Overheard in Christian faculty meeting:
“Jesus actually came down to this planet with us. He didn’t Zoom from Heaven.”
Overheard in Christian faculty meeting:
“Jesus actually came down to this planet with us. He didn’t Zoom from Heaven.”
As usual, Adam Nayman nails it on the head. This time re Captain America 4 and the state of Marvel movies.
If you’re in the Spokane area, come out Wednesday night!
Is the woman caught in adultery in John 8 an allegory (a type or figure) of Israel and the Lord? The thought had never occurred to me before hearing it retold in a sermon recently.
Israel is brought by her accusers before the Lord, having been caught in the act—that is, of betraying her love for the Lord through worshiping idols and failing to be faithful to the terms of the covenant. Her accusers (false shepherds? the gentile nations?) are not wrong that she has transgressed the Law; nor have they misjudged the jealousy of this Lawgiver’s love for Israel, the bride of his youth.
But the accusers are themselves accused by the terms of the covenant. The Law indicts all. No one, not one, is righteous before the Lord. When Israel is left alone before her Lord, then, whom alone she has sinned against, she stands condemned by her actions—but not by her accusers, all of whom have dropped their stones and walked away. He looks at her and says, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and sin no more.”
Saint Paul’s famous declaration, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” is but a gloss on this narrative allegory. Christ’s command to the woman—to Israel, his beloved bride—is not one more imperative she is bound to fail to keep. It is a liberating announcement of her freedom from sin. The word is effective by his sovereign power and will keep her, henceforth, from the sin that once led her astray.
As Christ says just two chapters later, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.” The woman caught in adultery replies in the words of the Song: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” And as Jesus says in Mark 10, “What God has joined together no man can put asunder.” And as Paul puts it at the end of his peroration in Romans, nothing can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I really enjoyed, and learned a lot from, this deep dive by Alan Jacobs into Sayers and Christie and fast-changing gender mores in English detective fiction a century ago.
In his latest newsletter, my buddy Matt shares a link and a comment:
Men might be reading more than the “narrative” about them would suggest. But when has a narrative ever needed real statistics to survive?
This is an odd way to frame the Vox link, however, which confirms that American men (on average and at the median reader level) are reading in as low of numbers as reported. What’s called into question is (a) whether this is a decline, (b) whether this is a crisis, (c) whether it’s a crisis of men specifically in contrast to women, (d) whether it’s related to fiction reading, and (e) whether it’s related to Trump and polarization in voting patterns by gender.
In other words, men aren’t reading more than “the narrative” would suggest—granting that “the narrative” is not a person or essay we can consult. Rather, “the narrative” has framed the issue as an intensifying cultural crisis lying at the intersection of gender and politics, which may or may not be accurate. What remains uncontested is that in general American boys and men do not read books in their leisure time.
Another great piece of media criticism by Freddie, which includes this nugget in a footnote:
There’s also, it should be said, a fetishization of editing in this business that I find unhelpful. Of course good editing is essential. Of course editors play a vital role in making sure what gets published is comprehensible, well-expressed, and true. And, also, sometimes editors are wrong and need to be told so. Good editing is good, bad editing is not, and hopefully you and the editor work out which is which in the process. The problem is that a lot of piety gets injected into the subject of editing, as if editing is good for its own sake , a sacrament. Good editing is that which results in good writing. Editing is as editing does and so editing should be regarded as an indispensable tool rather than as a marker of maturity, as a totem.
Students at the University of Florida do not know how good they have it.
Wendell Berry, collected in What Are People For?
“They spruce up the room where we devote our spare time to Netflix.”
That’s a line from the latest episode of Trevin Wax’s Reconstructing Faith podcast, “Reading the Bible When Nobody Reads." He’s talking about people buying hardback books, for themselves and as gifts, but not reading them. A killer line.
Grateful to Trevin for including me on this episode; it’s a good one, and I’m surrounded by heavies!
Two essays I have not read but that recently came out on the topic of autodidacticism are: Elisa Gonzalez’s “Schooling Myself” in The Point and William Deresiewicz’s “Here Come the Allodidacts” in The Hinternet. They’ve been queued up for a while but now I think I need to take the plunge and read both.
This morning I’m in Mockingbird with an essay called “Generation Autodidact."
Read my friend Myles Werntz on money and church division.
I wrote a little reflection on “intensive, universal lay Bible study," or rather its loss in many churches today.
Read Alastair Roberts on how and why to read Holy Scripture as the living word of the Word made flesh.
This essay in Mockingbird by Elizabeth Oldfield, on being religious, ecstatic, spooky, and disreputable, has the goods. My word for this is inoculation. I’m no charismatic, but it’s freeing beyond words to accept that you’re deplorable in respectable eyes. Veni sancte spiritus!
Read Ari Schulman on the airplane crash over D.C.
Christine Rosen writes about “the era of artificial friendship."
Would love nothing more than to replicate this on my own campus, and maybe every other campus, too.
This is the happiest little magazine nook I’ve ever seen. Located in Pascal’s, the wonderful coffee shop run by the Christian Study Center at the University of Florida.
And, if you happen to be a pastor in the Gainesville area, register for the breakfast tomorrow!
If you happen to live in the Gainesville area, come out tonight! See below for details.
Looks like Bonnie K’s got my back re contemporary mystery preferences and the golden age of detective fiction.