Last week's reads, on-time and condensed

It's probably unsustainable to write a little mini-essay on everything I read each week, so this is a more list-like collection.

First, some good conservative writers complain about Trump:
Tom Nichols, Washington Post, Trump's First Year: A Damage Assessment
David Frum, The Atlantic, An Exit from Trumpocracy
Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative, This is Your Brain on Trump TV

I really disliked this NYT review of Patrick Deneen's new book, but I liked Dreher's interview with him:
Jennifer Szalai, New York Times, If Liberalism is Dead, What Comes Next?
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, Classical Liberalism Strikes Out

Speaking of reviews, this one is better:
N T Wright, The Christian Century, The New Testament in the strange words of David Bentley Hart

Emma Green is a fantastic journalist. Here in The Atlantic, she writes a typically nuanced piece examining how Science is Giving the Pro-Life Movement a Boost

Claudia Dreifus, The New York Review of Books, "Studies in Power": An Interview with Robert Caro "I don’t really regard my books as biographies. I’ve never had the slightest interest in writing a book to tell the life of a great man. I started The Power Broker because I realized that there was this man, Robert Moses, who had all this power and he had shaped New York for forty-four years. And nobody knew where this power was coming from, and neither did I. I regarded the book as a study of power in cities.
After I finished that, I wanted to do national power. I felt I could learn about how power worked on a national level by studying Lyndon Johnson. Rightly or wrongly, I regard all these books as studies in political power, not biography."

Also on the subject of power in cities: Collette Shade, Splinter News, How to Build a Segregated City

From the "Modern Love" section of the NYT, on biking through the pain of divorce: Elaisha Stokes, New York Times, The Bike That Saved My Life

This piece was really interesting albeit problematic. The analysis of what colleges read what and how their selections may artificially inflate certain books is great; knocking on an author's TV appearances in a way that shows the authors can't really decide if he's too smart or too dumb for his success, not so much. Florence Dore, J. D. Connor, and Dan Sinykin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebel Yale: Reading and Feeling "Hillbilly Elegy"

Liz Bruenig always knocks it out of the park, whether she's discussing Augustine and historical Christian approaches to charity for the poor, or in her new WaPo column, discussing our modern ethics of sex and freedom, and how both are abused by celebrities, the President, and the rest of us.
Elizabeth Bruenig, The Point, Charitable Living
Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post, The sexual revolution isn’t going away. It never really happened.
Elizabeth Bruenig, Washington Post, President Trump is the freest man alive

More thoughts on the modern sex ethic, and a defense of the Victorian one:
Samuel James, First Things, Purity and Prejudice
David Sandifer, Touchstone, In Defense of Prudery

Some tech stuff, everything is terrible:
Sherry Turkle, Washington Post, Why these friendly robots can’t be good friends to our kids
Fred Vogelstein, Wired, Facebooks's Adam Mosseri on why you'll see less video, more from friends
Tony Reinke, Desiring God, Why We Should Escape Social Media (And Why We Don't)

Christ & Pop Culture is still putting out great stuff, like this review of "Lady Bird" and a plea for more honest repentance from church leaders:
Hal Koss, Christ & Pop Culture, Lady Bird Offers Us an Antidote for Our Cultural Homesickness
Abby Perry, Christ & Pop Culture, The Church Needs a Masterclass in How to Apologize for Sexual Assault

A few other miscellaneous things:
Andy Crouch, andycrouch.com, The Three Callings of a Christian
Chris Willman, Billboard, Why Are the Eagles So Hated? An Explainer on the Immensely Popular Yet Divisive Rock Band

Last week's reading

This week had a much wider range of reading material (hence this post being a day late, despite only being the second week of doing this). Offline, I went through the book of Colossians in my personal Bible reading, and in keeping with its instruction to act wisely toward those outside the faith, seasoning our words with salt, I'll start with some pieces that speak to Christian apologetics in different ways. First, in the NYT's "The Stone" column, Agnes Callard examines Pascal's Wager, aspirational faith, and The Breakfast Club, wondering Can We Learn to Believe in God? She writes: "The project is intellectual, involving a change in beliefs, but it is not only intellectual — and its intellectual character is inseparable from its affective and motivational character."

