Digital communication … is predominantly affect based: it tends towards the immediate outpouring of affect. Twitter is an affective medium, and the politics based on it is an affective politics. Politics is reason and mediation; reason, which is time-intensive, is currently being replaced by immediate affect.
—Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, p. 12
All hail the queen, P. D. James. I wrote this almost four years ago, and had forgotten I’d done so; but better late than never. She’s the best.
Richard Brody reviews a new biography of Terrence Malick. God willing we have his Jesus film before year’s end…
My essay on forgiveness is out from behind the paywall at Comment.
The real question is not whether God exists but whether anything else does. For all the fools who say in their heart that there is no God—and they say it often in our age, in print and in life—God’s existence is one of the few fixed points on which the great philosophical traditions have converged. We owe an apologetic attention to the fads and retrogressions of our near neighbors, but that is no reason to privilege atheism as a theological interlocutor over those other traditions, above all the Muslim and the Vedantic, that are nearer to us in heart if not in home. The overeager ecumenism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which beat us all into unrecognizable unity upon the anvil of psychology or sociology or some vague spiritualism, should make us cautious but not inflexible on this point. It is remarkable how little Christian theology has profited even now from these sympathetic traditions.
—Ross McCullough, review of Daniel Soars' The World and God Are Not-Two: A Hindu-Christian Conversation in Modern Theology
In the Bible there is no vision without audition. What Ezekiel hears—the Word of the Lord—is more important than what he sees. This should be a basic theological foundation for all Christian teaching.
—Fleming Rutledge, Epiphany: The Season of Glory, p. 154n.12
This morning I’m in Mere Orthodoxy: “A Future Worthy of Life: Houellebecq, Decadence, and Sacraments.”
Matthew Walther recommends 100 pages per day, rain or shine, weekday or weekend, holiday or holy day or ordinary day. Paul Griffiths, by contrast, recommends the following:
You need a life in which you can spend a minimum of three uninterrupted hours every day, excepting sabbaths and occasional vacations, on your intellectual work. Those hours need to be free from distractions: no telephone calls, no email, no texts, no visits. Just you. Just thinking and whatever serves as a direct aid to and support of thinking (reading, writing, experiment, etc.). Nothing else. You need this because intellectual work is, typically, cumulative and has momentum. It doesn’t leap from one eureka moment to the next, even though there may be such moments in your life if you’re fortunate. No, it builds slowly from one day to the next, one month to the next. Whatever it is you’re thinking about will demand of you that you think about it a lot and for a long time, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re distracted from moment to moment, or if you allow long gaps between one session of work and the next. Undistracted time is the space in which intellectual work is done: It’s the space for that work in the same way that the factory floor is the space for the assembly line.
A friend of mine finds this vision more attractive, because (a) it measures time, not pages read; (b) it implicitly incentivizes 25 dense pages of Aquinas over 125 pages of Mickey Spillane; (c) it’s devoted to intellectual work of whatever kind, not just reading; (d) it’s an achievable minimum within most kinds of adult working life; (e) it focuses on lack of distraction, rather than finding tiny slices of time in which to digest a few more pages; and (f) it allows for weekly and annual sabbaths, in which intellectual labor may rest.
Joseph Bottum: “in American universities, the theology department is typically where bad sociology goes to die.”
News to me.
Finally read Walther on reading one hundred pages per day. Lovely.
For the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s year-end round-up, Drew Collins picked Letters to a Future Saint as his book of the year, and had these words to say about it:
“I’ve never finished C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, because every time I’ve started, I meet someone who seems to need it more. On three separate occasions, I’ve made it about halfway through and then felt compelled to give it away—to a friend, a taxi driver, and someone sitting next to me on a plane. Letters to a Future Saint is one of those books. Simply but powerfully written, filled with empathy and hope, it is East’s account of what it means to follow Jesus, written from a ‘fellow pilgrim’ to a ‘future saint.’ Halfway through it, I felt that same old conflict—to finish or to give away? Thankfully for me (and sadly for the person sitting next to me on the flight back from Switzerland), I finished it.”
I missed this Caldwell election postmortem when it came out a few weeks back.
Merry Christmas! I decided to annotate an old-fashioned blogroll of 100 writers (essayists, journalists, bloggers) I always read, no matter what. With links galore.
Max Read on Substackers: “textual YouTubers for Gen Xers and Elder Millennials who hate watching videos.” Hurts cause it’s true.
H/T: Robin Sloan.
“There is a student-union quality to Irish political life. The Irish are ready and proud to give offense, but not to anyone subsidizing a lifestyle they could never afford on their own.”
This morning in Christianity Today I have a piece about the bloody feasts of Christmastide.
Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age, p. 161:
From a hymn on the nativity by Saint Ephrem the Syrian (for the Feast of the Holy Innocents on Dec 28):
In Bethlehem the slayers mowed down the fair flowers so that with them.
Would perish the fair Seed in which was hidden the Living Bread. …
The villains entered the garden full of young fruits.
They shook down the blossoms from the branches. Buds and shoots they destroyed.
Unknowing, the agitator offered pure gifts—
To him woe, to them grace. Bethlehem brought forth early and gave virgin fruits to the Holy One.
Blessed is He Who received the first fruits!
Read Sonny Bunch on Nolan, Interstellar, and IMAX.