Did not realize we had Thomas’s marginalia in his own hand.
Did not realize we had Thomas’s marginalia in his own hand.
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I wasn’t persuaded by Douthat’s somewhat negative review of One Battle After Another, but after so much critical writing (already) on the film, I want to see it again. I’m convinced, at least for now, that the film’s politics are far more ambivalent than many take them to be; that the obvious signifiers function like a Rorschach test; that the ’70s-style depiction of the 2030s is purposeful, not lazy; that the Pynchonian humor works; and that PTA knows what he’s doing. But the film deserves multiple viewings before a final judgment.
Oh, and while I enjoyed Bill Simmons and Wesley Morris’s conversation about the film, I couldn’t believe they didn’t bring up either the character of the daughter or Benicio del Toro’s character. Neither race nor gender nor “revolutionary politics” can be adequately discussed in relation to the film’s story or themes without talking about Willa and Sergio!
I appreciate this post by my colleague and friend Richard Beck about converts to high-church traditions who appear to “love Christianity more than Christ." My main question—an empirical one, not usefully adjudicated by my own anecdata—is what percentage of such converts fit this bill. My suspicion, which I can’t confirm, is that they are wildly over-represented in “extremely online” spaces, and in the pews it’s mostly normies. Someone should study this!
For Modern Theology I reviewed Phil Ziegler’s new book on the devil.
Die deutsche Übersetzung ist von Christopher Pieper: my CT piece on baptism is now available in German, thanks to this kind soul.
Today I’m in the Chronicle of Higher Education with a review essay of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s new book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science.
Turns out this Wemby kid’s not bad.
I enjoyed Paul Tough’s piece in the latest issue of Texas Monthly on the origins, successes, and challenges facing Solar Prepatory School for Girls in Dallas ISD.
I had never read Alasdair MacIntyre’s 2008 intellectual obit of Richard Rorty in Common Knowledge: a reflection on Rorty’s biography, training, development, and core ideas, as well as where and why they differed. An illuminating and even moving tribute.
In light of Jonathan Lear’s passing I went looking for his 1995 essay on Freud for The New Republic, but the only place I could find a PDF was Scribd.
Read Mark Lilla on John Ganz and the new right, but read him alongside Caldwell’s review of the same book.
I’ve been reading some reviews and essays by and about Kwame Anthony Appiah, in preparation for a piece I’m writing. Check out this 2022 profile of him in the Chronicle by Danny Postel. See also Appiah on John Rawls, on free speech, and on the dark side of Enlightenment.
Mark Oppenheimer’s conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant for the Arc podcast is good fun, not least because Mark and Leah are willing to tell each other, “You’re dead wrong.”
Jonathan Lear, RIP.
A truly great thinker and writer. Radical Hope is one of the most impressive and morally and intellectually challenging books I’ve ever read. I want to write books like Lear’s when I grow up. I’m grateful for all the ones he left us.
I wrote a profile of Leah Libresco Sargeant for Arc, a magazine edited by the great Mark Oppenheimer and published by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University in St. Louis. The profile is timed with Leah’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence, but ranges across her whole public career, indeed her whole life. Check it out!
I’m in CT today with a slightly more personal piece than usual: “You Don’t Have to Be Radical."
Douthat at his best. The money summary lines, turning the column’s arguments like a hinge:
It would be immensely helpful to our debates if more sincere liberals could be persuaded that this style of progressivism really is a postliberal form of politics…
But then it would also be helpful for conservatives to acknowledge why the populist alternative can seem so threatening as well.
This story, by Nancy Walecki, about her father—“guitar guru to the rock gods”—is simply beautiful. The anecdotes alone are worth it, but mix in the music, work, paternal, and Christian themes … it’s almost too much to take in at once.
In 2014 the New York Times profiled Paul Kingsnorth and his merry band of mourners at the Dark Mountain Project. This was after his departure from journalism and move to rural Ireland, but before his conversion to Orthodoxy.
I finally read Robert Draper’s profile of Charlie Kirk for the NYT Magazine, published in February of this year.
Apropos of nothing, just reminding myself and others about Adam Smith’s 2023 essay advocating for Christian universities to set aside some dorms as tech-free.
I thought Kevin DeYoung did a marvelously charitable job reviewing Peter Kreeft’s spiritual autobiography, From Calvinist to Catholic.