Probably my favorite thing I read this week was an essay by Francis Spufford at First Things, reviewing some Spiritual Literature for Atheists by Sam Harris and Barbara Ehrenreich. The latter (and better) book was part of my reading in 2014 when I was spiritually searching, and though I couldn't articulate it at the time, I was disappointed for similar reasons to Spufford. However, his justified critique of the two books in question is redirected at the Church, who has made it virtually impossible for many searchers – even those as probing, honest, and erudite as Ehrenreich – to see God as the answer to their search, the Yes to all the promises they feel implicit in their wandering. This chastisement is crucial for our apologetic approach.

Similarly, this short post from Thomas Kidd at TGC looks at Alan Jacobs' book on Original Sin, and he sees an apologetic insight here as well: "Too often, pop Christian apologetics proceeds with the assumption that Christianity is so self-evidently true that you’d have to be stupid or dishonest to reject it. This is a bad approach for a number of reasons, not least that it implies that believers saw the light because they were smart enough to see it. For those of us with a high view of grace, such a smug view will not do.
Jacobs follows in a much healthier and theologically sound tradition of those such as C. S. Lewis who say to the non-Christian world, as it were, 'I know that Christianity’s claims may sound crazy at first. But what if they actually make sense of life’s most besetting problems?'"Alan Jacobs and Augustinian Anthropology

I coincidentally stumbled across this several-years-old post for Cabinet Magazine from Alan Jacobs that's related to the same Original Sin book; he writes here about Adam & Eve, the exposure of our nakedness, and our shame in the sight of God when separated from Him by sin: In The Garden

Another Alan Jacobs post is up at The New Atlantis, in which he digs deep into the mindset of campus protests and the ineffectual discourse on either opinionated side of the issue. A great look at the mythical/quasi-religious views that fuel the passion of many for social justice, and the need for ideological purity that fuels its more performative instances: Wokeness and Myth on Campus

Speaking of moral sources, Yuval Levin argues at First Things that our secular, liberal order (both on the Right and the Left) is trying to bypass the intermediary institutions that shape us into the sort of Good-oriented citizens said order requires for stability. It's hard not to see the mythologized thinking mentioned above as a sort of secularized search for deeper meaning (a meaning fueled, indeed, by views of human dignity and benevolence whose roots are more spiritual than the protestors might care to admit). Levin argues that if we are not shaped by institutions (specifically, he mentions families, liberal education, and religion) that give us these deeper meanings and their associated moral formation, liberalism (again, broadly conceived) is likely to overdraw the account that these now-declining institutions had paid into:  Taking The Long Way

The recent issue of Fare Forward also deals quite a bit with this broad liberal order, as did their launch party/discussion at the Catholic Information Center. Eve Tushnet is in the issue and was at the launch, and she has some thoughts on her Patheos blog about the challenges facing the postliberal project: Off-Key in the Canticle: Some scattered notes on “post-liberal” order

And since there's never enough writing about Augustinian approaches to the intersection of religion and politics, here's Jonathan Leeman review of James K A Smith's Awaiting The King for TGC: Doing Political Theology, Waiting for King Jesus

Meanwhile, the workplace is experiencing a different sort of intersection with spirituality, as employers encourage "mindfulness" practices to improve workers' quality of life (i.e., distract them from their unfulfilling work while reaping the rewards of their higher productivity), as Laura Marsh explores in Dissent: The Coping Economy

A bit of a change of pace: this old Mockingbird article from David Zahl sings the praises of Jeff Lynne (of ELO & Travelling Wilburys fame): Lifting Up Jeff Lynne, ELO and the Wilbury Sound

Also on the arty side of things, Christian Wiman (who must have Joy on the mind) eulogizes Richard Wilbur in the NYT Book Review, showing how his joy puts the lie to the myth that says art can only be made through deep suffering: The Poet of Light

Another writer, Min Jin Lee, discusses her love of the Bible and how the story of Joseph informs her authorship in The Atlantic's "By Heart" series": What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible

Ironically, I have to click on every article about smartphone addiction, even this little snippet from Crossway to promote Tony Reinke's 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You. Will Your Phone Dominate Your Life in 2018?

In that same vein, Haley Bodine admonishes Christians to be Christlike online in CT: We Are the Light of the (Cyber) World: Let’s Act Like It

The other contender for best read of the week is Marilyn McEntyre's Comment piece In Praise of Forbearance, which has just about too many great passages to pick from: "'We are one in the Spirit,' we sing—not 'May we one day become one in the Spirit,' though that prayer has its place. The fact of unity and the hope of unity are both real experiences of Christians in community; like so many other truths about the life of faith, they coexist in paradox. But it may be that at this historical moment, we need to be called back to the fact in order to sustain the hope. What unites us is God's own infinitely merciful will. What divides us are digressions and misunderstandings, competing alliances, and political and theological arguments that can be resolved rightly only by a generous, patient, humble, wise, deliberative commitment to continue living with the quarrelsome, myopic lot who are our brothers and sisters, and among whom we must count ourselves.
...Forbearance requires and teaches humility; it fosters authentic hope rather than self-interested expectations; in practicing it we develop discernment, which 'sees disagreement not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity for maturation in the faith'; it encourages faithfulness not primarily to tenets or doctrinal specifics but to the pilgrim path we travel in relationship to those members of Christ's body among whom we happen to find ourselves. In that body—the beloved community we know as church—we find friendships that don't arise solely from our predilections and affections, but from deep recognition of what we hold closest and dearest, and in common."

Approaching he proper functioning of Christian community from a different angle is Thabiti Anyabwile's reaction to the President's recent vulgar comments (and consistently vulgar attitude) on immigration from countries he deems less desirable at TGC: My Immigrant Family

On my mind recently has been how to practice the forbearance mentioned above, how best to love the harder to love members of the Christian community, and one barrier I've encountered in myself is a certain intellectual pride. I'm not yet sure how I should leverage the mental gifts and education privileges I've received in service of others, but I appreciated this 2016 Atlantic piece from David H Freedman about our societal fetishization of IQ: The War on Stupid People

Finally, to close out this week's post, Dave Eggers closed out last year with this long Medium post, ranging wide from an immigrant's trial in California to the recent Senate race in Alabama. This piece ultimately left me wanting more threads to tie it together – it seemed like he was hoping the uniqueness of the situations he was examining would provide their own interesting connections and make up for his not really saying very much about them, despite the word count – but I did like his focusing on A Few Crucial Instances of Grace

Things I read in the first week of 2018

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.

Shared Links, Aug-Sept 2015

This Christianity Today interview with James KA Smith was kindly shared with me, but I haven't stopped thinking about it since: You Can't Think Your Way To God

Seeing Stephen Colbert take over the Late Show as a new Christian was great, since losing his Colbert Report "character" allowed him the opportunity to be very open about his Catholic faith. This GQ profile is is worth reading all the way through, just to get the full build-up to the really beautiful end: "'That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.'
I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.
I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. 'Tolkien says, in a letter back: "What punishments of God are not gifts?"' Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?' he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. 'So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.'" The Late, Great Stephen Colbert

Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry writes that certain controversies are blown way out of proportion: Against Students' Stories "Only by making a bad copy of a copy—only by subtly shifting crucial details just enough so that a non-story comes to seem like a story—can this non-event come to seem worth reporting by CNN, etc. Only by exaggerating what happens can it become the occasion for moralistic indignation. [...]
We understand why this happens. It’s the collective hunger of the online, for-profit media for tasty content that creates a situation where we find apparently reputable news outlets copying a student’s work, and doing it so badly—and so strategically badly—that a story is created where none would otherwise exist. The collective news consciousness is vaguely aware that college students are Anti-Speech Social Justice Warriors Who Also Generally the Worst, because we keep seeing op-eds declaring that it’s a real problem. It’s an easy story, especially when there’s a Man-Bites-Dog twist, such as the students in question being Christians. For hungry journalists who’d rather not do their homework, a whole set of confirmation biases and moralisms swings into action the moment they sniff anything of the sort."

