Parental Controls, Music, MAiD, Aslan

Sales & Deals

Today’s Kindle deals include some newer and older books. There’s quite a collection of C.S. Lewis today if that’s of interest.

Recommended Reading

Wirecutter wants to help parents understand some of the refinements to Apple’s parental controls that come with iOS 27.

Apple’s parental controls let you manage everything from screen time to what apps wind up on your kid’s iPhone. But the latest version of Apple’s iPhone software, iOS 27, refines those controls even further, making setup and management even easier while expanding what’s under your control.

The same updated parental controls are built into iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, and you’ll need to upgrade to the latest versions across all your devices in your family to take full advantage of the new tools.

I’ve been using parental controls for a few years to make sure my teenage daughter is accessing age-appropriate apps and not staring too long at a screen. I spent the summer testing the beta version of Apple’s updated iOS, and I have tips for parents looking to get the most out of it.

Read: Apple Has New Parental Controls for Your Kid’s iPhone. Here Are the 6 Settings to Know About.

Griffin Gooch delivered a long article on music this week. He begins it this way: “I don’t really like Christian music.” As he continues, he explains why he doesn’t like most Christian music, and then offers his attempts at a theology of music.

Music is like a therapist for our hurricanes of emotions—our doubt or grief or joy or longings. Which is because, as Jeremy Begbie notes, “Music is capable of connoting dimensions of God’s character or nature—specifically His ‘weight’ and ‘majesty’.”

Or, as the Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft put it, “God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God.”

And as a gift wrapped with dimensions of God’s character and love, it’s capable of “appealing to the heart”—as if something about its frequencies and vibrations shiver past analytical exteriors, crawling into our inner hiding places.

This is why even non-“Christian” songs that express doubt or incompleteness or faux contentment can resonate with Christians—and why non-Christians can resonate with “Christian” songs.

Unlike Griffin, I do appreciate a great deal of Christian music, but I still enjoyed much of what he writes here.

Read: A Theology of Music.

If Canada has made one positive contribution to the world as it relates to euthanasia, it’s probably serving as an example of how quickly it can go awry. It seems clear that the U.K. rejected euthanasia in part because of the Canadian example of what it can become. Hopefully other countries also pay attention.

Writing for TGC Canada, Ray Pennings explains how it came to this.

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) regime has undergone one of the most rapid expansions of any assisted dying system in the world since it was legalized in 2016. Originally introduced through Bill C-14, MAiD was limited to competent adults suffering from grievous and irremediable medical conditions whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” However, successive legislative changes and evolving clinical interpretation have broadened eligibility while reducing procedural safeguards. Today, MAiD accounts for roughly one in every 20 deaths, meaning Canada has the second-highest rate of assisted deaths in the world.

The Netherlands remains the only jurisdiction with a higher proportion of deaths resulting from euthanasia, but it reached that level after more than two decades of legalization. Canada surpassed 3 percent of all deaths within just five years of legalizing MAiD, making it the fastest-growing assisted dying program on record.

Read: Canada’s MAiD Regime: How We Became a World Leader in Assisted Death.

We have all heard that Eastern Orthodoxy is growing and that it is drawing many of its new adherents from Protestant churches. We have probably also heard that many of these new adherents are young men. Trevin Wax did some research and gave this some thought, and his thoughts are worth reading.

Not long ago, a friend asked me about an article he’d come across online, one of those stories combining news and analysis that makes the rounds on social media and stirs up conversation among the Twittering class. The gist went something like this: There’s a gender gap in Baptist youth groups (they skew overwhelmingly female), while the Eastern Orthodox are attracting young men who are fed up with the effeminate nature of evangelical worship songs and teaching style.

Analysis like this shows up on a regular basis, often backed by a few anecdotes and hastily assembled statistics. Claims like this frustrate me, not because there’s nothing true in the anecdotes but because the narrative being presented isn’t borne out by the statistics, and because I suspect writers who want a certain narrative to be true will cobble together whatever fits to give their pet project or pet peeve a kind of propulsive power. Don’t you know things are moving in this direction? So get with the program!

