Russell Moore, TGC, Eugene Peterson Preached One Sermon
Patrick Gilger, America, James KA Smith's Theological Journey
Next, artists: a visit to author Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo, and a post-religious reflection on Sufjan Stevens:
Ursula Lindsey, The Nation, The World of the Alley
Katie Bloom, The Outline, Sufjan Stevens Helped Me Understand God
Then politics: a long 2014 profile of the fascinating German Chancellor Angela Merkel (along with a brief eulogy for Christian Democrats in the wake of the announcement that she will not seek reelection), and a look at the trollish Dinesh D'Souza, who's finally found a political era that has caught up with his determined foolishness and corruption:
George Packer, New Yorker, The Quiet German
Matthew Walther, The Week, Germany's last kaiser
Alice B Lloyd, The Weekly Standard, Dinesh Unchained
Finally, philosophy: George Scialabba (who was featured in an essay in the last roundup) gives an overview of Ivan Illich, "the scourge of the professions," and the Times magazine looks at Bruno Latour's recent attempts to prevent his worthwhile critiques of scientific epistemology from slipping into complete disconnection from reality in the "post-truth" era. The TLS "Footnotes to Plato" series examines Isaiah Berlin's work, and Aeon looks at the integrity and influence of Simone Weil. Both TLS and Aeon had pieces on Hannah Arendt as well, and so did Wen Stephenson in the LA Review of Books (the best of the three, examining how her thoughts on human plurality, political action, and complicity in evil apply to climate change and the post-2016 era):
George Scialabba, The Baffler, Against Everything
Ava Kofman, NYT Mag, Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science
Henry Hardy, Times Literary Supplement, Isaiah Berlin: Against dogma
Christy Wampole, Aeon, Strange and Intelligent
Finn Bowring, Times Literary Supplement, Hannah Arendt and the hierarchy of human activity
James McAuley, Aeon, Shadow and Substance
Wen Stephenson, LARB, Learning to Live in the Dark: Reading Arendt in the Time of Climate Change
Reading about reading – Karen has an adaptation of her book's preface, and First Things has a similar but unrelated piece on filling one's life with reading (which is long and fun, but fairly light). I initially thought Poulos's piece would fit more exactly with the first two, but it ends up being more about the rise of technocratic solutionism and algorithmic bureaucracy:
Karen Swallow Prior, TGC, Practice the Christian Virtue of Reading PromiscuouslyJoseph Epstein, First Things, The Bookish Life
James Poulos, National Affairs, Great Books in a Digital Age?
Nitasha Tiku, Wired, An Alternate History of Silicon Valley Disruption
Nellie Bowles, NYT, A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic, Facebook Groups as Therapy
Kara Bettis, CT Pastors, The Embodied Church in a Digital Age
Dorcas Cheng-Tozun, CT, He Makes Everything Beautiful in Its Time—Including Tech
Patrick Stokes, ABC Religion & Ethics, Inhuman communication: Søren Kierkegaard versus the internet
It was Halloween, and All Saint's Day. Liz asks if we're thinking about Satan enough (probably not); Image's new blog editor offers a memento mori:
Elizabeth Bruenig, Hedgehog Review, The Devil We KnowJessica Mesman, Image, Happy Halloween: Remember You Will Die
Some theology and writing on Christian life and politics: A great review of two theology books, one on creation and one on the end of things (East); Fleming Rutledge draws connections between her book, The Crucifixion, and the work of James Cone; Sam James review a new book about campus speech disputes and finds salient connections with the last generation's parenting habits...and what this means for our own; Jamie Smith review Lauren Winner's new book about the risks of Christian practices being deformed by sin, and thus deforming us; Rosaria Butterfield thinks introverts like her can still find ways to offer hospitality; DL's Curator piece never really gets there for me – while her writing is still gorgeous and I appreciate her very real struggle to live a life of neighbor-love, it seems like far too often she's finding herself overcorrecting from the evangelicalism of her upbringing into wishy-washy universalism (I mean, at least be like Fleming Rutledge and be a rigorous, theologically argued universalist!); Dan Darling rebukes the racist fear of people fleeing from oppression; Matthew rebukes Rod Dreher and anti-immigration fear-mongers in general:
Brad East, Marginalia, First Things and Last Things in Christian Theology
Fleming Rutledge, Generous Orthodoxy: Ruminations, "The Cross and the Lynching Tree" by James H. Cone
Samuel James, Mere O, The Public Square Is about Parenting
James KA Smith, Christian Century, When Christian practice (de)forms us
Rosaria Butterfield, Crossway, How Can You Show Radical Hospitality as an Introvert?
DL Mayfield, Curator, Feasting in the House of the Lord
Daniel Darling, WaPo, Christians should see in the migrant caravan the Bible’s call to honor the dignity of all humanity
Matthew Loftus, Mere O, And Who Is My Neighbor?