More from Steve Colbert: his interview on the Catholic TV show Witness with Fr. Thomas Rosica, CSB: Father Rosica: “And we’re all fools for Christ, huh?”
Colbert: “Yeah, yeah - willing to be wrong in society, or wrong according to our time, but right according to our conscience, which is guided by the Holy Spirit... Are you writing this down, by the way? I should have this in Latin.”

I can't remember the first thing I read from Alan Jacobs (perhaps Fantasy & the Buffered Self?), but like Jamie Smith above, he's been a huge influence in my intellectual development over the past few years. He is particularly good – likely due to his voracious love for reading, both light and heavy – at writing about esoteric fiction I've never heard of (and of course, some that I have) and tying it into something incredibly relevant. This American Conservative essay on Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories is lovely; here's the important part: "All of this is of course merely a dream of refuge dreamed by someone (me) who is one of the safest people in the world. As I write these words, refugees from the Middle East are pouring into Europe, and someone posted on Instagram images of notices that the city of Vienna has put up in all the transportation centers. The one in English (I saw Arabic ones too) begin with the word 'WELCOME,' and go on to explain the various services the city provides for refugees, and to instruct visitors how to find help. Then, at the end, there is a single three-word paragraph:
-You are safe.-
'You are safe.' Could there be more powerful, more important, more consoling words? I have never needed to hear them in the way those thousands of refugees need to; and yet they answer to the deepest of all needs. For even water and food can wait for a while." Safe Spaces

I [virtually] met Rebecca Florence Miller through the Christ & Pop Culture members group, and have appreciated her writing on her Patheos blog as someone consistently seeking a messy middle ground on so many issues. This piece is on the necessity of recognizing our own sin (specifically looking at racism): "'What if you’re not a good person?' There is no path forward but to admit it, to accept it, to sink down deep into the knowing of this truth: I am not a good person. There are some good things I do, there are signs of the imago Dei too, but there is also a badness deep inside me that is self-centered and perverse, that considers my own needs before my neighbor’s, that clings to prejudices, that is 'in bondage to sin and unable to free myself' (as the old prayer of confession in the Lutheran church says). I am hopelessly entangled in the web of my own sin and the sins of society. How can I even begin the process of change if I cannot sit down in an honest moment and admit to myself my own badness, my own complicity in society’s badness?
The starting place of any twelve-step program is confession and acceptance that one indeed has a problem. In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said this way: 'We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable.' Those in twelve-step programs know that one must not just admit this once in their lives but must rather admit it daily. There must be daily confession of one’s problem. One never 'arrives' at complete recovery; rather, one is in recovery.
This cuts against the grain of American triumphalism, which whitewashes history, turns the focus of blame on others, and congratulates oneself on being a patriot instead of a pinhead. It also cuts against the grain of American liberalism, which desperately runs the hamster wheel trying to get to 'the right side of history' and desperately seeks assurance from neighbors that one is good, after all. It’s a painful admission, but the start of any recovery is always painful. In fact, it is painful and humbling each and every day." Patriots (Not Pinheads) and the Right Side of History: Racism and Self-Justification

Aldo Leopold was pretty awesome (from Wildlife in American Culture):
"Somehow they used mechanical aids, in moderation, without being used by them. I do not claim to know what is moderation, or where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets. It seems clear, though, that the origin of gadgets has much to do with their cultural effects."
"To the amateur [researcher] are allotted only make-believe voyages of discovery, to verify what professional authority already knows. What the youth needs to be told is that a ship is a-building in his own mental dry dock, a ship with freedom of the seas."

It's been present peripherally in a few of the previous links, but the 2016 Primary season was beginning around this time. Emily Uecker at McSweeney's gives the most succinct summary in Shakespearean stanzas for each of the Republican candidates. "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" "Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here": A Shakespearean Guide to the 2016 Republican Primary

In a Political Ideologies class this fall, I read lots of great stuff, but probably nothing greater than this passage from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: “I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves.”

Brad Williams defends the humanity of immigrants, regardless of their documentation status, at Christ & Pop Culture:  Illegal Immigrants: People, Not Political Capital "This political season, please try to remember that illegal immigrants are not money sponges who are looking to exploit our welfare system. They are men and women with families and dreams, and most of them are here to work and better themselves. They are image-bearers of God, and sojourners in our land: our response should be mercy, not wrath."

