Brandon Caples > Brandon's Quotes

“Menelik I not only founded the dynasty but also began the practice of Ethiopian Judaism. Although there is no way to verify the Kebra Nagast’s claims, Ethiopia does have a history of practicing Judaism, which predates Ethiopia’s adoption of Christianity.”
― Captivating History, History of Ethiopia: A Captivating Guide to Ethiopian History

“So, as we seek to love one another across racial lines, it is useful to remember that there is such a thing as asymmetry in history.”
― Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations

“Scripture is not color consumed on one hand or color-blind on the other. It is color-conscious.”
― Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations

“One reason that conversations about race are so hard is because too many American evangelicals lack thinking with biblical nuance. Sadly, when it comes to using our God-given brains, evangelicals often have only two speeds. For the evangelical, if something is not essential for salvation, it’s often regarded as unimportant. Issues, then, are either of speed 1: ultimate importance, or speed 2: no importance. Os Guinness reflects on the sin and scandal of evangelicals refusing to love the Lord with their minds: “American evangelicals therefore characteristically display an impatience with the difficult, an intolerance of complexity, and a poor appreciation of the long-term and disciplined. Correspondingly, we often demonstrate a tendency toward the simplistic, especially in the form of slogans or overly simple either/or solutions.”13 This either/or mental proclivity is why evangelicals often pit two good things against each other (e.g., evangelism versus justice, the spiritual versus the social, man’s responsibility versus God’s sovereignty, etc.). It’s why we often see those who disagree with us as a part of the faithful or as a full-blown heretic—we only have two speeds.”
― Isaac Adams, Talking about Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations

“At some point, the rate of dechurching will slow down, not necessarily because the underlying reasons have been mitigated, but simply because there won’t be enough people going to church regularly to sustain the rate of people leaving the church. The dechurched will give way to the unchurched—those who never attended church to begin with.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“The American church and especially evangelicalism is largely built for the nuclear family or those on that track. The young, single parent working multiple jobs to make ends meet is going to find it harder to create the bandwidth necessary for meaningful church involvement and be more likely to experience depression and even shame in a church culture that creates programs that work for and elevate the nuclear family. The early church that used to cheerfully bring the poor and destitute into their lives now (at least in the US) often serves them at a distance through benevolence programs without fully embracing them into their church family. Modern American churches are financially incentivized to target the wealthy and create a space where those on track feel comfortable. Biblical hospitality, though, is so much more than just throwing money at a problem, and the net result is that the average American church is not truly hospitable to the less fortunate, making them feel like outsiders in our midst.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“There are those who become disenfranchised with the church because it is too synchronized with right-wing politics and those who become disenfranchised with the church because it is not synchronized enough. This is supported in our research, as 28 percent of the dechurched evangelicals we surveyed believe that the United States should be declared a Christian nation and that the success of the United States is part of God’s plan for the world. Let that sink in a bit. More than one-quarter of the dechurched evangelicals in our survey believe the United States should be declared a Christian nation and no longer attend church. Among this group of people, the United States is viewed as enjoying special favor with God similar to Israel in the Old Testament. Many believe the US Constitution is divinely inspired, on par with the Bible itself. According to a Pew Research study in 2021,15 nearly one in five Americans believes the Constitution to be a divinely inspired document. It does not seem like a stretch to conclude that this group has a higher commitment to God’s work in the political realm than God’s work in his church.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“When we enjoy social comforts as Christians, we can be timid in sharing our faith because inherent in that sharing is the risk of losing that comfort if people don’t affirm our beliefs. But if we have no comforts, that hindrance to our evangelism is gone.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“As the social pressures to identify as Christian in our culture are removed and as new pressures mount to discourage people from identifying as Christian, many who were never Christians in the first place are finally able to freely walk away.”
― Jim Davis, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“We’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or educations. It’s up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them—or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the scale and efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people. It all depends on the objective we choose.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“My point is that police make choices about where they direct their attention. Today they focus almost exclusively on the poor. That’s their heritage, and their mission, as they understand it.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“This is a point I’ll be returning to in future chapters: we’ve seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education. It’s up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them—or to reach out to them with the resources they need.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“[A] crucial part of justice is equality, and that means, among other things, experiencing criminal justice equally. People who favor policies like Stop and Frisk should experience it themselves. Justice cannot just be something that one part of society inflicts upon the other.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“To create a model, then, we make choices about what’s important enough to include, simplifying the world into a toy version that can be easily understood and from which we can infer important facts and actions. We expect it to handle only one job and accept that it will occasionally act like a clueless machine, one with enormous blind spots.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“I was forced to confront the ugly truth: people had deliberately wielded formulas to impress rather than clarify.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings. Some of these choices were no doubt made with the best intentions. Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

“The human victims of WMDs, we’ll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.”
― Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy