And like that, I must have felt suddenly free to share whatever I wanted, because next was a piece from First Things from Ralph C Wood on Flanery O'Connor, which, it turns out, reflects a lot of the interests I've maintained to this day: Stamped but not Cancelled
"O’Connor’s kinfolk sometimes urged her to write about 'wholesome' people. She replied that her outrageous characters are indeed 'whole' because their peculiarity points, even if negatively, to the full, angular, thorny humanity that we are in danger of losing in our time. She likened the true grotesques of our age to chickens who have been genetically engineered so as to make them wingless, the better to produce an abundance of tender white meat. The denizens of our secular sovereignty are not so much a brood of vipers, she said, but 'a generation of wingless chickens.' This, she surmised, 'is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.'
When God dies, as O’Connor learned from Nietzsche, 'the last man' arrives. “‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” They blink because they no longer question or probe, because they refuse to take courageous risks or venture untrodden paths. The last men are shrunken creatures who make everything small, who live longest because they hop like fleas from one warm host to another, who no longer shoot the arrow of their longing beyond man, who want the same things as everyone else because everyone is the same. Unable even to despise themselves, they blink because they are satisfied with happiness as small-minded as themselves."
More on Charleston, from Suzy Khimm in New Republic: Clementa Pinckney's Political Ministry: "Righteous Indignation in the Face of Injustices"
"In the final weeks of his life, Pinckney focused on passing a bill requiring all South Carolina police officers to wear body cameras after Walter Scott’s death. And he rallied his colleagues to act by invoking a passage from the Bible. It was the day before Easter when Scott, an unarmed African-American man, was fatally shot in the back by a police officer in Charleston. On the Senate floor, Pinckney recalled the passage that described how Jesus had appeared before his disciples, but Thomas, who wasn’t there, refused to believe that he had been resurrected on Easter.
“He said, ‘I won’t believe until I see the nails. I won’t believe until I can put my hand in your side.’ And it was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe—my Lord and my God,’” Pinckney said in his resonant basso profundo. He compared Thomas’s story to those who refused to believe what had happened to Scott until they saw the video. “What if Mr. Santiago was not there to record? I’m sure that many of us would still say, like Thomas, ‘We don’t believe,’” he concluded."
And Ross Douthat on Persecution and the Black Church (NYT): "African-American Christianity hasn’t been persecuted in the United States in the way that, say, minority religions are currently being persecuted by the Islamic State; the martyrdom of black Christians hasn’t taken the form of being explicitly asked to abjure Jesus Christ or die. But because the religion of the slaves and their descendants has been crucial to black Americans’ resistance, their long campaign for equality before the law, it has also been a place where the weight of oppression has been particularly heavily applied. Not only during the civil rights era’s church burning and bombings but long before, the quest to subjugate black people has logically required targeting their churches, their religious institutions, their ability to freely practice Christian faith. The faith of black people is not the thing that white supremacists hate most about them, but it is a thing that white supremacists consistently tried to break and weaken, gentle and diminish, in order that white supremacy might be sustained. [...]
America already has been the site of a sustained exercise in persecution, albeit a persecution of a very distinctive and peculiar kind, and nothing that potentially threatens conservative Christians in our arguably-secularizing, arguably de-Christianizing America (marginalization, loss of influence, even fines and discrimination over certain issues) is likely to impose the kind of burdens on believers that the black church, for centuries, had to bear."
Joe Kickasola in Curator Magazine on Tom Waits: The Scar in the Sound "The Hebrew word for spirit, Ruach, is also the word for breath. If the spirit is breath, Waits is, very often, the death rattle, the last gasp as the body begins to collapse in on the breath. And yet–by sheer will–Waits forces it out, defiantly. In this way, he is like a warrior for messy, authentic life; for real, bodily experience in the world, amid many forces that would package and commodify it, simulate and sell it online.
He also functions in the prophetic mode, like Ezekiel wasting away on his side in the middle of square, hollering, out of his enormous discomfort, how everyone ought to turn around before it’s too late. Waits gives us the whole body, and the fragility of Being, by accentuating and foregrounding the grain of the sound, and it is by sound that he asserts material Being in an age tempted to skip the body altogether."
Mark Edmundson at The Hedgehog Review explores what seems to be the flip-side of what Charles Taylor describes as the Lockean "punctual self" – when we eliminate the soul, we are left with "the Body Omnipotent": Body and Soul
"Does the body still exist if we do not have souls? It may sound like a flippant question—or at least a sophistic one. I intend it as neither: Does the body still exist if we do not have souls?
What happens, in other words, if the dialectic that has existed for believers and for idealists alike suddenly collapses? If there are no souls, are there still bodies in the conventional sense—the sense that puts the body in tension with the soul? [...]
I do not think it is wrong to say that what we are left with, when our bodies become ourselves, is the quest for pleasure. If the body is the only existence (and therefore not quite the body as we knew it before), then we need to gear ourselves to living as enjoyably as possible. The objective of life becomes the avoidance of pain and the stringing together of as many moments of gratification as possible. What else could it be?"
In a year of separation, this Art House America post from Alissa Wilkinson seared me deeply: "Pain" Lessons "In any case, don’t cut a baguette. Approach it stealthily, then rip it apart.
Tiny baguette crumbs will spray everywhere, into your hair, your sweater, your cup of tea. They will sneak between the pages of your books and fall into the cracks next to your laptop keys.
This act of ripping seems muscular and violent. To soften it, think of it as that long-ago relationship with the man whom you liked a great deal, but who was all wrong for whatever reason. Hold the baguette gently so as not to flatten it on either end, yours or his. Tear softly, letting the pieces come apart naturally where the cracks had already formed. After you rip, little bits of one end or the other will stick to the torn baguette.
You can never fit something like that back together. No split is perfect, but bread tastes better torn messily, and anyhow, that’s never the end of the story. Better things are always on their way."
Tiny baguette crumbs will spray everywhere, into your hair, your sweater, your cup of tea. They will sneak between the pages of your books and fall into the cracks next to your laptop keys.
This act of ripping seems muscular and violent. To soften it, think of it as that long-ago relationship with the man whom you liked a great deal, but who was all wrong for whatever reason. Hold the baguette gently so as not to flatten it on either end, yours or his. Tear softly, letting the pieces come apart naturally where the cracks had already formed. After you rip, little bits of one end or the other will stick to the torn baguette.
You can never fit something like that back together. No split is perfect, but bread tastes better torn messily, and anyhow, that’s never the end of the story. Better things are always on their way."
Also from Alissa, at Books & Culture (RIP), she writes about David Foster Wallace. I shared this in response to a post on the DFW semi-biopic The End of the Tour I was tagged in by a friend; it's great: Everybody Worships
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