Brad East

I laughed hysterically throughout The Rewatchables' episode about James Cameron’s Aliens. Self-recommending.

Read Adam Roberts on Philip Hensher’s new book A History of the Novel in Britain. The avoidance of all genre, general tone of condescension, and reliance on “judgment as summary” are damning indeed.

I’m not the direct audience for it, but Timothy Burke’s policing of his fellow leftists on Cold War politics and those who lived through it is both wise and laudable.

Deadline interviews Paul Schrader about his new film: come for the Calvinism, stay for the Plantinga/Wolterstorff shout-outs:

DEADLINE: I wanted to ask what by now you’ve learned about guilt and inherent vice or human fallibility? You’ve explored these themes a lot across decades. What have you learned about those qualities by this stage in your work?

SCHRADER: Yes, guilt is the gift that keeps on giving. I was raised within a guilt-driven form of Protestantism: Calvinism. The notion of total depravity is very important. “Our righteous works are like filthy rags” in the eyes of God. The TULIP represents the five points of Calvinism: Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. That gets hammered into you. I was raised to believe that we are incapable of salvation. You had to accept it by grace. It was a puzzle box of a conundrum. But it was also a great education. I’m even wearing my Calvin shirt today. Unlike many from evangelical churches, John Calvin was a hardcore intellectual. He believed you could think your way into heaven, and he constructed this whole edifice of thought, the Institutes, two volumes of it. I took it in college. It was all logic with one little pinhole of faith. But of course, a pinhole of faith is about the same size as a barn door of faith because once you let faith into the argument, all the logic and all the reasoning in the world doesn’t matter, and so that was the whole gimmick of Calvinism: to try to think or reason your way into salvation, but you need to have that little pinhole of faith…

DEADLINE: Do you resent this upbringing in any way? Given how formal and strict it sounds…

SCHRADER: Not at all. It was great. My college [Calvin College/University, Michigan] has fallen a little behind. It was a premier liberal arts Christian school, and those schools, primarily because of funding, are drifting more to the right. And so, when I went to school, the idea of liberal arts, thinking, and philosophy was very much in the Christian tradition. It’s become less so now, which is a pity. But I did not feel encumbered. A number of my professors went on to become quite famous philosophers such as Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga. The whole notion of Christian philosophy was very invigorating, and I think that gets sort of short shrift by some people who just assume that because you have faith, it means you don’t have to think.

MBD:

I also try to be a moral realist, in the sense that I don’t confuse expressing opinions about various evils done by foreigners with providing material assistance to the victims of those policies. Condemning Han supremacy from my desk in New York State is not brave, it involves no sacrifice or risk, and it doesn’t even take much in the way of moral acuity. At most I might be holding up norms where I have influence. At worse [sic], and when done with too much self-regard, bombastic moral pronouncements on activities over which you have no real influence is a kind of seductive substitute for real moral action. I’ve always admired more the European aristocrats who, when really scandalized by an evil in a world beyond their borders, go out and travel to it themselves and get directly involved by volunteering in some way. Some, of course, get caught up in horrible enthusiasms. But Roger Scruton actually helped to hold seminars behind the Iron Curtain. That may not be as glamorous as carrying a gun against some tinpot and his militias, but it involved real work, and potentially real danger and sacrifice.

Read Paul Kingsnorth’s eulogy for Berry: “In the end … Berry will be proven right.”

See also my 2021 essay on Berry for The Point titled “When Losing is Likely."

I’m heartbroken about losing Wendell Berry, though he died full of years, at a good old age, at the end of a live well lived. I hope to write about his impact on my life later this week. Until now: may he rest in peace and rise in glory!

Matt thinks that, given the nature of forgiveness, the act of forgiving is (a) dependent or contingent upon the repentance of the offender and (b) impossible to do for those who have wronged us if they died unrepentant. I lack the time to respond in full now, but I disagree!

