On the latest episode of Mere Fidelity we talk Israel, Jews, and gentiles in Paul with Jason Staples. Something of a sequel of a December conversation with Paul Sloan.
On the latest episode of Mere Fidelity we talk Israel, Jews, and gentiles in Paul with Jason Staples. Something of a sequel of a December conversation with Paul Sloan.
Over on the blog I wrote about “intentionality” in the Christian life.
Another reading:
Pluribus is a secular parable of the question asked of candidates for Reformed ministry: Are you willing to be damned for the greater glory of God?
In this case, the question is: Are you willing to be unhappy for the greater good of humanity?
Over on the blog I wrote up fourteen brief thoughts on what Pluribus is about.
Read Philip Ball on the likelihood (or not) of life, and intelligent life, on this or any planet:
Maybe it’s just too early to conclude anything at all about the chances of intelligent life on other worlds from our quest so far to find it.
John Piper is eighty years old. This is a lovely little (pre) tribute to his life and legacy. Also more thoughts on this to come over on the blog.
Read Phil Christman on true crime. Maybe more reflections on the blog about this.
Read Ross Douthat on the end of American conservatism.
Read Vinco Passaro in Harper’s on Malcolm Cowley, American literature, and its present-day disappearance.
Read Stephen Barr on the history of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the teaching of the Catholic Church.
Read Jason Blakely in Harper’s on political scientists, data, surveys, and Trump.
Jim Nantz, riffing on veni vidi vici when offensive tackle Frank Crum catches a ball as an eligible receiver:
He reports, he receives, he runs for the touchdown!
Over on YouTube I got the chance to chat with Jen Pollock Michel about faith, catechesis, and theology. Check it out.
Returning to Les Murray, I texted a friend that he reads like a rural Australian illiberal Catholic T. S. Eliot. As it happens, Murray was born exactly half a century later than Eliot. I think I’ll stick with that description.
Now it’s the sin of sloth in The Silver Chair, the best of the seven Narnia books.
Les Murray, 1987
My brother Mitch on the sin of greed in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Tyler Cowen, by his own report, in a recent podcast on AI and the workplace:
This may sound counterintuitive, but under a lot of scenarios, the more unhappy people are, the better we’re doing, because that means a lot of change.
I repeat:
the more unhappy people are, the better we’re doing, because that means a lot of change.
There may be no more succinct statement of this view of the world, one that brings together a certain approach to capitalism, labor, technology, and “progress.”
This is what R. S. Thomas and Wendell Berry mean by “the machine” or “industrial humanity.” And they were right to hold it in contempt.
On the blog I wrote about the seven books of Narnia and the seven deadly sins (and even Michael Ward’s seven planets). Narnia heads, tell me where I’m wrong.
I loved this Plough essay by Michael Ward about Jupiter, royal joviality, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
I read everything Matt Zoller Seitz writes, but I didn’t love this worshipful James Gunn profile. It’s too uncritical, it subordinates art (including popular entertainment) to progressive politics, and it fails to explore, even from a progressive perspective, what might remain unsatisfying about Gunn’s endless recycling of violent trauma, irreverent gutter humor, and top-down abuses of power.
If the story is always, without exception, broken and lashing-out underdogs healing from trauma in order to topple bad fathers and authoritarians, what’s to appreciate? Why see the next movie if we’ve seen it already? And if Gunn has a politics beyond “big guys lose, small guys win”—which I don’t need him to have, but Seitz suggests he does—what is his actual substantive take on power sought, maintained, and exercised with non-abusive authority, wisdom, and justice? It might as well be Abrams in Episode VII all over again, needing to destroy the Republic to have the good guys be powerless again. But then it’s just Eric Ryrie’s theory about the eternal return of the Allies versus Hitler, which is simple enough as a narrative arc but not particularly interesting in artistic or aesthetic terms.
Three excellent reviews in the latest issue of FT by Richard Rex (with some spicy asides against Luther), Nathan Pinkoski (newly relevant in light of the last week), and Philip Jenkins (whose devastating review is somehow almost too fair to its subject).
This review by Ed Feser is one of the best potted histories of Kant’s philosophy, including its antecedents and epigones, that I’ve ever read.
I’ve always vaguely known who Marvin Olasky was, chiefly by his journalism and editorship at WORLD, but I learned so much from his brief autobiographical story in the latest issue of CT. What a life.