Brad East

1 Maccabees 1:11-15:

In those days lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, “Let us go and make a covenant with the gentiles round about us, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us.” This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king. He authorized them to observe the ordinances of the gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.

As I read this passage, in just five verses it summarizes (or rather, anticipates) more or less verbatim the charge of the Pharisees against Paul’s ministry to and among the gentiles via the synagogue-networked Jewish diaspora in the Roman Empire.

My review of Phil Christman’s new book, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, is out from behind the paywall at First Things. It’s called “Politics for Losers."

Not sure she quite convinced me, but I found Molly Worthen’s piece on CCM to be disarming, instructive, and moving.

J. Robert Lennon on Elmore Leonard: “He did more with less than any crime writer I can think of."

And: “Leonard’s superpower was to apprehend the broken syntax of real speech and translate it to the page so that it jumped straight from the eye to the ear, bypassing the inner grammarian.”

Read Walther on online, post-political discourse.

“‘My thoughts darted from these promising horizons to gnarly thickets of logistics’ is a sentence I will long remember."

Read Andrew Kaufmann on the idea of the west.

Artificial intelligence is incapable of thinking, for the very reason that it cannot get goosebumps.

—Byung-Chul Han, Non-things (2021)

“…prolonging Volunteer misery.”

Sports announcers are the best.

Modern Theology has been slowly publishing reflections on and reconsiderations of Kathryn Tanner’s first book and its proposal of a theological grammar for describing God’s relation to and difference from the world. All of them are worth reading, but see especially her own piece, titled “How My Mind Has Changed on God’s Noncontrastive Transcendence."

Read C. S. Lewis’s 1958 essay, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," h/t Bonnie Kristian.

Read Christopher Caldwell on the instability and collapse of global liberalism.

Read Rachel Roth Aldhizer on Medicaid and what her disabled son needs to live.

Read Nick Burns on why AI isn’t biased enough.

Read Daniel McCarthy on “how the right learned to love the state."

Read Luke Timothy Johnson on Bruce Gordon’s new global history of the Bible.

Read Daniel Gullotta on Randall Balmer’s new book about the separation of church and state.

In which Andrew Wilson finally cracks the code: how to understand what “the righteousness of God” means in Scripture.

At the beginning of Joshua 18, five tribes (the two half-tribes of Joseph forming two rather than one) have received their allotment of land; seven remain. (Again, no Levi.) The text even draws attention to the number: “seven tribes' inheritance had not yet been apportioned” (v. 2).

Mark 6-8: Feeding of the 5,000 then the 4,000. Jesus starts with five loaves in the first then seven in the second. So that Jesus, in feeding the multitudes—arrayed as men of war, just as the tribes were under Joshua (Yeshua)—is reapportioning the land, dividing it again as Israel’s martial king and judge (having earlier divided the waters of the Jordan in order to enter the land, to re-gather God’s covenant people). Yet instead of doing so alongside a second Eleazar, he himself is also the priest who knows the will of God in the matter.

Wendell Berry, Sabbath poems, 2007

This find by Andrew Wilson is very neat.

Alan asks:

There is literally not one person who thinks that kids learn anything about anything when they’re allowed to spend their classroom time on their laptops and phones. Everybody knows that education has been given up on; everybody knows that teachers are just babysitting; everybody knows that the fix is in.

The only question remaining is: Can we lie about the situation forever?

That really is the question. I was just discussing this with a colleague last week. He thinks the game is up and schools and employers are going to bring the collegiate house of cards tumbling down imminently; I replied that humans have an extraordinary capacity for self-deception and for living indefinitely with cognitive dissonance, even in the face of plain contradictions. I don’t pretend to a prediction, but I am willing, at least, to believe that we could collectively perpetuate this particular lie for a distressingly lengthy period of time.

Speaking of Buckley, read Henry Oliver on both the biography and the man.

Luttwak applies the appropriate skepticism here, along with some jaw-dropping anecdotes.