On this week’s episode of Mere Fidelity—my return after a five or six week absence—Derek and I had Brad Littlejohn on as a guest to talk with us about Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
On this week’s episode of Mere Fidelity—my return after a five or six week absence—Derek and I had Brad Littlejohn on as a guest to talk with us about Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
Presumably paywalled for non-subscribers—all the more reason to subscribe today!—but I’m honored to have an essay in the newest issue of The New Atlantis titled “You Don’t Have to Use AI."
For Father’s Day I wrote about my fathers in the faith, i.e., faithful men in my congregation who helped hand on the faith to me.
Some Australians would die before they said Mate,
though hand-rolled Mate is a high-class disguise—
but to have just one culture is well out of date:
it makes you Exotic, i.e. there to penetrate
or to ingest, depending on size.
—Les Murray, “A Brief History” (1996; this is the third of six stanzas)
These viewership numbers for the NBA Finals are pretty wild. My thought all season, whether listening to Simmons on tanking or reading Freddie on style, is that while their criticisms may be on point, the league is actually as good as it’s ever been, maybe even better than ever. Glad to see people tuned in! I’ve had more conversations with casual sports and basketball fans in the last month than I have since Steph and LeBron were battling a decade ago.
Rilke, 1908: Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
Wittgenstein, 1937: Daß das Leben problematisch ist, heißst, daß Dein Leben nicht in die Form des Lebens paßt. Du mußt dann Dein Leben verändern, und paßt es in die Form, dann verschwindet das Problematische.
“There’s no going back”—the refrain of every libertarian the day after the day after a bad law goes into effect. Thought, political and otherwise, is reduced to the tiniest of time frames instead of decades and centuries. Change becomes impossible, excerpt in a forward march, where “forward” aligns with ever-relaxing restrictions that, once relaxed, can never be undone; whereas temporary “backward” setbacks can always be undone, usually quite quickly, even against popular majorities.
The sheer nerdiness of the 1999 Spurs and their beloved StarCraft LAN parties is a wonder to behold.
The “amoral center” is spot-on: sharp analysis by Douthat.
“Your search — how can i eliminate ai from my google searches? -ai — did not match any documents.”
You don’t say.
I wrote about the San Antonio Spurs' magical run this season, and all the good news and happy lessons (not bad ones!) to take away from it.
That last point, about “religious” or otherwise non-secular philosophers not counting even though they are numerous, for the reason that some personal conviction or seemingly countercultural belief invalidates their views, also appears in biblical scholarship. The “majority” or “consensus” or “established” position on Pauline authorship of, e.g., 2 Thessalonians or Colossians is none of those things, except by fiat of a select few. But those who would or do dissent are made not to count, et voila, a scholarly consensus!
Douthat is right in his response to Yglesias; he might have added, too, that “few philosophers” is one of those academic tricks whereby all the members of the guild who would upset an elite consensus are excluded from the set by virtue of either their perceived religiosity (thus they don’t count) or their perceived marginal views (ditto)—hence, a perfectly circular “consensus” achieved solely through the explicit operation of ruling out dissenters on principle, the principle being that they dissent from the consensus, which consensus is arrived at only (again) through not allowing those who disagree to count.
The doctor himself.
Inside the Church of Saint Irenaeus in Lyon.
The magi.
