Berry, 2008:
Berry, 2008:
Co-sign Timothy’s co-sign of my non-co-sign of Wyatt Graham’s non-co-sign of Kingsnorth.
Wyatt Graham in Mere O today, in a critical review of Paul Kingsnorth called “To Be a Christian Is to Sanctify the Machine”:
But I also wonder at Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer.”
But the Greek is more literal than this translation suggests, as is the lovely Latin: omnis creatura Dei bona—every creature of God is good. Is the Machine a creature and thus ipso facto good? Is every one of our tools, including the system as a whole? There’s a good deal of question-begging here, and hence some re-defining what the Machine is in order to make it “sanctifiable.”
I say this as a critic of Kingsnorth’s book. I just don’t think this style of Reformed response is adequate to the challenge of the technological society.
I’d love for someone to take up Alan’s idea of “design amnesia” and explore it further. Maybe Cory Doctorow’s word of the year applies to more than the internet and tech platforms.
Freddie: “I am just baffled, baffled, baffled by the refusal of our media to stop and say, guys, this technology does not work.”
In addition to Sonny Bunch’s list, here are Adam Nayman’s eleven films of the year, Tim Markatos’s twenty, and MZS’s (un-written-up) ten.
Wesley Morris writes so rarely now, but I wish he’d do a list to round out my five favorite critics to read.
Finally found time to watch House of Dynamite. My wife predicted the ending early on, but I said no way—they wouldn’t do that to us. Turns out they would. What an own goal. And a missed opportunity.
I did not know about, and had not before read, Alan Jacobs' 2009 essay on Iain Banks' Culture series. Now I do, and now I have.
Over on the blog I wrote against scientism, this time on display in Robert P. Baird’s review of Ross Douthat’s new book.
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Did P. D. James and Jane Gardam ever meet, correspond by letter, and/or review each other’s books?
Inquiring minds would like to know.
Some writers for Mere Orthodoxy, including me, shared their best reads of the year.
Enjoyed reading about these developments in biblical archeology.
More 2025 recaps on the blog:
Wendell Berry, 2012
Co-sign Sonny Bunch on the third Avatar. Adam Roberts' review is brutally funny and full of real insights—especially the literal fasces!—but unfair, I think, and indulgent of some over-reading and ungenerous ad hominem swipes.
Always be reading Robin Sloan, always be subscribing to his newsletter, but especially today’s edition, in which he links to my review of del Toro’s Frankenstein. Never was a link such an honor!
Read MZS on Jim Jarmusch. Wonderful opening—Jarmusch as apophatic cinema—but an even more powerful kicker.
Please read Alan’s tribute to Dan Treier. A wonderful Christian, scholar, and mentor from afar. Years ago Dan befriended me when he didn’t have to, and we were able to meet in person last year. We weren’t close. But I caught a glimpse of what Alan so movingly writes here. I can’t believe he’s gone. Only last month he reached out to let me know he couldn’t be on a panel I’d organized at SBL. I had no idea how fast the end would come.
But not the end. Dan is with Christ, who lives. And “if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him.” May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
Next month’s Commonweal issue is online, and it’s got my review of Paul Kingsnorth’s new book. A bit late, given the pub date, but I’ve not yet read a review of the book that’s an unsatisfied as mine ended up being. Tried to be fair before I issued the verdict, given how much I appreciate Kingsnorth’s writing in general.
He was a gentleman and a scholar. He was highly cultured—in both literary and scientific fields—and had exquisite manners. He was a man of God, but he was also very shrewd, a born diplomat, tactful and inventive, able to gauge situations, to judge and handle people. He was a great artist in human relations—an art that Chinese society had brought to perfection. Being Italian (from the Papal Domain) he had inherited the best of a glorious and sophisticated cultural tradition, without having to carry the burden of imperial-nationalist hangovers from which Spaniards and Portuguese were seldom free. For the Chinese (as for the French), any new idea, in order to be taken seriously, must not only be expressed in their own language, but it must also be expressed with literary elegance.
—Simon Leys, “Madness of the Wise: Ricci in China” (1985)
The reviews section of The Hedgehog Review is always good, but it’s especially good in the latest issue.
It goes without saying that I loved Trevin Wax’s FT essay “We Were Jesus Freaks." I also have thoughts I’m hoping to share, either on the blog or on the pod, or both. But read it first and be transported back to another world … the evangelical pop-culture nineties.