Ross Douthat takes on Ben Carson and the appeal of evangelical outsider candidates, writing about how "the evangelical tendency has been to look for a kind of godly hero, a Christian leader who could win the White House and undo every culture-war defeat... Such unrealistic ideas are hardly unique to the religious right. But evangelical culture, as James Davison Hunter notes in 'To Change the World,' his magisterial account of recent Christian engagement with American politics, has a particular fondness for the idea of the history-altering individual, the hope that 'one person can stand at the crossroads and change things for good.'
As Hunter’s book points out, neither political nor cultural change usually happens like this. Instead, it comes from networks, institutions, interest groups, and it requires strategy, alliance-building and steady pressure." We know how this story ends, unfortunately; evangelicals apparently weren't so much concerned with the "godly" or "Christian" parts after all, preferring instead the anti-establishment strong man to smite their perceived enemies for them. Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion (NYT)

Despite evangelical fears of persecution through biased and unfair media coverage, a lot of great work on religion (albeit amongst much dreck) has come out of secular outlets since I started paying attention. The Atlantic's Emma Green is one of the sharpest and fairest religion journalists around. Here's her piece on how people reading too much political progressivism into Pope Francis's rhetoric and ideology misread his primary pastoral function: Pope Francis Is Not ‘Progressive’—He’s a Priest [Pope Francis] comes to the United States not as a politician, but as a pastor. As the country receives a pope who is known for going off script and freestyling his ministry, only one thing is truly sure to happen: Prepare for some preaching, America.

...
“My hope,” he wrote in Evangelii Gaudium, “is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: ‘Give them something to eat.’”

I should really get more in the habit of sharing good passages from books I'm reading, like this one from NT Wright's Surprised by Hope: "Part of the problem in our contemporary debates about asylum seekers or about the Middle East is that our politicians still want to present us with the dream of progress, the steady forward advance of the golden dream of freedom; and when the tide of human misery washes up on our beaches or when people in cultures very different from our own seem not to want the kind of freedom we had in mind, it is not just socially but ideologically untidy and inconvenient. It reminds the politicians that there is a gap in their thinking. The world is in fact still a sad and wicked place, not a happy upward progress toward the light."
"'Don't you believe in progress?' people ask scornfully when someone objects to a new 'moral' proposal. They used to say that when people objected to cutting down ancient trees to build a new road, but we have begun to realize that progress in that sense wasn't all it was cracked up to be."

Another strange thread in these posts is the tie back to Pope Francis, and my growing comfort with the Catholic Church. While I'm still working out where I stand on some of the Roman Catholic vs. Reformed debates, and don't even know now how I feel about some of Francis's more radical stances, I'm sure glad I was reading Melinda Selmys on his critics, particularly those complaining, "Why didn't the Pope say more about [insert personal ideological priority here]?"
"One of the major things that happens to most people when they grow up is that they realize that, no, actually, there is way more about the world that I don’t know than there is that I do know. Mature thinking is characterized by a kind of humility which is willing to admit uncertainty and doubt.
This isn’t the same as lacking conviction – rather it’s a matter of having the conviction that the truth is bigger and more complicated than one’s own limited intellectual horizons. Socrates, who saw the acknowledgement of his own ignorance as the foundation of wisdom, was certainly neither an intellectual slouch, nor a wishy-washy relativist, nor a man lacking in courage or principles.
Humility-before-truth is not a matter of denying truth, but rather a matter of being willing to learn and to be taught – including a willingness to learn and be taught things that do not conform to our own pre-established beliefs." Is the Pope Catholic? (Patheos)

Shared Links, June-July 2015

One of most fascinating things about exploring and consolidating the links I've shared over the years has been seeing little hidden connections and narratives implied throughout. Obviously the biggest one is my conversion to Christianity, and I can see various influences tugging my towards God all throughout 2014. The connection I see in June of 2015 is between the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which drove me away from posting for quite a while, and the shootings of 9 congregants in Charleston, SC, which it appears brought me back from several months of near silence. Conor Friedersdorf reminds us in The Atlantic that Thugs and Terrorists Have Attacked Black Churches for Generations. If American Christians are concerned about surviving under persecutions, our co-religionists of color would be a good place to look for guidance. "Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history.... One wonders how many black congregants are remembering bygone fires today."