Luke Burgis’s conversation with Tyler Cowen was a pleasure to listen to; it made me like Burgis more than I did already.

Tyler, convert already!

I’m sure you don’t need me to recommend that bombshell essay by Tyler Austin Harper, but do also read his interview with Len Gutkin and Evan Goldstein at the Chronicle.

Dale Coulter’s “Protestant Mind” newsletter has quickly become indispensable reading. Check out his latest on the state of Christian Zionism.

Re: JD Vance’s new book, the three reviews to read are by Kevin D. Williamson (the ugly), Matthew Walther (the mean), and Julia Yost (the meta, and incidentally the just).

On the tragic case of Jason Arday, the two best things to read are by Jesse Singal and Graeme Wood.

Another catch-up read: The one-two New Statesman punch of Emily Lawford and Pippa Bailey on “the angry young women” of progressive Gen Z college grads.

I really enjoyed C. W. Howell’s exploration of God and his absence in the short stories of Ted Chiang.

Brad Littlejohn hits a home run in his essay for Commonplace called “Tech Policy’s Libertarian Hangover," with a helpful follow-up on his Substack.

This is an outstanding, judicious, dispassionately written review by Patrick Iber of Dave Zirin’s new biography of Howard Zinn.

This was a disappointing, deflating, and confusing read. I would have appreciated a good-faith engagement, or even takedown, by comparison to the finished piece.

Only Adam Roberts would launch an investigation into Dorothy Sayers' height. Loved seeing this in my inbox.

Freddie on the fantastical prophecies of the AI true believers:

So this is what I would say to Read and others who are trying to skate the line of being AI skeptic skeptics without being full-on deranged maximalists: you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives in a world that would be almost totally recognizable to people living in the year 2000, a world that functions more or less the same way our world has functioned for the duration of our entire lives, with an economy that is not structurally much different from the same one we’ve always known. There will be jobs, and there will be cancer, and any missions to Mars will be fundamentally scientific endeavors that do not promise any economic return at all. No human being alive today will make it to 150 years old, not even the youngest infants; any asteroid mining that occurs will be a gimmick and will be a net money loser by a vast margin. Nothing in the world of medicine will happen that will come close to matching the improvements in health and longevity that were achieved in the 20th century, when the boring mundane advances of routine handwashing, antibiotics, and vaccines saved lives by the tens of millions. More and more often, you’ll get around in self-driving cars. And that will be cool. Traffic fatalities will decline. But we won’t live to see a world where human-driven cars are banned—you can’t technology your way out of a political problem, and if you think getting Americans to give up their guns is hard, just wait until you see how they cling to their cars. And, you know. Cars are just cars.

Peter Leithart on Samuel Moyn:

Precisely as my own personal time horizon shrank, my familial time horizon expanded because my wife and I lived to see our children’s children. Grandchildren perform a miraculous resurrection that many in my generation experience only on a small scale, or not at all. If Moyn really wants to smash the gerontocracy, he should go natalist.

First line of the Odyssey: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

First verse of Hebrews: Πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως πάλαι ὁ θεὸς λαλήσας τοῖς πατράσιν ἐν τοῖς προφήταις

Somehow it took me two decades to learn that the (in)famous word Homer uses to summarize Odysseus’s winding/many-layered/multiplicitous character is the same word that Hebrews uses to describe God’s many and various ways of speaking to Israel before sending his Son in the person of Jesus.

How did I miss this?

This is disappointing. See Derek’s reaction, too.

I finally read Antón Barba-Kay’s wonderful essay for Commonweal, published back in January, called “Havens for the Human.” I’m glad I saved it and made time for it. The analysis and prescriptive vision for the future of the university are both lovely.

Plus, we get the line “big brother, big tech, big LOL.” That one got me.

“Ryan Gosling And WB Eye Live-Acton ‘Flintstones’ Pic About Bamm-Bamm”: a real headline at Deadline.