I'm going to try to post everything I read worth reading this year. January 1 was a Monday, so perhaps this roundup will be a Monday ritual - we'll see. I still might post separately if I have something I specifically want to comment on, but I think this is a good start.
This first week, I read less online than usual (probably as a result of being on social media less), but the first thing I read was (very appropriately) Andy Crouch at The Gospel Coalition: Keep Technology in Its Proper Place in 2018
Also at TGC, Hannah Anderson had a great piece on her theology of place, rootedness, and community to start off their new series of longform writing: Finding Our Place: Our Family’s Long Quest for Calling and Home
Alan Jacobs explored how writers describe place (namely the New York City of the distant past and distant future), and the similarities between historical and speculative fiction for (the now sadly defunct) Education & Culture: Narrating the City (Past and Present)
On the city beat, this NYT piece criticizes NIMBY homeowners who seek to control an area much larger than what they own, looking at the history of community-based resistance from racial restrictive covenants up through opposition to everything from landfills to funeral homes. I generally enjoy Emily Badger's writing, but this piece fell short to me. Hasn't the implication of NIMBYism always functionally meant "Not In My Neighborhood"? Furthermore, setting aside that this can often be used for terrible purposes (e.g., the aforementioned race restrictions), should homeowners (and later renters) banding together and getting involved to positively (from their perspective, at least) influence their community's future really be where we direct our anger? It seems to me this article should have sussed out the nuance between good and bad collective action, or perhaps made an argument towards accepting the NIMBYs' resilience and initiative while seeking ways to help them find better desires. How ‘Not in My Backyard’ Became ‘Not in My Neighborhood’
In National Affairs, Brian Dijkema argues that conservatives should support unions under the principle of subsidiarity, but that unions should also stop being a variant force of technocratic legibility and operate on a more human scale, using the resources of religion to recognize human dignity: Reviving Solidarity
I've been really impressed with everything I've read at The Point, and their new issue looking at the Church is no exception. In A Serious House, James Chappel goes looking for the decline of religion and is surprised by all the vibrant life (not to mention untrumpeted care for others) he finds. "Maritain began to ask how the church could lend its weight toward reforming modernity, as opposed to overcoming it. His change in focus was in part a product of his interest in the Christianity of the catacombs: the dusty and small meeting spaces that resemble the storefront churches of our own suburbs. The earliest and purest Christians had no inkling of the yawning granite structures that would one day symbolize the faith. For them, the church was ambulatory, representing the spirit of Christian assembly operating within social structures, like yeast in dough, rather than confronting them from without. Instead of viewing the church as a 'fortified castle,' Maritain urged, 'we must think of an army of stars thrown across the sky.'"
On the subject of great writing on Christianity from outside it, David Ramsey explores the "lined-out hymnody" in the Old Baptist churches of the Christ-haunted South for Oxford American, and ends up Tuned Up in the Spirit. "The thing is, the secular knowledge of my secular life seems to me inadequate to the experience of being alive. For now we see through a glass, darkly. Yes, precisely. Let’s say that my wife made noises I had never heard before, and our daughter was born. Let’s say that light traveled ninety-three million miles from a dying star and fell at a certain angle in the window the first time I looked at her face. I do not claim to understand the specific joy that true believers feel. But these lives we are gifted—I am thankful."
Changing gears entirely, Michael Sacasas evaluates the application of Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to our modern world of technology and the perils of rendering people superfluous at his blog, The Frailest Thing: Superfluous People, the Ideology of Silicon Valley, and The Origins of Totalitarianism
Cited in the piece above is this excerpt adapted in Vanity Fair from Emily Chang's new book, Brotopia, chronicling the rise of rampant sex-and-drug parties among the Silicon Valley elite. Not a light read, and sadly, not particularly surprising, but illuminating nonetheless. “OH MY GOD, THIS IS SO F---ED UP”: INSIDE SILICON VALLEY’S SECRETIVE, ORGIASTIC DARK SIDE
It seems appropriate to follow that up with Christine Rosen's The Reckoning in Commentary, in which she argues the post-Weinstein sexual-ethics fallout has been a long time coming. The above piece, though, reveals how much there is that's still left to fall.
Matthew Loftus argues at Mere Orthodoxy that If Anything Is Pro-Life, Nothing Is; while we certainly need a consistent ethic and anthropology to make pro-life arguments, and a wide variety of policies may ultimately reduce demand for abortion, linking everything imaginable - from immigration to zoning - with the movement to ban abortion merely muddies the waters.
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