Wendell Berry, Sabbath poems, 2007
Wendell Berry, Sabbath poems, 2007
There is literally not one person who thinks that kids learn anything about anything when they’re allowed to spend their classroom time on their laptops and phones. Everybody knows that education has been given up on; everybody knows that teachers are just babysitting; everybody knows that the fix is in.
The only question remaining is: Can we lie about the situation forever?
That really is the question. I was just discussing this with a colleague last week. He thinks the game is up and schools and employers are going to bring the collegiate house of cards tumbling down imminently; I replied that humans have an extraordinary capacity for self-deception and for living indefinitely with cognitive dissonance, even in the face of plain contradictions. I don’t pretend to a prediction, but I am willing, at least, to believe that we could collectively perpetuate this particular lie for a distressingly lengthy period of time.
Speaking of Buckley, read Henry Oliver on both the biography and the man.
Luttwak applies the appropriate skepticism here, along with some jaw-dropping anecdotes.
I finally got around to reading Douthat’s “Age of Extinction” essay. Even better than expected. Can’t wait to assign it to students this semester. And some great lines, including:
BookTok is to literature as OnlyFans is to great romantic love.
A. N. Wilson does an admirable job in his critical review of Alice Roberts' Domination, and yet…
Will there ever be a day when the first person plural of elite academic scholarship doesn’t presume enlightened secularist unbelief? “They,” “back then,” believed things that seem to nonsense to “us,” “here and now.” What makes you so sure? And what fraction of humanity today are you speaking on behalf of?
Also: Surely Wilson knows that Jesus was a celibate wonder-working exorcist. It wasn’t the desert fathers centuries later who invented ascetic extremes…
In the NYRB both Mark Lilla and Osita Nwanevu review Tanenhaus’s biography of Buckley.
The Orthodox Prayer for Enemies:
Lord Jesus Christ, Who didst command us to love our enemies, and those who defame and injure us, and to pray for them and forgive them; Who Thyself didst pray for Thine enemies who crucified Thee: Grant us, we pray, the spirit of Christian reconciliation and meekness, that we may heartily forgive every injury and be reconciled with our enemies. Grant us to overcome the malevolence and offences of people with Christian meekness and true love of our neighbor. We further beseech Thee, O Lord, to grant to our enemies true peace and forgiveness of sins; do not allow them to leave this life without true faith and sincere conversion. And help us repay evil with goodness, and to remain safe from the temptations of the devil and from all the perils which threaten us, in the form of visible and invisible enemies. Amen.
Thanks to Leah Libresco Sargeant for drawing my attention to this.
Not sure if he coined it, but Adam Roberts' reference to scholarly “citationarrhea” is pitch perfect.
This new study about Gen Z church attendance checks out anecdotally. But two caveats.
First, the study and headline both clearly want you to think that the overall percentage of Gen Z attending church is higher than older cohorts, which is false. Very strange.
Second, given Gloo’s backing, you can tell where the data is supposed to lead: greater financial investment in church-tech, the better to “meet the youths where they are.” That means church chatbots, Christian AI, social media, viral videos, screens galore, surveillance data, and much more.
Not today, Satan.
Jeff Bilbro reviews Ed Simon’s new cultural history of the apocalypse.
Hawley pulling the curtain down on episode two of Alien: Earth with “Stinkfist” was, for this former Toolhead, an unexpected time machine. Still a little dazed by it.
I’m in CT this morning with a review of Jonathan Linebaugh’s new book The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture.
Tomorrow, stepping into the classroom at noon, it will have been 482 days since I last taught undergrad students at ACU.
As the kids say, it’s been a minute.
Side by side searching the same inquiries on Google and DuckDuckGo, the former is so degraded that the first (and desired) entry in the DuckDuckGo search never even appears in Google’s list.
Google was already going down hill, but this is a new low. Surely Gemini has something to do with it.
In the MIT Technology Review, Alex Ashley has a piece called “How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance." Give it your time.
My friend Zac Koons wrote the cover story for the latest issue of The Christian Century: “The Priesthood of All Chatbots?" Lord, have mercy.
Russell Moore’s “30 Things I learned from 30 Years of Ministry” is well worth reading for anyone, but aspiring and early-career pastors in particular.
The latest issue of The Point is outstanding all around, but see especially Geoff Shullenberger’s essay “Popular Justice," which touches on Foucault, Girard, and the nature and forms of political violence.
“Stay the Course: How to Keep Your Faith in College”—my advice for entering freshmen from two years ago. Still true!
Actually, it seems to me two trends are happening simultaneously in K-12 up through college:
Sometimes these are two parallel lines, and never the twain shall meet. But sometimes they coexist within a single institution (like my own, and most of higher-ed), and it’s jarring when they crash into each other—because each thinks its own side is ‘the right side of history’ while thinking the other side is self-evidently bad, stuck in the past, and unwilling to face facts.
And that’s where things stand.
On last week’s episode of Mere Fidelity, we discussed when, whether, and why one ought to leave (or remain in) the ecclesial tradition in which one was raised. This week we discussed enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment.
I think it important to remember that genre issues have everything to do with the theologians' desire to be read. For some time, theologians have desired to be read primarily by other theologians, which has resulted in theology being weighted down with jargon. I take this to be an indication of what can be described as the academic captivity of the discipline of theology. I want to be clear that the scholarly character of theology done in an academic mode has been very important for helping us know how and even what we should think as Christians. The genre for such theology is the monograph or the scholarly article. The articles are usually written by their authors to ensure that readers of the article will be people who write the way the author of the article writes. In other words, such articles are written to make Christians who are not academics know that they will never understand what Christianity is about.
—Stanley Hauerwas, Fully Alive: The Apocalyptic Humanism of Karl Barth, p. 174