and authentically Native crime series propelled by the irresistible Cash Blackbear, a warm, sad, funny, and intuitive Ojibwe woman.”

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The Pronoun Wars

Most words are subject to change but least likely among them, or so until a few decades ago one would have thought, have been pronouns, those mostly two-, three-, and four-letter words that stand in for nouns: he, she, it, we, you, they, along with the possessives my, mine, yours, ours, and theirs. But we now live in a time when one may choose one’s own pronoun, which many people, especially among the young, happily do.

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And My App! Palantir’s Quest To Give AI a Moral Purpose

In a hole in the ground there lived some hobbits. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole. Silicon Valley isn’t known for those. But a respectable place in a respectable town—and yet, somehow, these hobbits ended up going out on a great adventure. They may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but they gained … well, you will see whether they gained anything in the end.

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Bad Faith Arguments

When a book’s dust jacket describes its author as an “award-winning investigative reporter” and the author begins by describing his work as “an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church,” readers might expect that, by the end of the book, something strikingly new would have been revealed. But in this case (to borrow from Richard M. Nixon) “That would be wrong.” For Philip Shenon gives the game away two sentences later when he defines “the battle for the soul of the church” in these terms: “It pits Catholics desperate for a more tolerant church—one, that in the words of Pope John [XXIII], dispenses the medicine of mercy instead of severity—against those who see that vision as heresy.”

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Onward, Christian Americans

Jonathan Rauch is asking all the right questions. "Why should secular Americans, including many who feel they have a beef with organized religion, care about the state of Christian America?" for one. For another, "What happens to our liberal democracy if American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends?" These questions, and the paucity of answers currently available to them, worry Rauch, a self-described secular gay atheist Jew. And if they are troubling enough to move Rauch to write Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, that should set off alarm bells.

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Economic Giants Collide

The much-vaunted Special Relationship between Britain and the United States hasn’t always been so special. Leaving aside the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, economic and political relations between the world’s two leading Anglo powers have often been tumultuous. In the second half of the 19th century, for example, American protectionism clashed head-on with Britain’s free trade commitments. Tensions over the Irish question plagued relations between Britain and America well into the 1920s.

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A Tale of Two Abrahams

Along comes Anthony Julius, offering his own modern midrash on the first Jew in history, Abraham. Julius's Abraham is a literary creation bound by neither fealty to traditional faith nor scholarly convention. The work, the author writes in the preface, presents "neither a historical nor an antihistorical account of Abraham," nor is it an account "written within the rabbinic imagination," i.e., it is not placing itself within the 2,000-year-old traditional Jewish interpretive history of the character. "When it is written [in the Bible] that God speaks to Abraham, I take it to refer to Abraham's inner conviction that he is in communication with God," writes the author. Julius's account is a mash-up of "philosophical argument and storytelling," a reimagining of a Freud-citing patriarch.

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