Of all the predictions Alexis de Tocqueville made while surveying the youthful United States, one of the boldest concerned religion. Notwithstanding Protestantism’s apparent American dominance, the Frenchman prophesied that Roman Catholicism would be the long-term victor in a democratic age. “Our posterity will tend more and more to a single division into two parts,” he wrote in Democracy in America, with “some relinquishing Christianity entirely, and others returning to the bosom of the Church of Rome.”

The last few years have given that prediction new life. From the spate of traditionalist-inclined college converts to the heretofore secular humanists who have thrilled to Pope Leo XIV’s critique of artificial intelligence, it often feels like Catholicism is the strongest religious alternative to post-Christian tribalism, nihilism, and transhumanism. Writing for the Catholic magazine Commonweal, Wesleyan University’s Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, himself a non-Catholic, envisions “a Catholic century,” in which the church’s thought becomes a “default option” for people seeking the common good amid liberalism’s crisis and AI-driven dehumanization.

As a Catholic I have a similar reading of the intellectual situation. But it’s also essential to look beyond the intelligentsia to assess the health and future of religion. And in the wider culture, the form of Christianity that’s most adapted to late-modern America is clearly not the Church of Rome. It’s evangelical Protestantism. The vibes of a Catholic moment are real enough, but evangelicalism’s resilience is our era’s more fundamental fact.

You can see that resilience across almost every means of measurement: conversion rates, retention rates, identification rates, church attendance, intensity of belief. A recent overview from Ryan Burge, the religion data analyst, showed that evangelicals have maintained a roughly steady share of the U.S. population since the 1970s, while both Catholicism and the so-called “mainline” denominations (Congregationalist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and so on) that once dominated American Christianity have seen marked decline. In the 2020s, evangelicals are more than twice as likely to attend church weekly as Catholics. They are also twice as likely to describe religious faith as “very important” in their lives.

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For all the buzz around a ‘Catholic century,’ evangelicalism is the denomination best placed to thrive in contemporary America. https://t.co/e3hTYPNEmb

— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 22, 2026

Alexander Hermann, a researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said median homes used to cost three times the median income or less in 75 of the nation’s largest 100 housing markets in 1990. Ask The Post AIDive deeper

Today, that’s true in only three out of 100 markets.

According to data provided to The Washington Post by the Harvard center, the average price-to-income ratio of homes shot up in the 2000s when interest rates were low. Amid today’s high rates, it hasn’t come down. It’s much harder to afford a house with a high interest rate when the house itself is far pricier.

“By price-to-income and other metrics, home buying was a lot more affordable, even if interest rates were high,” Hermann said, noting that even a low rate that makes the monthly payment manageable wouldn’t help prospective buyers who can’t afford the down payment on a house five times their income.

“The difference between now and the ’70s and ’80s … is that prices were definitely lower then, and the supply challenges were not the same,” Hermann said.

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Page One:“.. median homes used to cost three times the median income or less in 75 of the nation’s largest 100 housing markets in 1990.Today, that’s true in only three out of 100 markets.”@washingtonpost https://t.co/mXIUisNcXg

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) October 19, 2026

Pope Leo XIV has taken as his motto “In Illo uno unum”: In the one Christ we are one. Last November he joined Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and other Orthodox representatives to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea. The pope and the ecumenical patriarch affirmed in a joint declaration their churches’ orientation toward “the hoped-for restoration of full communion.” Even Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, who leads one of the Orthodox churches most skeptical about Rome, has expressed hope that relations “will progressively develop for a joint witness to Christ.”

These symbolic gestures don’t directly address the longstanding theological barriers, but there has been some progress over the past several years. The 2023 Alexandria Document was an important step toward a joint understanding of papal authority, though not all Orthodox churches ratified the statement.

Patriarch Bartholomew, for his part, has prayed that the obstacles of the filioque—Rome’s teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, rather than from the Father alone—and papal infallibility be resolved so that they “no longer serve as stumbling blocks to the communion of our churches.” The patriarch mentioned these two obstacles intentionally, and a joint international commission plans to examine them head-on over the next several years.

But reunion is the work of all believers, not just hierarchs and theologians.

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From @WSJopinion: Two churches divided by a common faith. The estrangement between Orthodox Christians and Catholics is a scandal, writes Dmitri Solzhenitsyn. https://t.co/wUfuzWTElQ

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 16, 2026

Although we differ on the specifics, both of us believe in hell. This makes us part of a shrinking majority. Only 59 percent of Americans today believe in hell. That’s down from 71 percent in 2001. But these figures, while striking, fail to capture the remarkable shift currently underway in the United States. No one talks about hell much anymore, at least not publicly—not even religious people. We’ve both attended weekly religious services for most of our adult lives, and there’s just no other way to put it: Hell comes up less.