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."

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

Shared Links, Jan-May 2015

So 2015 came, and I was reading The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis for the very first time; I often think that if I'd been made to read it as a teenager, my spiritual path would have been quite a bit different: "And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."

This Medium piece by Hans de Zwart is chilling: Ai Weiwei is Living in Our Future Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom

Pico Iyer in the New York Times: Healthy Body, Unhealthy Mind "We run and run in search of contentment, Pascal wrote in his 'Pensées,' and so ensure we’ll never be settled or content. We mindlessly race away from the one place where happiness is to be found."

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead wasn't around when I should've first been reading Lewis, but I'm sure glad it was here in 2015 when I needed to see a modern writer glorifying God's good and mysterious Creation: “That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn't. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is very easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it."

" 'For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?' In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

Scrolling through this digital Memory Lane is interesting because of the surprises. I shared virtually nothing in February or March, which is when I was going through my divorce, and when I was finally starting to tell others I was a Christian. I don't remember consciously stopping sharing things, and I can't say for sure what caused it: whether there was a connection between having more in-person conversations and spending time with friends and a decreased use of social media, or merely a very different mental state from the major life changes I was going through, or perhaps a challenge in finding things to share that were Christian (probably a decent amount of what I was reading at the time, although I can't be sure) without revealing my newfound spiritual allegiances too publicly. Perhaps the number of major changes just made everything else I could've shared seem insignificant, particularly to share with people I didn't know as well, compared with what I hadn't told anyone but those closest to me. 

One thing I did share: Leonard Nimoy passed in February, and while I was never the biggest Star Trek fan, this is a great quote: "There is a moment when we are all touched by the humanity in these creatures that are supposedly inhuman, when the character Spock, the Frankenstein monster, or Quasimodo, says, 'I, too, need love.' Millions respond and love pours out because we all need it and we all understand. When one is touched, by a flower or a drink of water, then we are all touched and we can cry for him and ourselves. Tears of connection. And now I realize that all of this was preparation for the role of Spock. Crying for Quasimodo’s heart inside that awful body. Loving the monster who spared the child. Joining with humanity to share understanding and compassion.
These very simple and obviously human experiences were the best preparation an actor could have to play the supposedly ahuman Spock. Spock was not my first experience playing alienated characters."

In April, likewise, I shared nothing, until the riots happened. My friend Kate was at Mondawmin when everything started, and she wrote at her blog what she saw: Cops in Riot Gear at Mondawmin Mall at Liberty Heights and Reisterstown Road

Matthew Loftus had a pretty quick turnaround after the riots, writing for The American Conservative on The Policing Baltimore Needs: "From Jim Crow to the War on Drugs, police have been incentivized to deny justice in support of an unattainable goal—but with an honest assessment of failures and a serious commitment to agreed-upon objectives, Sandtown can be a safer place. The community here will not give up fighting for our streets no matter what happens over the next few days. When the cameras leave and the fires stop burning, we’ll still be doing our best to work with the police and contribute to their efforts to make our community safer together."

For Baltimore City Paper (RIP), Rapper Kane Mayfield on Freddie Gray and the reality of police brutality. "The death of Freddie Gray didn’t even shock me. It’s not good, but it doesn’t shock me. I’m not shockable. I’m desensitized. I’ve been desensitized by the slow and deliberate destruction of people who look like me for longer than I can remember."

Matthew Loftus at The American Conservative again, asking the armchair pundits of the Internet as well as in-person protestors to Let Sandtown Speak For Itself: "With the nation’s eyes on Baltimore (and Baltimore’s eyes on Sandtown), what has struck me, as someone who has lived here for five years, is the speed with which people from the outside are willing to impose their own preconceived notions on my neighbors and our neighborhood. [...]
I have lost track of the number of sermons and conversations I’ve heard in which challenges to systemic injustice guided by wise policy changes, and personal responsibility shepherded by spiritual and cultural renewal, are combined into a comprehensive solution, not seen as being at odds in a culture-war skirmish. If you can’t comprehend that the two might work together, consider listening to the people here working for both."

