Read Audrey Watters on the Canvas meltdown.
She’s right. You can teach without an LMS. Once you give it a try, you’ll never go back.
Read Audrey Watters on the Canvas meltdown.
She’s right. You can teach without an LMS. Once you give it a try, you’ll never go back.
Read Leithart on the Ascension:
Without the Ascension, we risk shrinking the gospel to a private message of eternal life, which may or may not have public import. When Ascension Day is given its proper due, the gospel shines as public truth, a fundamentally political message of the royal Conqueror that has decisive import for both nations and individuals.
This Spurs team is so fun to cheer for. Bursting at the seams with all the right guys. Pretty soon it’ll be America’s team once the opponent is OKC…
And I wish guys like Simmons and Lowe would quit calling for Fox to be traded. He’s the glue guy. He’s the veteran. He’s the captain of the ship even with Castle on the floor. He’s the missing link, only he’s not missing at all. Don’t trade him! Let the man lead. It’s gotten us this far.
Read Ephraim Radner on the opacity of other human beings.
And while you’re at it, read him on aliens, too.
Nadya Williams has the receipts on Sarah Ruden’s new book on Saint Perpetua, but Eve Tushnet has written a perfect—read: perfect—review of it. I won’t quote a line, because it’s too good to pick apart. Just read it.
Read Nagel on Scanlon. I’m but a humble eavesdropper (grasshopper?) among giants, but here is the only offending paragraph:
Scanlon’s work is situated in highly contested philosophical territory. In my view, his interpersonal foundation for morality is more plausible than the impersonal foundation of impartial benevolence that is its main contemporary rival. He offers a persuasive explanation of what underlies many of the intuitions about individual rights, prohibitions and obligations that are often cited in opposition to utilitarianism.
Is the bolded section of the second sentence true? No, unless you select only for those—even among living Anglophone philosophers—who find one of these two theories compelling. There are plenty of Thomists in the world, for example, and that’s to mention only one alternative. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, etc.
“The Apostle Paul Was Not an Escapist." I’m not so sure. And the implied contrast, between a thoroughgoing eschatology and an ecclesial ethic, seems a false choice to me. As does that between Paul (the man, the thinker, the writer in context) and the canonical Paul, who together with the other canonical writings is what counts for Christians. That is to say, the former is not necessarily identical to the latter, and so the felt need to unite them as one is understandable but misguided.
But that’s a story for another time.
I liked CT’s pairing of two serious evangelical reflections on the ethics of sterilization together: one by Matthew Lee Anderson, the other by Justin Whitmel Earley.
I’m a sucker for Adam Roberts' little etymological deep dives. Here’s another, on Hopkins.
This double-review of two books on faerie for The Lamp is DBH at his A+ finest.
I loved reading Theodore Dalrymple on Agatha Christie. My oldest is on his tenth Christie mystery, with no signs of stopping. Snobbery about writers like her is so silly, even if they aren’t your cup of tea.
A gift from a parting senior.
I have always loved Jrue Holiday’s game. Just wish he could be in silver and black, or at least not facing us in round one while Wemby’s out…
Read Caldwell on imperial decline, technological change, and international order. And meditate on this sentence taken out of context (it leads into a brutal final paragraph):
More information doesn’t always mean you make better decisions—it may mean you have to make decisions more quickly, which often means lousier decisions.
Read Robin Sloan on the extraordinary technological qualities of … the notebook.
He’s not joking, nor am I!
Also in Portico, read Alan Jacobs' essay on Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow.
I love it when Adam Roberts goes down his little etymological rabbit holes—here it’s “bite the dust,” from Homer and French poetry through English translations of The Iliad all the way to Queen.
Freddie is right here, both about the present and about the past. The key text here is David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old. More recently it’s worth reading every entry in Charles C. Mann’s multipart series for The New Atlantis called “How the System Works."
Read Alexander Larman on J. G. Ballard in the first issue of the new journal Portico.
Loved reading this update from Noah Hawley. I didn’t realize the next season of Alien: Earth was already about to start filming.
Perhaps this is taking a bit of A.I. slop too seriously. I am not so sure. It is difficult to understate just how shocking the image is. No president, no medieval king, no emperor or modern dictator has ever publicly represented himself as Jesus Christ or claimed for himself the ability to raise the dead. To Catholics the posting of this image is, or should be, the most profoundly offensive act imaginable, a grave public sin that brings shame to, and invites God’s judgement upon, our nation. Even for secular readers it must be a staggering reminder of the dangers of divinizing those in authority and of the role institutional Christianity has played historically in preventing it.