Hannah Arendt was one of the few modern philosophers who grasped the political consequences of losing belief in hell, writing, “The most significant consequence of the secularization of the modern age may well be the elimination from public life, along with religion, of the only political element in traditional religion, the fear of hell.” The contemporary retreat from hell has any number of causes, many of them understandable. As pastor Robert Golding notes, modern people find the concept of hell “illogical, unnecessary, and cruel.” Innovations in criminal justice now emphasize rehabilitation over mere punishment and bristle at the thought that anyone—even hardened criminals—deserves endless punishment or, worse, death.

Many readers will, no doubt, scoff at this idea. They might protest, “I could never believe in hell!” That’s okay. We’re not going to try to convince you to believe in it. One need not believe in hell to grasp its importance or its utility.

For the good of our democracy, you should want your religious neighbours to take their belief in hell more seriously—not less. And even if you don’t believe in hell, you should take some time to ponder its political utility and ask yourself how you intend to make up for its absence in your own life.

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Hell can be good for democracy because it helps us delay judgment until some unspecified point in the future, allowing us to "chill."My essay in @commentmag with @matthewkaemingk adapted from our new book CAN RELIGION SAVE DEMOCRACY? 🧵https://t.co/6cqdSCgRvE

— Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid) October 13, 2026

Given the lack of evidence of any mass radical ideology of Christian nationalism, then, why does that narrative gain so much traction in today’s discourse? We can point to a few reasons. 

First, as the country has become more progressive in many ways, those who support the idea of a Christian nation are now further from the mainstream and thus look more extreme than they used to even if their views haven’t much changed. 

Second, there is a group of politicians, theologians, and right-wing influencers who really do advocate for radical ideologies that can be reasonably labeled “Christian nationalist” in the most alarming sense of the phrase. It’s easy to confuse those very visible cases with the more moderate expressions we find in population data. 

Third, it’s fair to say that the image of right-wing politics has gotten uglier over the past decade, meaning politically conservative Christianity suffers from guilt by association.

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Racist theocrats do exist in America. But most conservative Christians—even those who want a “Christian nation”—don’t share their beliefs or goals.Sociologist of religion Jesse Smith examines 3 myths about Christian nationalism: https://t.co/xMKPQy6JJ4

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 12, 2026

The late conservative icon William F. Buckley released God and Man at Yale in 1951, at age twenty-four. This polemic, released as Yale turned 250 years old, wielded the unique knowledge of a recent graduate to contend that that the Yale faculty were actively inculcating students in secularism while dismissing religion as “superstition”; that this malfeasance went far beyond mere open-mindedness (and that it would be undermining even if relativism were its end); and that Yale faculty were simultaneously indoctrinating students in an anti-capitalist economic ideology that threatened America’s system of limited government while instigating admiration for collectivism and ultimately, socialism. 

By the time I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 2000s, the notion that the “tenured radicals” comprising an ivy league faculty would so much as pretend to conceal their investment in secular orthodoxy—or profess anything other than collectivist economics (which they, of course, do not practice)—seemed implausible on its face. 

By then, the venal bargain that Tyler Austin Harper lambastes in his recent essay in The Atlantic had long since been made, albeit in a less extreme form: influential faculty in the humanities and social sciences “discover” and “study” wild theories about race, sex, and gender—the crazier and more inexplicable to normal people the better—all while ratcheting up student debt and outsourcing ever more teaching to poorly paid adjunct instructors without benefits.  

Yet meanwhile—at least during my time at Penn—most of the students, even the ones majoring in the humanities, intended to go into business or some other lucrative field anyway. The real goal was not self-sacrificial do-gooding or a restructuring of society to better serve the poor, but fluency in an esoteric, elite language in which to express the most sophisticated brand of virtue-signaling available.  

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“I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale [1951] https://t.co/ciHjFOkJZU

— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) October 2, 2026

I was due to be a Gen X-er. By waiting a week past my due date, I not only lost my father his 1980 tax deduction but also became a Millennial. Not that being born in the first few days of a sociologically designated generation (or claiming a cool label like “Cusper” or “Xennial”) is really that much of a distinction. But I have come to realize that entering one’s generational cohort at the beginning of an arbitrary twenty-year span means not being quite so wholly subsumed in the zeitgeist as are one’s slightly younger peers.  

Add to that a family whose scant middle-class means and slight Luddite tendencies meant that we were never technological early adopters. Multiply that by a choice to homeschool when such an election still produced a marked cultural wince. Subtract any culturally defiant choices such as those of my friends who did not even own a television. It totals a childhood not outside the mainstream culture—certainly not paddling against it—but holding water as the cultural drift moved us all along.  

From the vantage point of midlife, I am deeply grateful for an upbringing that walked through the ’80s and ’90s with a good deal of cultural foot-dragging, but I have also come to believe that this sort of cautious, reluctant, belated travel through innovation is beneficial to everyone in every generation at every time. Most of us cannot drop off the grid, but almost all of us can wait a little longer before buying into new technologies for our homes and families. These small “not yet” choices help to form us and our children into more intentional and humane people, better able to use technology than to be used by it, and to assess the loss that accompanies technological advance as well as the obvious gains.  