Stop Making Sense.

Shared Links, Nov-Dec 2014

Some things I shared in 2014 are really surprising in retrospect. This Guernica excerpt of Studs Terkel's oral history of death (shared along with a bit of Philip Larkin's The Old Fools) was intended to pay tribute to my neopagan friends and family on Samhain. I knew at the time how much the piece moved me; now I know why. With current events in their state of perpetual turmoil, it's easy to look for political or philosophical arguments for Christianity, but ultimately, we must remember to deal with our mortality. "It’s one thing to write to someone and say you forgive them—it’s another to physically touch them and say you forgive them. It would help me in my healing and him in his, I knew. I felt compelled to do it....

On the way back home, I was thinking about it, and then I talked to Arlene and Father Oldershaw. I said, 'I’ve got it! I know what was happening. I was getting a taste in my body of how much God loves us. He loves us so much that He wants to leap over the table, grab hold of us, and just rock us because we’re his children.' That love, that forgiveness—I got a taste of what it must have been like for Jesus when he was here and walked the Earth among people that he loved so desperately, so wonderfully. I got a taste of it!" You Got Into My Heart Violently, But You’re There

Of course, that's not to say that politics aren't important, even in their most banal, marginally effective forms, as Tim Wise argues here: Your Bumper Sticker is Not a Philosophy: Reflections on Voting and the Limits of Radical Purity "There’s something cathartic (in a juvenile, angst-driven, anarchy-tatted kinda way) about preening as a moral superior because you didn't give in to the two-party 'duopoly,' or whatever the hell Ralph Nader calls it. Maintaining one’s ascetic sense of unsullied ideological purity feels good. So does heroin, of course, but I’m not sure the indulgence of either is one’s best bet for safety in the long run. Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that voting is the key to real political change; it self-evidently is not. But to think that it means nothing, or so little as to not recommend the activity is to engage in a dangerous moral conceit...
What it comes down to is this: Voting is harm reduction; just like giving clean needles to addicts. Voting doesn't solve our problems, just like clean needles won’t solve the problems posed by intravenous drug use. But harm reduction matters."

I love this piece on London's taxi driver test so much. It's kind of a humanity vs. technology tale, raising some great questions on what technology is for and how we define "progress." Jody Rosen for T - The New York Times Style Magazine: The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS "Given the pace of technological refinement, how long will it be before the development of a Sat-Nav algorithm that works better than the most ingenious cabby, before a voice-activated GPS, or a driverless car, can zip a passenger from Piccadilly to Putney more efficiently than any Knowledge graduate? Ultimately, the case to make for the Knowledge may not be practical-economic (the Knowledge works better than Sat-Nav), or moral-political (the little man must be protected against rapacious global capitalism), but philosophical, spiritual, sentimental: The Knowledge should be maintained because it is good for London’s soul, and for the souls of Londoners. The Knowledge stands for, well, knowledge — for the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic learning, for the humanist notion that diligent intellectual endeavor is ennobling, an end in itself. To support the Knowledge is to make the unfashionable argument that expertise cannot be reduced to data, that there’s something dystopian, or at least depressing, about the outsourcing of humanity’s hard-won erudition to gizmos, even to portable handheld gizmos that themselves are miracles of human imagination and ingenuity. London’s taxi driver test enshrines knowledge as — to use the au courant term — an artisanal commodity, a thing that’s local and homespun, thriving ideally in the individual hippocampus, not the digital hivemind."

