I went on The Cartographers podcast to talk spooky Christianity with Ashley and Bryce Hales.
I went on The Cartographers podcast to talk spooky Christianity with Ashley and Bryce Hales.
Read Myles Werntz on the new Bonhoeffer movie. It’s a sober, thoughtful assessment—including important reflections on the relationship between politics and faith, both then and now—but there are also some howlers.
The one that made me snort: “If this scene included fireworks and a montage of Dietrich doing calisthenics to prepare for the weeks ahead, it could not have been more perfectly written for a spy thriller.”
The one he cut from an earlier draft: “This film’s relationship to the historical Bonhoeffer is the relationship of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter to the historical Lincoln.”
Rowan Williams reviews Jordan Peterson’s new book on the Torah.
My only quibble is his parenthetical, “not really what the text is about,” commenting on Peterson’s reading of Jonah as a parable that stands opposed to forms of environmentalism that prize “nature” over human well-being. I take the openness and flexibility of spiritual interpretation to mean that one can never declare, a priori, what a text is or is not about; what matters is the reading produced and the reasons offered on its behalf. If I recall correctly, Williams himself once gave a lecture about the ecological ethics of the tale of Noah’s ark. He wasn’t wrong to do so! These things are licit. Which doesn’t mean that every such reading is good; that none can be bad. Peterson’s might be. But not because he reads Jonah as “about something it’s not.” That’s what allegory is.
I’m in CT today with a review of Jordan Peterson’s new book on the Torah, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989), p. 163:
Alan Jacobs published this piece on Didion, stories, and politics on the eve of Election Day. It has aged well.
Read Douthat on the uncertain new era we find ourselves facing.
Earlier this year a friend wondered aloud in a text thread whether Judith Butler is the most influential intellectual/writer since Marx—as measured by global, material, political effects. I posed Mao as another possibility. But I could not for the life of me remember which French or German critical theorist has continued, since the 1960s, to identify as a Maoist and to claim Maoism as a kind of orienting political vision. It’s Alain Badiou: here and here.
Leaving this here for myself, when I inevitably forget again.
Although many corporations promise that AI will make society more equitable, the most likely result of its widespread adoption will be to create a drastic bifurcation between those humans forced to interact with computers and those who can relate with other persons.
Adam Roberts is nonpareil. He is the GOAT. He is a one of one. Read him today on “Robots, Slaves, Orphans." When I grow up I want to write (even better, to read) like him.
From Prufrock’s Saturday Links:
Martin Scorsese told AP that he wanted to adapt Marilynne Robinson’s Home for his next film: “Scorsese told AP that while his A Life of Jesus film has been optioned, he is working around the ‘scheduling issue’ of adapting Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robinson’s book. ‘It’s an option but I’m still working on it,’ Scorsese said of A Life of Jesus, adding, ‘There’s a very strong possibility of me doing a film version of Marilynne Robinson’s Home, but that’s a scheduling issue.’”
Very generous and thoughtful review by James R. Wood of my little book on the church. An interesting point at the end on avoiding citation of Yoder, using de Lubac as an alternative. Will think on that.
Up this morning in Christianity Today: My review of Martin Scorsese’s new docuseries The Saints.
Two quotes: one from David Graeber, on making the world what it is, and one from Wendell Berry, on attending to its givenness.
In the print edition of Christianity Today I wrote about the doctrine of providence: what it is and what it’s for (and not for).
I went on The Sacramentalists podcast to talk about Letters to a Future Saint with Fr. Wesley Walker.
I went on The Raised Hand audio edition to talk about my essay for them two weeks ago arguing for knowing God through prayer as what college students need most today.
Matthew Burdette: “I have become convinced that one of the primary challenges for Christians today is to come to terms with the overwhelming success of secularized Christianity.”
On a meta-level, our crisis of communicative action can be explained by the fact that the other is disappearing. The disappearance of the other means the end of discourse. It robs opinions of their communicative rationality. The expulsion of the other strengthens the auto-propagandistic compulsion to indoctrinate oneself with one’s own ideas. This self-indoctrination produces self-referential info bubbles, which impede communicative action. With the development of the auto-propagandistic compulsion, discursive spaces are increasingly replaced by echo chambers in which the only voice one hears is one’s own.
Discourse presupposes that I can distinguish between my opinion and my identity. People who do not have this discursive ability hold fast to their opinions because they feel that their identities are threatened. Any attempt to persuade them to adopt a different opinion is therefore doomed to fail. They do not follow the other; they do not listen. Discourse, however, is a practice of listening. The crisis of democracy is first and foremost a crisis of listening.
—Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy (2021)
I’ve always loved election night. I’d go so far as to say it’s my favorite TV show, after the World Cup finals.
—Michel Houellebecq, Submission (2015)