I can remember the time before my family bought our first microwave. Or television with a remote control. Or cordless phone. Or VCR. Or computer. Moreover, in most cases, I also recall a vague, childish knowledge of the grownup discussions going on for months before such innovations were ceremoniously purchased and ensconced in our home. In the haziness of memory at least, I am aware of a prevailing ethos that we didn’t really need that new technology, not in any pressing way.  

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Best-selling British author Os Guinness never planned to be a writer. America helped make him one, with a little help from Switzerland. Since then, hundreds of thousands of readers have turned to the Christian public intellectual to understand both their walk with God and their place in the world.

Guinness’s 1998 title The Call, perhaps his most widely recognized book, helps believers discover their God-given purpose in life. The Global Public Square (2013) addresses religious freedom and the role of faith in society. And A Freedom Like No Other, published this year, continues his esteem of the American republic and its constitutional liberty.

But this liberty is also at risk, Guinness cautions. A visit to the US in 1968 began his intellectual relationship with America, as he traveled from Harvard to Berkeley amid political assassinations, race riots, and a liberal counterculture upending traditional values. And as he interviewed leading figures from the right and the left, he came to a startling conclusion.

“I hardly met any evangelicals who really understood what was going on,” he said in a 2025 interview.

Guinness’s travels led to his first book in 1973, The Dust of Death, a critique of cultural trends in the 1960s. For a man who never planned to be a writer, he proved prolific in the decades that followed, penning more than 30 titles.

Read it all.

Os Guinness Still Challenges Christians to Think

The tumult of the 1960s sparked a literary journey that hasn’t stopped for the prolific social critic.https://t.co/XnmWTZZodU

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) September 30, 2026

In short, The Death of Religion? insists that religion is not dying; it’s merely changing. Christianity may be declining in the West but it’s growing elsewhere. “The fastest-growing areas of Christianity are in the Global South,” the authors state, “particularly sub-Saharah Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.” For those who are Christians, this is an important reminder that the work of God continues throughout the world, with Christianity continuing to advance in many places—and this is reason to celebrate.

In fact, Johnson and Kidd project that Pentecostals will continue to experience significant growth and may surpass a billion adherents by 2050, asserting that in this competitive religion economy, these are the groups that have managed to thrive. And while there are good reasons to criticize the consumeristic mindset of some Christian groups, “at some basic level, churches still have to account for congregants’ perceived needs.” Pentecostal congregations, apparently, do just that.

The authors acknowledge, however, that “the most salient story of Christian decline in American history has been the shocking collapse of the mainline denominations since the 1960’s.” They discuss the decline of several different denominations in American and around the world. The Methodist church, for example, has been deteriorating in the U.S. since the 1960s, but globally the denomination is doing very well. The Episcopal Church has a similar story. The denomination has not died yet, but “it is about as close to death as a well-heeled, historically influential denomination can get in contemporary America.” But like Methodism, the worldwide Anglican church, of which the Episcopal Church in America is but one part, appears to be growing in the Global South, and conservative Anglicans have formed new denominational structures such as the Anglican Church in North America that are trying to partner with like-minded groups around the world.

Read it all.

Is religion dying?

It's easy to think so, but the story is more complicated.

A new book by sociologist Byron Johnson and historian @ThomasSKidd argues that the decline of religion has been greatly overstated. @sopresley reviews "The Death of Religion?" and explores why… pic.twitter.com/qXrsphf7TQ

— Acton Institute (@ActonInstitute) September 30, 2026

I once witnessed a theatre director giving notes to a cast of actors preparing to perform on stage. She said to them: “Imagine, just before you go on, that you’ve forgotten all your lines, forgotten the whole play, forgotten all the work you’ve put into rehearsals and preparation. Forget it all, and then step into the light, into the story.”

But forgetting presupposes the memory you are to forget. For the actor, the truth of their performance arises out of this process of remembering and forgetting. And then you step into the light, into the story. . .

I want to say this is truth reclaimed for meaning, truth as meaning. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says: “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (18.37) So, the actor’s truth and the Christian’s truth are alike in this respect: it is something we come to belong to; it is how we live our part.

Rather than the truth being raw, or coherent with other truth statements, or somehow correspondent with reality out there, the truth is a memory of an encounter with meaning, something to which we can belong and which re-members us in turn. In short, it’s personal. More, it’s a Person.

Whether or not you try to record this truth on paper is ultimately immaterial. But you must record it in your heart.

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‘The love we share at Christmas is a refuge. It replenishes our depleted batteries and allows us to go out again into the world’: The 2023 Country Life Christmas message, by Revd Colin Heber-Percy https://t.co/Vedsc9ywQX pic.twitter.com/97trNbTmlt

— Country Life (@Countrylifemag) December 25, 2023

When Sheen appeared in his Emmy-winning show, “Life is Worth Living,” from 1952 to 1957, he was an auxiliary bishop in New York. He proved a natural for the medium: handsome with a beautiful voice and mesmerizing eyes. Sheen used no props except a chalkboard and chalk. He focused on such serious topics as philosophy, history and religion. He rarely, if ever, used notes.

