In Commonweal, Paul Griffiths has a characteristically incisive review of Mark Lilla’s new book on ignorance.
In Commonweal, Paul Griffiths has a characteristically incisive review of Mark Lilla’s new book on ignorance.
In the latest issue of The Lamp, which just went online today, I have a review of Ryan P. Burge’s new book The American Religious Landscape: Facts, Trends, and the Future. The review is called “The Stickiness of Religion."
When I wrote the piece I had no idea it would be in the issue commemorating the passing of Pope Francis—nor that I would be just one review separated from Christopher Caldwell. I’m grateful to be included.
Somehow I’d forgotten that this occurred just under twelve months before Lewis passed. Did Kingsley tell Martin all about it?
I’ve lost the ability to go truly gaga for a new superhero film, but Superman was a pleasure in the way James Gunn’s films always are: witty, well-paced, endearing, clever, never boring, visually interesting, and thematically coherent from start to finish. He made all the right decisions about avoiding a retread and successfully infused a tired icon with a beating heart. My (early) audience loved it, as did my sixth grade son.
The line, which comes about midway through the movie, about what counts as “the real punk rock” is pure uncut Gunn: on a knife’s edge between parody and sincerity, tipping just back over into earnestness only after viewers—like the characters on screen—hold back an eyeroll and find themselves giving in, despite their own best efforts, to his heartfelt, unapologetic cringe.
Followed by much punching.
I love the little rant that opens Phil’s newsletter from two days ago, but this closing paragraph had me cocking my head:
Smartphones are so ubiquitous that even to hate on them, I now have to pick one up, open Notion, hit the little microphone icon, dictate a note with a particularly clever malediction upon them, and post that note later on here or on Bluesky or into the pages of a book manuscript. I mean I don’t “have” to, but the effort involved in doing it another way would feel like teaching myself to use only water that I draw from a well daily using wood buckets.
I don’t know, man. I don’t know what Notion is, I don’t use dictation, I don’t write online using a smartphone, I don’t have a Substack, and I’m not on Bluesky or Twitter or Instagram. I am on micro.blog—I’m writing on it now, on a laptop!—but I don’t have to be, I don’t just not “have” to be. It’s a decision, which is to say, contingent and uncoerced.
Let’s say a word well is a journal and a word bucket is a pen. I use one every day, as I assume Phil does. We both write online, and no writer can avoid the internet, but I think there’s more agency involved and less resignation necessary than he suggests here. And I’m the alarmist Luddite!
On one hand: Gareth Edwards remains one of the best directors alive at pacing, staging, and choreographing big action set-pieces. His eye is as good as ever, and I hope his next film is based on a great script.
On the other hand: Jurassic World Rebirth stars four very charismatic actors—Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, and Rupert Friend—who have not a lick of chemistry with one another on screen. Whether the fault is the script’s, the director’s, or their own, every scene featuring a conversation is dead on arrival.
As Sonny Bunch put it, “from awe to boredom."
Driving through Louisiana, I found another alternative spelling for the Name.
Hadn’t heard this was coming down the pike. Looking forward to checking it out.
On the blog I wrote briefly about the “evangelical gentrification” of churches of Christ.
Really good deflationary take by Alastair Roberts on “covenant” as a master theological-scriptural concept in Reformed thought.
Matthew Lee Anderson dissents from my case about nonpronunciation of the Name; he doesn’t persuade me, but this is a very strong paragraph on the question:
The OT is replete with prayers that the Name of the Lord would be glorified, but this is not simply a matter of praise and renown but an expression of the desire that God would make His glory immanent among His people, that He would be with Israel by dwelling again in the Temple. The time between the prophets is the most pronounced period of withdrawal of the immediate disclosure of divine glory in Israel’s history (as I think even Catholics who affirm the inspiration of the Apocryphal literature produced then can affirm). In that light, the reverence for the Name that develops might be construed as a kind of expression of piety for the return of that glory: as the Lord goes silent, the Name becomes more weighty.
Paywalled for now, but in the new issue of The Hedgehog Review, I have an essay on aliens called “Lexicon of the Phenomenon." Subscribe and read today, or better yet, read it in the print edition!
This morning I’m in CT with an argument that Christians should not pronounce aloud the Name of God.
I did not care for this take on Orwell. It’s right on particular points but wrong, or rather wrong-headed, on the whole. Dinging useful and illuminating writers for not being geniuses or “Great” is a poor use of time.
With “the infinite workday," Microsoft has given us a gift—or is it poison?
Don’t listen to their advice, but do pay attention to their analysis. It’s deadly earnest and somehow utterly transparent.
Revising my manuscript, I find the phrase “in my jumble judgment.” Should be humble, but there is no question that my judgment is jumbled.
The truth is Pilate not
lingering for an answer.
—R. S. Thomas, “Incarnation” (1990)
Some people confuse David Keith with Keith David. I often have trouble with Russell Hittinger versus Reinhard Hütter. But most of all the trouble for me is Perry Anderson, Benedict Anderson, Bernard Williams, and Raymond Williams.
When I’m reading or writing without an internet connection, the only secure name is Perry (though I often forget he’s the brother of Benedict). The rest of the first and last names get mixed up and I suppose Bernard Anderson wrote about imagined communities, Benedict Williams was a Marxist critic, and Raymond Williams was an analytic moral philosopher.
This has been true for more than ten years and I don’t expect my mind will ever be able to get these names straight.
[T]rue Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness. Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.
—Simon Leys, “An Empire of Ugliness” (1997)
Alan Jacobs, “Deskilling and Demos”:
What I’m loving here — of course! — is human effort, human exploration, figuring it out, trial and error, rough edges, things in progress: the rough ground. I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to. But you all know that. Demos and sketches and architectural drawings are cool, is what I’m saying.
Myles Turner can’t hit a three to save his life, but man the dude is lights out from the midrange. Pick and roll with him at the foul line is money every time.
For this Father’s Day, read Bonnie Kristian on millennial and zoomer dads today.
Old-man T.J. McConnell is like sixth-man Manu. So much energy, so many good things, you take the occasional bad as the cost of getting all the good. The price of doing business is absolutely worth it.
It’s good to be back in the classroom.
Oh, and before this week I’d never used a proper chalk blackboard before, only a whiteboard. My Luddite soul was strangely warmed.