Transitioning from the theology but staying on the subject of racism, here are several pieces following the tragic white supremacist attack in Pittsburgh. Russell Moore refutes those who find justification for anti-semitism in the Bible, while Wes Hill (via Lauren Winner) worries about the risks of isolated proof-texting. Brandon McGinley considers the local aspect of both a tragedy of this magnitude and the work needed to fight back. Evan offers his own Jewish perspective in a moving tribute to his heritage, while Emma Green looks at the rituals associated with death and mourning in Pittsburgh's Jewish community. On a slightly different note, Ian Bogost suggests we move past advice intended for children, as it is no longer clear how to interpret in today's world, but rather numbs and absolves us in the wake of acts of evil:
Russell Moore, If You Hate Jews, You Hate Jesus
Wesley Hill, Commonweal, Death at the Tree of Life
Brandon McGinley, WaPo, The long, hard work of healing a society
Evan Tucker, Times of Israel, Pittsburgh in Baltimore
Emma Green, The Atlantic, The Jews of Pittsburgh Bury Their Dead
Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, The Fetishization of Mr. Rogers’s ‘Look for the Helpers’
This article from the sixties was recirculated following the synagogue shooting; its meditation on complicity has eternal relevance in America:
Eugene Patterson, Poynter, A Flower for the GravesThis brings us to more general politics, with several pieces on identity, polarization, and how we might work and act together despite these differences. First, Hazony believes we have lost our American identity, which may be the case, but sadly, his account of that identity is too shallow to provide a workable way forward; as Mendelson observes, the utter emptiness of the rhetoric of "exceptionalism" has been around since the time of Pericles. The past failures of any so-called American identity have been clear for generations – we only needed to listen to people of color and others who fell outside its prescribed boundaries to see its limitations, as Coaston shows. Jones argues that the "middle" is messier than we think; a compromise between good and evil is not inherently virtuous, especially when the side of evil keeps pulling the center their way. (My initial instinct was to quibble with this piece, both in its unclear definition of virtue and its seeming unwillingness to acknowledge the others that, like it or not, we live with, but it is a worthwhile corrective to a morally blind moderation that allows evil to persist; any worthwhile "middle ground" to be sought must relate the disparate parties within the boundaries of moral absolutes.) A polarized America has numerous interpretations of evil, though, and it seems that there may no longer be a place for a virtuously positioned moderate in this political climate (Plott); might this doom us to a politics based primarily on cults of personality (Miller)? Meanwhile, younger evangelicals largely – though not uniformly – struggle to reclaim their faith from the political associations with which it's long been saddled (Dias). Judy Wu Dominick provides the most productive way forward, recounting her journey to an interest in justice, and offering the diverse cultural, economic, and political backgrounds of the 12 disciples as an example of how Jesus transcends our chosen affiliations:
Yoram Hazony, Time, How Americans Lost Their National Identity
Edward Mendelson, NY Review of Books, What Thucydides Knew About the US Today
Jane Coaston, Vox, Max Boot, Jackie Robinson, and the racism problem in the Republican Party
Tayari Jones, Time, There's Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground
Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, The 2018 Midterms Could Kill the American Moderate for Good
Tayari Jones, Time, There's Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground
Elaina Plott, The Atlantic, The 2018 Midterms Could Kill the American Moderate for Good
Katherine Miller, Buzzfeed, First Came Trump, Then Came Beto: Ted Cruz And The Brutal Politics Of Likability
Elizabeth Dias, NYT, ‘God Is Going to Have to Forgive Me’: Young Evangelicals Speak Out
Judy Wu Dominick, CT, Love Your Political FrenemiesRachael Denhollander, Vox, I’m a sexual assault survivor. And a conservative. The Kavanaugh hearings were excruciating.
Kimi Harris, CT, Time Doesn’t Heal Sexual Assault If Victims Are Silenced
Edmund Waldstein, Popula, #MeToo in light of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics
Rick Barry, Christ & Pop Culture, Brett Kavanaugh, Willful Ignorance, and the Pop Culture of the 1980s
These two aren't really connected, except that they are about stuff: too much of it, what happens to it, problems arising in how we deal with it, and what should we do with it instead:
Leslie Hook & John Reed, Financial Times, Why the world's recycling system stopped working
Matt Miller, Comment, Holy Clutter
Two pairs of book-related pieces: an adapted excerpt from Smarsh's Heartland and Gracy's very positive review of it, and two essays on Bulgakov:
Sarah Smarsh, The Guardian, Country pride: what I learned growing up in rural America
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, A Price Tag on the American Dream
Viv Groskop, LitHub, Life Got You Down? Time to Read The Master and Margarita
Cathy Young, The Weekly Standard, Devil's Ball
The Good Place Season 3 is getting good again!
DL Mayfield, Christ & Pop Culture, The Good Place Recap: The Ballad of Donkey Doug (Season 3, Episode 6)DL Mayfield, Christ & Pop Culture, The Good Place Recap: A Fractured Inheritance (Season 3, Episode 7)
Two last reviews to close this out, both of things I like that have required some wind to be taken out of their sails: On the more serious side, Louie seems to think that he can merit a career resurgence by showing off his black defenders in a way that allies him with the oppressed; he'd do better not to view black comedy fans as monolithic (or even try to have a comedy career right now in the first place). But some comedy is worthwhile, like this takedown of the empty pretentiousness of most people lugging around a copy of Infinite Jest (not me, of course, I am very literate and sophisticated and had a conversation about IJ just this week in which I only needed to be reminded of who one character was):
Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, Louis C.K.’s Phantom Alliance With His Black Fans
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