“Life is Worth Living” routinely drew up to 30 million weekly viewers, becoming for a time the most popular television show in the country. Through both the show and his real-world ministry, Sheen inspired countless conversions.

Every bishop today wants to know Sheen’s secret. How did he enrapture millions of souls despite political, religious and geographical differences? How did he win converts while being outspoken about controversial truths?

The answer can primarily be found in Sheen’s prayer life, which inspired genuine love for his fellow human beings. On the day of his ordination in 1919, Sheen committed himself to a daily hour of prayer. He kept this promise until the day he died in 1979, despite a hectic schedule and major pastoral responsibilities. Sheen was so faithful to this promise that he drew his last breaths before the Eucharist.

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America’s first bishop turned saint? Catholic leaders have a lot to learn from Blessed Fulton Sheen, master of the TV era, writes @ArchbishopOKChttps://t.co/nDX6j4ay62

— Wall Street Journal Opinion (@WSJopinion) September 25, 2026

As many atheist philosophers (such as the eminent John Gray) have noted, the New Atheists’ philosophical arguments were never very good. Moreover, their arguments seemed strangely anachronistic following many of the great scientific discoveries of the 20th century.

Consider first modern cosmology. Cosmologists have discovered that the universe, contrary to the expectations of those who long portrayed it as eternal, probably had a beginning. Multiple lines of evidence from observational astronomy support this conclusion. Developments in theoretical physics (such as the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which states that any universe that is expanding – as ours is – cannot be infinite in the past), also back it up.

Nobel laureate Arno Penzias, who helped make a key discovery supporting the Big Bang theory, noted the obvious connection between its affirmation of a cosmic beginning and the concept of divine creation. “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses…[and] the Bible as a whole,” he wrote in 1978.

Atheist physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking claimed to explain the beginning of the universe from “nothing”, but their “nothing” turned out to be a set of mathematical laws that allegedly pre-existed (or existed independently of) the material universe. But maths has no causal power. Mathematical equations are inherently conceptual. Thus, the attempt to circumvent the problem of the beginning with what was called “quantum cosmology” led inexorably back to the need for a pre-existing mind.

Second, physicists have discovered that we live in a kind of “Goldilocks universe”. In other words, the fundamental laws and parameters of physics are finely tuned against all odds to make a life-friendly universe.

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Who wrote the digital code?

"Discoveries in molecular biology have revealed digital code in even the simplest living cells. Francis Crick and James Watson elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. Crick then developed his famed “sequence hypothesis”. He proposed that… pic.twitter.com/itAlWDyGN2

— Nancy Pearcey (@NancyRPearcey) September 23, 2026

Finally, we will ask what went wrong.

The postmortem will be this. Many people panicked about the possibility of strong AI models killing us all. That fear was not based on peer-reviewed scientific research showing a high chance of doom, nor was doom indicated in any market prices of the time, including measures of risk. It was a story, just like this is a story, and it was spread on social media. The key point of the doom story was that, if America keeps the No. 1 spot in AI models, the models will be so strong they will do us all in, or lead to unimaginable catastrophes. We were too afraid to have America keep the lead, forgetting that if truly destructive AI is our fate, the doomer scenario can come from Chinese AI as well.

Today, we cannot say for sure that the AI doom scenario is false. But is it a story we wish to live by? Is belief in it a good way to protect and extend life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Will it help us much, or for long, if it is Chinese AI that turns on us and does us in?

In my view, successful societies accept challenges and meet them. Solving problems, bit by bit, is the best way to ensure that we have the capabilities to meet big and truly existential risks, should those risks come along. Debating the chances of our doom, ex ante, on a highly speculative basis, is unlikely to provide the same kind of expertise and talent cultivation. It is instead more likely to demoralize and immobilize us.

So which America are we going to choose?

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Tyler Cowen: A Doomsday Scenario for American AI https://t.co/3qm0eVwQ3I

— Mark Semonian (@msemonian) September 21, 2026

there’s more to the effect of our modern screen life on our reading habits than merely the choice between glass and paper. The personal computers of the 1980s gave us word processing, making the typewriter obsolete; the early internet of the 1990s gave us email (I remember thinking that this was reviving the lost art of letter writing that had been killed by the telephone); and by the turn of the century the bounty promised by the web looked truly impressive: digitized books and primary sources for research, online journals, a proliferation of news and commentary. (Yes, also the logorrhea of early blog culture, now reappearing on Substack.) Then came the smartphone, the jazziest (though not the first) being the iPhone, debuting in 2007. Now in the hands of billons worldwide, these devices have fundamentally changed our daily lives, for good and for ill. They are designed to seize and keep our attention, to amuse us endlessly with ever-changing stimuli, and to lure us into an in-the-cloud world that contains much of the human race’s knowledge yet also makes us dumber. As Wolf writes: 

No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids). 

