Hi friends,
Quick bit of housekeeping: I’m restoring the moniker “Robbie Rambles” to these link aggregation missives, because this newsletter has a new name: Theology, Technology, Tomfoolery. I realized that most of my writing coalesces around those first two themes, and I wanted new readers to be able to quickly understand what they’re getting into here. The third theme, “tomfoolery”, leaves plenty of room for me to also write about whatever the heck I want. I wrote more here if you’re interested.
Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:
• Katherine Dee asks (and answers) whether or not one’s internet activities should be required as part of intake for any sort of psych care. Transparently, I’m generally ambivalent about “mental health” as a category: I think the the epistemological underpinnings that have led to the gradually increasing pathologization of much of life tend to go unexamined, especially in mainline churches (one reason I’m excited to read this book), but I also do see a therapist myself (who understands and even shares my skepticism) because the fact is that giving and receiving focused help for addressing besetting moods and habits has been overwhelming professionalized. Some of the paradigms and theories used are helpful (something backed up by empirical data), and my therapist is explicit about how he deploys them, while also being honest that psychotherapy is kinda “seeing through a glass dimly”.
I resonate with Dee’s own admission the she’s “of the school of thought that our psychology is more influenced by our environments than popular understanding accounts for”, and “It’s not exactly nature and not exactly nurture, but a secret third thing.” The occasion for her essay is a recent preprint paper that asks if “AI psyschosis” should be treated as its own clinical entity. Admittedly, my peers and I use the term a lot to describe a lot of things — CEOs with grandiose visions of its capabilities, programmers talking about their agents as though they’re friends — but I would be unsurprised if we find some sort of increase in psychiatric diagnoses in the coming years, akin to what’s happened with ADHD.
• When I was 18, I purchased my first pipe from The Tobacco Barn in Lake Forest, CA. If memory serves, it was a Savinelli that was part of a starter kit that included a tamp, carrying pouch, and some pipe cleaners. The gentleman at the county explained how to pack and smoke it. For tobacco, I purchased a couple ounces of one of their bespoke aromatic blends, called “My Pleasure”. It was sweet and very mild.
Sadly, I can’t link to it anymore, because Tobacco Barn is now under the management of Cigar Spot, a local Orange County chain based around online ordering and pickup that was formed to survive California’s draconian pandemic restrictions. I don’t resent the move — you gotta do what you gotta do — but it does make me sad, though to be fair, the shop’s identity had been moving away from pipes toward cigars for years at that point.
I began thinking of that place again after reading Jackson & Co.’s feature about Tim Davis, a tobacconist who has been serving Wilmington, NC out of the same shop since 1979. True tobacconists are an increasingly rare breed, replaced by the “smoke shops” that blight our cities, towns, and highways.
The cultural shift from tobacco to cannabis is also, in my opinion, emblematic of the atomization, loneliness, and devitalization that characterizes much of civic life in 2026. In the article, Tim recounts how his videos explaining to correctly pack and smoke a pipe became so popular because, “For the past thirty years, they haven’t had anyone to teach them.” I was fortunate to have both the Tobacco Barn and some friends in those years of early adulthood who could teach me what to look for in a pipe, or how to better light it. I’m sad that many young men don’t have the same thing now.
• After a spate of statements this week about how AI might kill us all, I thought Armin Ronacher’s thoughts in response to calls for a slowdown were very good. At the risk of sounding conspiratorial, I do think the flurry of comments has the appearance of being coordinated, but even if they’re not, the incentives are in place for the major labs to push for more regulation, especially as some of their largest customers move to using open weight models.
• Over at Mockingbird, we’ve begun digging through the archives to bring back “Forde Friday”. You can read this week’s (re)inaugural entry here. Gerhard Forde is probably the most personally influential theologian for me, and for more than a few folks at Mbird. Reading this excerpt of his on “a new sense of self-worth” revives my admiration for him. It felt radical to me years ago when I worshipped at non-denominational evangelical churches, but looking at this as an Episcopalian in 2026, it doesn’t seem any less radical. While I’m blessed to be part of a parish whose clergy are theologians of the cross, looking at the broader Episcopalian landscape, it seems many of us are just as obsessed with self-justification and human effort as our fundamentalist counterparts. That shouldn’t surprise us though: everyone is an inveterate theologian of glory, even the best theologian of the cross.
Cheers,
R