caseytaylor ⛪📖🦸‍♂️

@ShaneRaynor A ministry colleague was hiring for a staff position. When candidates heard "Methodist," they ran. Didn't matter if they said, "No, we're not UMC!"

I’m not convinced most non-Methodists even know there’s difference between the UMC and the GMC, or that both denominations even exist. Methodism overall seems to have a bad reputation thanks to the progressive insanity the UMC allows that has been amplified on social media.

This is the part that keeps getting buried under the raw numbers. Hegseth spent months pressuring Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to remove four decorated colonels from the one-star promotion list. Two Black men. Two women. Driscoll refused, because their records demanded it. So Hegseth pulled their names himself… which legal experts say he likely had no authority to do. The defense secretary is supposed to approve or reject the entire list, precisely to prevent this kind of targeted discrimination. Then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George - the Army’s top officer - asked to meet with Hegseth to discuss the blocked promotions. Hegseth refused to meet. Refused to discuss his decisions at all. Then he fired George. Whose term wasn’t supposed to end until September 2027. Nine U.S. officials across all four branches confirmed the NBC reporting. “There is not a single service that has been immune,” one said. The officers’ attributes being cited for removal include past support for Covid vaccine mandates… and association with Mark Milley. The Pentagon’s response to every outlet that asked: “fake news.” They didn’t dispute a single name.

🚨BREAKING: Every book you have ever read. Every novel that has ever been published. It is sitting inside ChatGPT right now. Word for word. Up to 90% of it. And OpenAI told a judge that was impossible. Researchers at Stony Brook University and Columbia Law School just proved it. They fine tuned GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and DeepSeek V3.1 on a simple task: expand a plot summary into full text. A normal use case. The kind of thing a writing assistant is built for. No hacking. No jailbreaking. No tricks. The models started reciting copyrighted books from memory. Not paraphrasing. Not summarizing. Entire pages reproduced verbatim. Single unbroken spans exceeding 460 words. Up to 85 to 90% of entire copyrighted novels. Word for word. Then it got worse. The researchers fine tuned the models on the works of only one author. Haruki Murakami. Just his novels. Nothing else. It unlocked verbatim recall of books from over 30 completely unrelated authors. One author's books opened the vault to everyone else's. The memorization was already inside the model the whole time. The fine tuning just removed the lock. Your book might be in there right now. You would never know it unless someone looked. Every safety measure the companies rely on failed. RLHF failed. System prompts failed. Output filters failed. The exact protections these companies cite in courtroom defenses did not stop a single page from being extracted. Then the researchers compared the three models. GPT-4o. Gemini. DeepSeek. Three different companies. Three different countries. They all memorized the same books in the same regions. The correlation was 0.90 or higher. That means they all trained on the same stolen data. The paper names the sources directly: LibGen and Books3. Over 190,000 copyrighted books obtained from pirated websites. Right now, authors and publishers have dozens of active lawsuits against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. These companies have argued in court that their models learn patterns. Not copies. That no book is stored inside the weights. This paper says that is a lie. The books are still inside. And researchers just pulled them out.

The 2025 Cooperative Election Study is out and there's even more evidence now that the rise of secularism has abated. Maybe even reversed. A new paid post on my newsletter today where I try to figure out why that's happening. Some really surprising data on Boomers and Gen X.

"Inertia still rules American religion. Despite decades of change, most Americans remain in the same broad religious group they were raised in. Switching gets attention, but stability is still the norm." A new paid post on the newsletter today. graphsaboutreligion.com/p/inertia-stil…

I've got brand new data about American religion that was collected in October of 2025. And, folks... The share of Americans who are non-religious has dropped for the third year in a row. Atheists and agnostics are down to 5% each. Those are 2014 levels.

@LauraRbnsn @johnpauldickson seems like a good source to help with that.

Does anyone have a good source for the claim that early Christians were known for rescuing exposed infants? I can get to orphan care a few centuries deep into the Christian era but the version of the claim I grew up with was more of a spontaneous, decentralized narrative (if

“My family was super religious, but I rejected it young.” That story gets told a lot—but it’s rare. Just 2% say they had a very religious childhood and left early. In reality, religion is usually passed down. Your parents' faith tends to become your own.

@TalbotDavis @grok @jhaskinscabrera @WillimonTweets I’m pretty sure I heard of one anecdotally

Hey @grok, how many congregations have used Para 2554 to get back IN TO the #umc? @jhaskinscabrera @WillimonTweets

In just three centuries (AD 100 and 400) the West witnessed the sudden emergence of food rosters for citizens and non-citizens alike, aged-care facilities, free dignified burials, organised efforts to eradicate infanticide, attempts to undermine slavery, public hospitals, and orphanages. And they all have one thing in common!

In 1911, the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Evanston, Illinois charged a "pew rental" fee. The most expensive seats in the house? 5-10 rows back in the middle. Nearly $7K in today's money. The cheap seats were in the very back of the sanctuary.

Eugene Peterson noticed that the word soul has been quietly displaced by the word self in how modern culture talks about persons. That shift carries more weight than it appears to. The soul, in its long theological usage, pointed toward the person in relation: to God, to others, to a source beyond the individual. The self, by contrast, is constituted by nothing outside of it. It is the person turned inward, stripped of those relational depths, accountable only to its own experience. The replacement of one word by the other was not neutral. It was a quiet but thorough theological revision of what a human being is.

@markdtooley No, but in pockets (like SW FL where I live), it's alive and well among retirees.

@caseytaylor Alive certainly, but well? Do you meet many people under 50 who are still adherents?

The “end-times” theological view that entails Armageddon etc peaked in influence 20 years ago so these reports seem doubtful. The new trend of “Christian Nationalism” espoused by Hegseth’s denomination is postmillennial, expects Christianity to prevail before Christ’s return & rejects end-times narrative.

One of the most dangerous conditions in ministry is when genuine gifting operates through an unformed life. The gift functions, but it functions in isolation from character, accountability, and ongoing interior transformation. Because the gift still produces visible results, it generates external validation that reinforces the very dis-integration it should be exposing. People see the fruit of the gift and assume the tree is healthy. But a gift that works through a life that doesn’t is not a sign of divine approval. It is a ticking clock.

The Protestant insistence on justification by faith does not cancel the therapeutic vision of the early Church Fathers. Wesley proved this. He held both together without compromise. The atonement declares the sinner righteous AND heals the soul's distortions. If our soteriology has no room for healing, it is thinner than Wesley's. And thinner than Scripture's.

Wesley never treated preaching, prayer, and the sacraments as theological abstractions. They were remedies. Applied to the soul's sickness. Sin was pathology. Grace was medicine. This is the Wesleyan instinct that formed the soil Pentecostalism grew. And we forget it at our peril.

Wesley for the win.

Again I say: I’m glad to be an Arminian-Wesleyan. #holylove

This is my lane of expertise so let me help you translate what AOC is saying here: It’s Marxism. She claims that the foundation of Western culture is “thin” and that culture is really nothing more than a perpetual state of evolution in response to material causes. Your primary marker of identification should not be tied to religion or the place you live but to your “class.” This is textbook philosophical Marxism.