I think this statistic is especially interesting: “There are four times as many Baptist churches in Tennessee as there are Orthodox churches in the entire country.”

Read: Are Evangelical Worship Songs Driving Young Men to Eastern Orthodoxy?

For months now, there have been rumors that in the forthcoming film adaptations of the Narnia books, Aslan will be voiced by Meryl Streep. Sure enough, this week the rumors were verified. I may have something to say about this in the future, but for now, here is Samuel James with an open letter to Greta Gerwig, who is directing them.

There are a fair number of Narnia-loving fans who are a bit put out by the decision to cast Meryl Streep as the voice of Aslan. Full disclosure: I am one of them. I think this was a mistake, but not a devastating one. I think good faith people can disagree about art without such disagreements poisoning our capacity to hear one another, or even worse, becoming instruments of self-righteousness to assure ourselves we are Better Than Them (the writer Scott Alexander calls this the “scissor” effect, and I pray it stays far away from your movie).

In the spirit of resisting this, then, I want to make a winsome and respectful case that it would have been better to cast a revered, gifted male actor to voice Aslan. You told Empire magazine that you selected Ms. Streep because she is “profound but not pretentious” and had “gravitas but not morose self-seriousness.” You said you needed someone who “could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight.” This is right-on. And Ms. Streep certainly seems more than able to deliver on this.

Read: An Open Letter to Greta Gerwig.

Also read Murray Campbell: Meryl Streep Is the New Aslan.

Writing for National Review, Noah Rothman writes about some of the craziness that was “Woke 1,” while urging that we don’t think wokeness has gone away or been defeated. In fact, “Woke 2” could be quite a lot worse.

Even though it was a movement in which she took a starring role, Ocasio-Cortez tried to blame everyone else for the excesses of wokeness.

You see, “during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” she explained to Karl — as if she hadn’t used her own muscle to open it. When there was no stigma associated with it, AOC eagerly cast herself as an avatar of wokeness. She joined her fellow radicals in calling for the abolition of federal immigration enforcement, the erasure of offensive American holidays, and “prison abolition” — all long before lockdown.

But the New York Democrat was only racing to the front of a parade already in procession. Well before the pandemic, the voters with whom Ocasio-Cortez tried to ingratiate herself booed Bernie Sanders when he endorsed the civil rights movement’s approach to dealing with “white supremacists.”

Read: The Future of Woke. (I believe you should be able to read the article without having an account.)

This Week’s Top Links

Reader Recommendations

Earlier in the week I asked what you are enjoying these days and therefore what you recommend. Here are some of the replies.

Colleen recommends Rosaria Butterfield’s book, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age.

James has been listening to James White’s free church history series and says, “I have found it very helpful for apologetics and also for my own walk.”

Rebecca recommends gardening. “I’m in the middle of harvest season, and every day as I harvest I am reminded of the way God created the world to provide a bounty of tasty foods for his creatures. Most people won’t be able to start a garden right now, but you might be able to start planning for one next year, even if it’s only a pot or two of veggies on a balcony.”

Bob enjoys the “Foundations by ICM” app. He says, “it’s basically a Genesis to Revelation study of the Bible in 180 (25 minute) audio lessons done by pastor Dick Woodward.” He and his wife listen to it together most evenings.

Lizzy suggests you consider Courage: Fighting Fear With Fear by Wayne and Joshua Mack. “This book has helped me so much with fighting the fear of man and growing in the fear of God! It is extremely thorough, Biblical and practical.”

Michael is being greatly challenged by Glen Scrivener’s book, The Air We Breathe. He says this book can make even more of an impact for those who live in a non-western culture. (See my review of this book here.)

Charissa wants you to ensure you don’t miss a classic: J.I. Packer’s Knowing God. “This book has, after a dull time, brought me to my knees with the magnificence of our God, and my puny self and faith.”