What we are all experiencing—and Wolf confesses her personal struggle to return to deep reading of books—are “decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge.” 

Convinced that consistent, attentive reading is essential for the development of both our reason and our compassion, Wolf is worried about the effects of our contemporary screens on our capacity for self-government. This is even more explicitly the concern of British writer James Marriott, a journalist at The Times. Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society has been out for a few weeks in the UK, and is soon to be published here in the U.S. (This one, dear reader, I acquired on paper from the publisher.) 

Marriott is a worried man, and he works hard not to be too alarmist—to use his indoor voice, as it were. But The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.” We fill our eyes (and now increasingly our ears, too) not with the pages of books or even with the extended narratives and arguments to be found in newspapers and magazines, but instead with TikTok and YouTube videos, podcasts, X memes, Instagram posts, and Reddit rants.  

Read it all.

“As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”https://t.co/1igjBHxPox

— Jordan J. Ballor (@JordanBallor) September 21, 2026

Mr. Kramer doesn’t shy away from pointing the finger at Germany’s newer demographic sources of antisemitism, even as he cites the latest official figures, which show right-wing extremism as the single largest identifiable source of antisemitic crime. In 2024, he says, 48.4% of antisemitic offenses were classified as right-wing, compared with 31.1% as fueled by “foreign ideology” and 11% by “religious ideology.” He stresses that “antisemitism linked to Islamist and anti-Israel milieus has risen sharply since Oct. 7 and is now a major part of the threat picture.”

And so, 25 years after it opened, Berlin’s Jewish Museum must face up to an existential challenge. It’s no longer enough to “explain Jewish culture to Germans from a Jewish perspective,” as Ms. Berg describes the institution’s founding mission. It must adapt to—and push back against—a spate of ugliness and violence in Germany that flows from sources old and new, from a resurgent right that many believe is nostalgic for a Nazi past and from an arriviste cohort of Islamist Jew-haters who teem in Germany’s cities.

“We cannot ever be complacent,” Ms. Berg says, as she navigates the barriers outside her buildings, each bollard proof of how hard it is for a German Jew to live in peace.

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Fun Fact: Daniel Libeskind, who designed the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the National Holocaust Momument in Ottawa, is the uncle of Canada's NDP leader, @avilewis. https://t.co/edrdD9AwDz

— Phil Pothen 🇨🇦 he/him (@pothen) September 9, 2026

In December, Edward Hughes and Louis Kirsch, two of the world’s leading artificial intelligence researchers, left Google. Their goal: to build an A.I. system smart enough to build a better A.I. system.

At their new London start-up, Inherent, they now spend their days working alongside a prototype called Faraday. Named for the 19th-century English physicist Michael Faraday, it gathers mountains of data capturing the daily activities of Dr. Hughes, Dr. Kirsch and Inherent’s other researchers: emails, instant messages, meeting transcripts and their ongoing chats with Faraday itself. The company then uses this data to build a better version of Faraday.

“Faraday has access to everything that goes on at the company,” Dr. Hughes said. “We want to give it data describing the process we go through, to discover something.”

Though Inherent pledges to keep humans involved in this elaborate process, many other companies are building similar technology, and some leading researchers believe A.I. systems will eventually be powerful enough to improve themselves with little or no help from human developers — a mind-bending goal that computer scientists call recursive self-improvement, or R.S.I.

Two Silicon Valley start-ups — each valued at $4 billion — are proudly pursuing this dream, and leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are chasing it too. They hope to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence that discovers drugs, creates new materials, speeds other forms of scientific discovery and, one day, surpasses human intelligence in practically every way.

Read it all.

The Liftoff Scenario That Terrifies A.I. Doomsayers: “Recursive self-improvement” is the idea that artificial intelligence could learn to build & train itself, creating exponential new progress — & risk (NYT) https://t.co/y5RXO0VbEu

— Candice Rose (@CandiceRose) September 16, 2026

In its latest (fourth) report on AI “misuse”—more essential reading—Anthropic revealed that its most popular models (Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus) are being, or have recently been, misused by a variety of Generative Threat Groups (GTGs) in “seven harm areas: cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud, biological misuse, conventional weapons development, and distillation.” In each case, AI was making bad human behavior much more effective, until Anthropic spotted what was going on.

The interesting thing is who out there is up to no good. GTG-20006 (Anthropic gives each case a number) was the inevitable Russians, “attacking military intelligence targets in Ukrainian and European governments as well as diplomatic and defense organizations and individuals connected to U.S. foreign policy.” Putin and his little green men have been doing this kind of thing for years, of course. But AI makes the mobile exploitation kit, the credential-stealing tool, and the phishing platform all work better and faster as well as helping evade detection.

