I’m in CT this morning with a piece about the uses and purposes of just war theory.
I’m in CT this morning with a piece about the uses and purposes of just war theory.
I still remember reading the opening paragraphs of this May 2007 Page 2 column by Bill Simmons. Two decades later I could paraphrase it off the top of my head, having not looked at it in years.
I enjoy listening to the podcast, but I wish he still wrote.
I’m afraid I have to co-sign this downer take on Project Hail Mary. I’m a defender of Peter Jackson’s multiple endings to ROTK, but then, that was after nine hours of an epic journey with an enormous cast of characters. In the case of PHM, I just wanted it do end already.
I missed this piece from a year ago by Griffin Gooch called “The Witch Trials of John Mark Comer." Spot on from start to finish—minus his mild criticism of me, since he and I are on the same team here. Defending Comer from superficial criticisms shouldn’t mean shielding from any criticisms!
That mild dissent notwithstanding, and in light of my newly discovered role as Comer-explainer wherever I travel or speak, I expect to be sharing this a lot going forward.
In a recent lecture Miroslav Volf brought my attention back to Canto 3 of Paradiso, in which Dante has the souls on the bottom rung of heaven, so to speak, answer how they possibly resist the urge to ask or yearn for more. How, that is, are they content with their station rather than jealous of those above their rank?
Their answer (lines 70-27):
Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
virtù di carità, che fa volerne
sol quel c’avemo, e d’altro non ci asseta.
Robin Kirkpatrick translates:
Dear brother, we in will are brought to rest
by power of caritas that makes us will
no more than what we have, nor thirst for more.
Or as we might render the relevant phrase: “We desire only what we have." In Miroslav’s looser paraphrase, “We hope for what we have." Which is to say, what we have is what we want, and what we want is what we have. In a word, true contentment and rest.
Co-sign Alan’s pitch to redistribute your media portfolio. I’m currently subscribing to too many magazines … but I’d prefer to have that problem than the alternative.
The Lent issue of The Lamp was a cover-to-cover no-misses edition. Some recs from an outstanding issue: Matthew Walther on technological poverty, Paul Griffiths on Wittgenstein, Eve Tushnet on the dandy, Theodore Dalrymple on Marat, Roger Lewis on Tom Stoppard, and B. D. McClay on the parables of the steward.
Even just writing those out leaves me a little dumbstruck. What a great magazine.
Read John Ehrett on the post-religious right. One of the best essays on this topic from the last decade.
“Realists of a larger reality”—whoever brought this quote by Le Guin to my attention (Alan Jacobs? B. D. McClay? Robin Sloan?), thank you.
On one hand, all of Freddie’s criticisms and reform proposals for the NBA seem spot on.
On the other hand, I don’t share his experience of the actual product on the court. I’ve enjoying watching actual NBA games over the last couple years as much as I have at any other time, with the only possible exception the Duncan/Kawhi stretch from 2007 to 2017 (for obvious reasons). So what gives?
I really enjoyed Alan’s riff on Worf and therapeutic liberalism.
This morning I’m in CT with a piece about the need for folks who care about low-tech parenting to build a big tent.
In the new issue of CT Jen Pollock Michel somehow successfully accomplishes the three-book book review, united by the theme of the body’s voice. The authors are Alan Noble, Molly Worthen, and Jen Hatmaker. Beautifully written, calmly reasoned, and wise in its judgments. Not quite sure how she thread this fine a needle, but she did.
This interview of Dwight Hopkins by Vincent Lloyd could have gone on much longer and I would have kept reading.
On the blog: two utterly unrelated posts. One asks about screens in American churches, the other proposes Luka as Allen Iverson 2.0.
I’ll add my voice to the chorus and say that you need to read about the rise of “dinergoths."
Wait, so you’re saying AI is making work more intense, not less? Increasing the work load, not alleviating it?
Who could have foreseen this…
All I want for Christmas is for Heat 2 to be Michael Mann’s swan song, his epic, his Godfather: Part II. Please.
The first time I heard John Van Deusen’s voice in “None Other” I heard Michael Stipe, Paul Simon, and Sufjan Stevens.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that I can’t stop listening to it.
Read Katelyn Beaty on the ways that, for all its errors in the area of gender and purity, 1990s evangelicalism was absolutely right and regrettably prophetic in its objections to the mass sexualization of teen girls.
Read Douthat on the Oscars. Over against One Battler After Another and Marty Supreme, Douthat considers Sinners, Bugonia, Eddington, and Weapons:
These are the movies that really get at where our culture is going, I suspect. We are formally committed to seeing Trumpism versus liberalism (whether in Boomer or progressive shape) as the great conflict of the age. But our subtler filmmakers sense a different form of conflict lurking, in which the enemy is something else — the vampire in the dark, the malignant corporation, the nonhuman intelligence, or the devil.