Brad East

Christopher Hitchens once wrote: “One of [Clive] James’s charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people.”

Likewise, Roger Ebert once said to Gene Siskel: “I also have the greatest respect for you, Gene, but if you have a flaw, it is that you are parsimonious with your enjoyment, parceling it out as if you are afraid you will prematurely expend your lifetime share.”

When I think of good criticism and good writing, it is these examples—this style—that is foremost in my mind. Joy, praise, and pleasure in the good are just as important, indeed more important, than nitpicking, negativity, and the “critical” eye. Whether as readers or as writers, we need not be parsimonious in our joy.

B. D. McClay is writing a book! About defining women SF authors! Cause to celebrate!

She confirmed that this is not an April Fools' Day prank…

John Wick 5 is coming. I think this is a mistake. It went out on a perfect note and at the peak of its powers. The story is done! Leave the brand alone! Oh well.

Just saw that in February Tzvi Novick published Judaism: A Guide for Christians with Eerdmans. Looks to be a fantastic resource.

Kudos to Gary Marcus for this April 1 post; he got me for about five seconds.

Zach Lowe is back! And reunited with the podfather! It’s Grantland 2.0! Let’s go!

Wisdom of Crowds has a great post with a bunch of links about Christianity and Silicon Valley.

In the latest issue of First Things I have an essay called “Goldilocks Protestantism." I believe anyone can access it for free, minus a subscription to the print mag, so long as they create a FT account. Let me know if not…

On the blog, I offer notes toward a definition of Dad TV.

Minus an odd and unbefitting closing few lines, this essay on The Brothers Karamazov by Daniel Soar is worth your time.

Mary Kate Rogers reads Severance as a metaphor for embryos and IVF.

My buddy Chris Krycho takes me to the woodshed for my careless tech skepticism. Reply forthcoming!

And H/T from that Douthat newsletter: Alice Evans proposes a novel theory to account for the global Islamic revival.

Ross Douthat responds to that awful Adam Gopnik piece on Jesus (or “Jesus”).

Incidentally, he touches on one of my personal hobby horses: an early dating for Acts. My favorite recent book on these questions is Jonathan Bernier’s Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament: The Evidence for Early Composition.

Read Matt Zoller Seitz on Thomas Kinkade.

You’ve not lived until your child microwaves a Kraft Easy Mac for four minutes without first having added water to it. We thought the house was going down in flames.

I think the strangest thing by far, reading tech optimists and boosters, is that even at their most dystopian, they lack the imagination to consider the profoundly alienating, boring, or otherwise inefficient and frustrating possibilities of prospective technologies.

It’s as if they look at the internet today and just see efficiency, frictionless transactions, and a thousand apps of convenience—rather than a thousand apps of maddening exhaustion, too many transactions to keep up with, and inefficiencies all the way down. In other words, something like the tyranny of the inbox. I don’t use email because, on balance, I consider it preferable to snail mail. I use it because I must. And I’ve never met a soul who loves email.

We have no agency, AI will mean a less human, a less humane, a less recognizable world, a world utterly beyond our reckoning or control, it’s coming inevitably, there’s nothing to do, except by the way we must use our agency to keep us from lagging behind, it’s coming, it’s coming, it may be better or it may be worse, it may be good or it may be bad, “though history tells me it will be good."

Got it. Wash, rinse, repeat. Message received.

It’s much too early to declare victory, but Haidt’s book already having real-world effects like this is welcome news.

Sound the alarm: Adam Gopnik is writing about Christianity again. Where is David Bentley Hart when you need him?

Gopnik writes (sneer veiled by smooth prose): “People seek faith, and faith, by its nature, demands the embrace of what reason resists.” Good to know!

The biggest howler: “The humanism [that pagan critics of early Christianity] championed was always plural—there are many plausible ways to live. But, in its refusal of certainty, their humanism also produced enormous anxiety, and anxiety is always drawn toward the reassurance of authority.”

I don’t mind Gopnik’s views, which are a dime a dozen, whether in the world of elite journalism or in the academy. I mind the omniscient tone and Olympian perspective that cannot condescend to read, much less to mention, a single dissenting view. Why not engage other scholars than these? Why rehearse the same old liberal Protestant pieties? Why give credence to a single Jesus-never-existed writer and YouTuber but not one glance at the serious, sizable, substantial body of research disagreeing with everyone cited in the story?

But I’m glad to know it’s only the religious who demand embrace of what reason resists.

On the blog I wrote about three types of Christian higher ed.

This wise reflection on “accountability” and male friendship in churches by Samuel D. James has me thinking about what I call the “ten-minute rule.”

The rule is simple. It states that, in any church event organized and advertised by and for adult men, you can set you clock for overt mention of porn: i.e., no later than ten minutes in, the issue of pornography will surface, usually with a sigh followed by a story, always with a brusque declaration that “we’ve got to talk about this,” and never without liberal deployment of the word “accountability.”

I’m not denigrating the good intentions behind these events, but this exceptionless pattern is why I avoid such events like the plague.

Read Bonnie Kristian on overdiagnosis, overmedicalization, and the lessons for pastors.

The always excellent Matthew Walther asks, “What is a parish?" He answers his own question then offers an alternative.

A wonderful reflection on the Psalms in Hebrews, together with lessons for Christian reading of the Psalms, from Alastair Roberts.