I have long shared the view articulated by Gregory Conti, a professor of politics at Princeton, that “even if AI does not end life on Earth, it will destroy our way of life”.…..To understand why Conti is right, you need to grasp the four forces inexorably driving p(Doom) upward above 10 percent: Recursive self-improvement, The unscrupulousness of Sam Altman, The complete confusion in Washington, The utter cynicism in Beijing.

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Niall Ferguson: AIpocalypse Now
It’s not just the next 9/11, enabled by AI, that is coming. It’s the next global financial crisis. It’s the next pandemic. It might even be the next world war. What, if anything, can we do about it? https://t.co/DRLqpVxqKF

— Juan Carlos Zapata S. (@jczapata_s) September 14, 2026

Peter Green’s translation of the Odyssey keeps Homer’s repeated epithets and formulaic phrases fully intact. Achilles remains “swift-footed” whether he is fighting or sitting in his tent. Green’s English is plain and meant to be read aloud; he preserves the repeated epithets and formulaic phrases precisely because the repetition itself is part of the point. Read Green and you will hear “wine-dark sea” and “rosy-fingered dawn” exactly as Homer repeated them. 

Robert Fagles took the opposite approach. Uncomfortable with straight repetition, he worked to make the epithets contribute to the drama of each moment. Where Homer has Hector carry his “shining helmet” unchanged from line to line, Fagles makes the helmet flash repeatedly, until the device starts to feel more like a cinematic lighting effect than a Homeric formula.  

More recently, Emily Wilson made the choice consciously rather than instinctively. She explained to the Chicago Review of Books that repetition means something different depending on who is listening: in Homer’s oral culture, repetition signaled that something is important and worth listening to and remembering. Back in 2017 she shared in that same interview her belief that in a literate culture like ours, the same repetition reads instead as unimportant, something to skip. She therefore chose to preserve the feeling of Homer’s repetition through variation, rather than reproduce the exact words. Dawn still appears as often as she does in the Greek, and each appearance keeps the recurring imagery of roses, flowers, pinkness, fingers, and newness, but the phrasing changes from occurrence to occurrence. 

Wilson has since reconsidered that decision. After finishing her Iliad and living longer with the Homeric material, she returned to the Odyssey and began an entirely new translation. In a March 2026 talk at the University of Iowa titled “Realms of Gold: Re-translating Homer in the Twenty-First Century,” and in subsequent interviews, she has said that her experience has changed her understanding of repetition: she now sees more clearly how repeated phrases create patterns across the poem and help readers recognize connections between scenes. She is allowing herself more lines and syllables than in the first version precisely so that more of those repetitive elements can remain. The fact that she is willing to redo one of the most successful and widely read translations of the last decade because of this shift is rare and revealing. 

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Homer Against the Attention Economy – Public Discourse
https://t.co/X74jw8MZ7O

— rogueclassicist ~ david meadows (@rogueclassicist) September 11, 2026

The Prime Minister has pledged to change what he calls the “unacceptable” law that prohibits Roman Catholic and Jewish Prime Ministers from advising the Crown on ecclesiastical appointments.

In a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday of last week, Andy Burnham, who is the first Prime Minister to be a Roman Catholic on taking office (News, 4 September), said that the restrictions were an “antiquated and archaic anomaly”.

The “restrictions set out in the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 and the Jews Relief Act 1858 prevent persons professing the Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths only from advising the Sovereign on appointments to the Church of England and Church of Scotland”, he said.

As such, Mr Burnham had transferred his constitutional responsibility for advising the Sovereign on church appointments to the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Alex Norris.

Read it all.

EXC: Legislation to remove the constitutional bar on Catholics advising the King on Church of England appointments being introduced in the Commons tomorrow

It’s our first Catholic prime minister’s first billhttps://t.co/ojXo0L6Yuv

— Patrick Maguire (@patrickkmaguire) September 14, 2026

The Man Behind the Red Bandana from Drew Gallagher on Vimeo.

From there:

I got up and turned on the TV, and there was just this big black hole in the World Trade Center. And there was just smoke billowing out of it. I called my sister Cathy I said, “You might wanna wake up, turn in your TV and take a look at what they’re showing.” The commentator’s saying that it’s an American Airlines plane. And I casually asked Cathy, I said, “Do you know where Betty is?” And she says, “Betty’s supposed to be flying out of Boston.” And I said, “Do you think Betty is on that plane?” We just didn’t know. So I left a phone call on her cellphone, just asking her when she’s landed or anywhere you’re on the ground, to just give us a call and tell us you’re okay. And there was no call from Betty. I called American Airlines, and it was only then that it was confirmed that Betty was on the flight.

I just want to add, through your passing, Betty, our family’s gotten very very close. Dad, who’s quite stoic, doesn’t really say a whole lot, man of the family, one day told us that he cries himself to sleep. Even to this day, he just keeps staying up watching TV, hoping somehow that you’ll reappear. And we’re all still waiting for that phone call from you to tell us that you’re okay. We just miss you a whole lot.

You may find the transcript of Betty Ong’s conversation reporting the hijacking from the American airlines plane here.

Every year on 9/11 I take the kids to ground zero to write down names engraved in the memorial. Then we go home and look them up to talk about their stories. Today, my youngest was writing a name when a woman walked up and asked her what she was doing. When she explained, the… pic.twitter.com/Xd8ZknmOX1

— Samantha Steele Ponder (@samponder) September 12, 2026

This site is intended as a place to remember and celebrate the lives of those lost on September 11, 2001. It includes Guest Books and profiles for each of those lost.

It is well worth your time to explore it thoroughly today.

September 11, 2001, as reported the next day by the New York Times: pic.twitter.com/DH6QUFnDgo

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) September 11, 2026

“The cloudless sky filled with coiling black smoke and a blizzard of paper—memos, photographs, stock transactions, insurance policies—which fluttered for miles on a gentle southeasterly breeze, across the East River into Brooklyn. Debris spewed onto the streets of lower Manhattan, which were already covered with bodies. Some of them had been exploded out of the building when the planes hit. A man walked out of the towers carrying someone else’s leg. Jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly.

“The air pulsed with sirens as firehouses and police stations all over the city emptied, sending the rescuers, many of them to their deaths. [FBI agent] Steve Bongardt was running toward the towers, against a stream of people racing in the opposite direction. He heard the boom of the second collision. “There’s a second plane,” someone cried.”

–Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Random House [Vintage Books], 2006), pp.404-405

11 Sept 2001: Al-Qaeda conducts #terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City and the #Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia by flying planes into the buildings. A fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. The White House or #Capitol was the likely target of that… pic.twitter.com/GxvhseKBbL

— Today In History (@URDailyHistory) September 11, 2026

Almighty God and Father who wills that all people may flourish and have abundance of life, be with us especially on this day when we remember such destruction, darkness, devastation, death and terror; help us to honor the memory of those whose lives were utterly cut short, and to believe that you can make all things new, even the most horrible things. Redeem and heal, O Holy Spirit, grant us perspective, humility, light, trust and grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Please note the following changes to our hours of operation as we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Thursday, September 10: The #911Museum will close at 3 p.m.

Friday, September 11: The #911Museum will remain closed to the public all day so that 9/11… pic.twitter.com/VigSzHl6WS

— 9/11 Memorial & Museum (@Sept11Memorial) September 10, 2026

What we have realised, over the last five years, as Save the Parish has got off the ground and started to ask the questions that should have been asked decades ago, is that what we are in danger of losing is not just some old buildings, or the clerical stipend, or one mode of training over another, but the essence of the Church of England itself.

Who are we? What is the unique ecology of the Church of England, which we love so dearly that we have got up and come here on a Saturday morning?

“If the Church of England were to fail,” said John Keble, “it should be found in my parish.”

Or, listen to Justin Welby, who, I concede isn’t often quoted by Save the Parish: “you could lose the House of Bishops tonight…[and] it’d be a couple of years before there was any noticeable impact on the Church of England. Whereas if you got rid of all the parishes and the churchwardens and the laypeople it would be noticeable in about one second.”

Well, we are here for the parishes and the churchwardens and the laypeople today. And for the priests. (I do declare an interest…)

Read it all.

Last night people from across the country – lay and clergy; Evangelical, High Church, Solidly Middle, Anglo Catholic; Tory, LibDem, Labour – gathered to pledge to Save the Parish.

Alison Milbank, @revstrott, and I all shared our thoughts – have a watch!https://t.co/nV43HmzWee pic.twitter.com/DuCnbEYNkt

— Marcus Walker (@WalkerMarcus) August 4, 2021

There’s a lot of talk about socialism these days, despite it’s inherently flawed premise and repeated failures, resulting in millions dying, mass starvation, widespread human suffering, readers here already know the history. Unfortunately, it’s rising again due to new promotion from people who hate America, combined to create the perfect storm since we also recently stopped promoting the story of prosperity and our information ecosystems are deeply propagandized. Also, our biased education system simply ignores past examples that might challenge some of the ideals they’re so keen to promote, which I find both annoying and civilizationally suicidal. Perhaps this is cyclical, and every civilization has to re-learn forgotten mistakes (even though we have parables that try to help, but ofc they’re unhelpful if no one reads them). So all we can do is share stories which are more instructive than dry statistics.

Today we have a fun one which takes us back to the year 1825. Here, a wealthy Welsh industrialist named Robert Owen acquired a complete American town, a plot with 20,000 acres, 160-plus buildings, working mills, workshops, barns, farmland already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony, and 1,000 people showed up in year 1, most convinced they were present at the birth of a new way of running civilization. It’s also notable that Owen wasn’t some kind of crank, before ever setting foot in Indiana he’d already made his name running textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland with shorter hours, real schools, better housing, and the mills still turned a profit. For the early 1800s that’s really impressive and illustrative of his operator skills.

Although, his prior success is exactly what made him dangerous. Owen had convinced himself that people are basically a product of their environment, where you could rearrange the environment and you rearrange the person. Kill private property, kill competition, split the rewards evenly, and cooperation just… happens, naturally, without anyone having to be talked into it, which is of course idealist and ignorant of human nature. As is always the case, a very intelligent person is unable to model the behavior of others, many of whom simply operate differently.

The experiment pulled in serious people. Real optimism, real brainpower, real $ behind it. In January 1826 William Maclure floated an entire boat of scientists and educators down the Ohio River, historians still call it the “Boatload of Knowledge.” Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it, so was naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur along with Geologists, artists, educators, people like this. So this wasn’t some kind of backwoods commune of true believers with no credentials interested in getting high. It was, arguably, one of the highest concentrations of talent in America at that moment. If intelligence and good intentions were sufficient conditions for a new economic system to work, New Harmony had every box checked.

Unfortunately, it fell apart almost immediately.

Read it all.

This week's longform idea, we're talking about the (failed) socialist utopian experiment in America that lasted two years https://t.co/395RsSU4Vp

— Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) July 28, 2026

The campaigning group Save the Parish (STP) has launched its manifesto for the elections to the next General Synod. It is calling for financial resources to be decentralised and redirected towards parish ministry to save “the essence of the Church of England itself”.

Six commitments are outlined in the manifesto, which was launched at St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield, in London, on Saturday, by the Rector, the Revd Marcus Walker. He warned of an “existential crisis” facing the Church.

The commitments, based on the group’s “founding priorities of ‘parish’, ‘priest’ and ‘people’”, are to: restore Church Commissioners’ funds to stipendiary parish ministry; direct the parish share to mission and “the cure of souls”; adopt a “charter of care that values our clergy and guards them from mental and physical exhaustion”; renew theological resourcing for theological education “which is ordinand-centred not budget-centred”; adopt a “churchgoers’ charter” that honours the volunteers who hold the parishes together; and reform the Mission and Pastoral Measure.

Fr Walker, who chairs the STP network, said: “If we want there to be a thriving parish system in a generation’s time, we have to get up and do something.

Read it all.

Good point from @WalkerMarcus. It’s the poorer parishes that suffer most from Church funds being diverted into highly paid woke diocesan posts to be Engagement Officers, Diversity Officers, Policy Officers, Media Officers, etc, etc… pic.twitter.com/gZHtv4UCrl

— Harry Phibbs (@harryph) July 25, 2026

A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

The God That Failed brought together several prominent European and American writers who had once either been members of the Communist Party or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but had eventually grown disillusioned. Each writer explained what initially attracted him to, and what eventually repelled him from, communism. The star-studded cast included Arthur Koestler, an Hungarian-born British writer now best known for his brilliant novel about communism, Darkness at Noon; French novelist André Gide; the Italian Ignazio Silone, author of Bread and Wine; British poet Stephen Spender; and two Americans, journalist and author Louis Fischer, and African American writer Richard Wright.

Read it all.

The Return of the God That Failed https://t.co/Z9aUNSWmTy

— Collin Hansen (@collinhansen) July 27, 2026

Mr. Goldman’s proposal won’t satisfy those Christians who want America to return to its Protestant roots. One of the most prominent spokesmen for Christian nationalism is Doug Wilson, an Idaho pastor and founder of a college and publishing company. His notoriety derives in part from associations with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and his objections to gay marriage, transgender medicine, abortion and even women’s suffrage.

If forced to navigate between the Scylla of secular civil religion and the Charybdis of Christian nationalism, we might look to the deeply American religion of Presbyterianism. A recent report by the Presbyterian Church in America reaffirms a proposition that American Presbyterians have believed since 1788: that freedom of religion and assembly are crucial for Christian endeavor. At the same time, the PCA approved a paper that, with slight qualifications, rejects Christian nationalism.

A small denomination, with roughly 400,000 members, the PCA took on Christian nationalism after the circulation of these views on social media and in such books as Stephen Wolfe’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism” and James D. Baird’s “King of Kings.” But the most important theme in the PCA report isn’t a direct repudiation of Christian nationalism but an affirmation of religious liberty. Liberal political orders have, “in God’s providence,” secured religious liberty, limited political power and recognized human dignity—and one of government’s duties is “to protect the free exercise of religion, including liberty of conscience.” Government should “not interfere in matters of faith” despite having a responsibility to encourage “piety, justice, [and] public order.”

Read it all.

"A recent report by the [PCA] reaffirms a proposition that American Presbyterians have believed since 1788: that freedom of religion and assembly are crucial for Christian endeavor….[and] with slight qualifications, rejects Christian nationalism." https://t.co/KrOmsIJuLl

— D G Hart (@ReallyOldLife) July 24, 2026