In response to a comment on that post, I shared this thought and a quote from Wendell Berry's Feminism, the Body, and the Machine: I disagree that this article is merely Golden Age-ing an “antiquated system.” Perhaps it’s a result of stuff that’s been on my mind anyway, but I think this article is asking some deeper questions regarding the limits of efficiency, how we define progress, and in a deeper sense, even our notions of freedom. Is it better to outsource our knowledge of the places we live – not to mention, established parts of a culture – to profiteering technology firms if it is more financially efficient? Put another way, are there costs to these actions that we aren’t considering? To what extent are we willing to increase our dependence on technology for things people could do?
These are complicated questions, and not new ones. I was re-reading a Wendell Berry essay this morning that has some relevance here (sorry for the long quote):
“What is the purpose of this technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God, which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love of family, community, and country.
The higher aims of ‘technological progress’ are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in ‘the future.’ We do as we do, we say, ‘for the sake of the future’ or ‘to make a better future for our children.’ How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a ‘world of the future’; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid ‘futurology’ available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at ‘the future of the human race’; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.
And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers—not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.
The question of how to end or reduce dependence on some of the technological innovations already adopted is a baffling one. At least, it baffles me. I have not been able to see, for example, how people living in the country, where there is no public transportation, can give up their automobiles without becoming less useful to each other. And this is because, owing largely to the influence of the automobile, we live too far from each other, and from the things we need, to be able to get about by any other means. Of course, you could do without an automobile, but to do so you would have to disconnect yourself from many obligations. Nothing I have so far been able to think about this problem has satisfied me.
But if we have paid attention to the influence of the automobile on country communities, we know that the desirability of technological innovation is an issue that requires thinking about, and we should have acquired some ability to think about it. Thus if I am partly a writer, and I am offered an expensive machine to help me write, I ought to ask whether or not such a machine is desirable.”

In the same thread, I shared this Longreads post, excerpted from Nick Carr's The Glass Cage:
“Look closely at Google Maps. When you’re traveling through a city and you consult the app, it gives you more than navigational tips; it gives you a way to think about cities. Embedded in the software is a philosophy of place, which reflects, among other things, Google’s commercial interests, the backgrounds and biases of its programmers, and the strengths and limitations of software in representing space. In 2013, the company rolled out a new version of Maps. Instead of providing you with the same representation of a city that everyone else sees, it generates a map that’s tailored to what Google perceives as your needs and desires, based on information the company has collected about you. The app will highlight nearby restaurants and other points of interest that friends in your social network have recommended. It will give you directions that reflect your past navigational choices. The views you see, the company says, are ‘unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute.’
That sounds appealing, but it’s limiting. Google filters out serendipity in favor of insularity. It douses the infectious messiness of a city with an algorithmic antiseptic. What is arguably the most important way of looking at a city, as a public space shared not just with your pals but with an enormously varied group of strangers, gets lost. ‘Google’s urbanism,’ the technology critic Evgeny Morozov has written, ‘is that of someone who is trying to get to a shopping mall in their self-driving car. It’s profoundly utilitarian, even selfish in character, with little to no concern for how public space is experienced. In Google’s world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.’ Expedience trumps all.” Your Inner Drone: The Politics of the Automated Future

Alan Jacobs again, with a wide-ranging Medium post on lots of things: The Devil's Bargain. I shared this with a quote from Ursula K LeGuin's National Book Awards speech: "Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality. Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art...
Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings."

Abraham Lincoln's 1842 speech on persuasion and empathy to the Springfield, IL temperance society, printed in Lapham's Quarterly: Better than a Gallon of Gall

America, in so many ways, needs to repent corporately of its many sins; sadly, it's too easy to valorize and justify our actions, claiming they don't truly represent us. Peter Beinart argues in The Atlantic that Torture Is Who We Are: "America has tortured throughout its history. And every time it has, some Americans have justified the brutality as necessary to protect the country from a savage enemy. Others have called it counterproductive and immoral. At different moments, the balance of power between these two groups shifts. But neither side in these debates speaks for the 'real America.' The real America includes them both. Morally, we contain multitudes."

I've shared Ken Kalfus's The Folly of Mars in n+1 twice, and I doubt it will be the last time; people F*cking Love Science, or something, but it's really just Bread, Circuses, and Rockets: "It’s not the planet Earth that’s fragile—it’s the human organism that’s extraordinarily delicate and needy, unable to survive beyond very narrow physical limits, the conditions for which exist naturally nowhere else in our solar system. To keep even a few people alive in space or on another planet requires from those left behind the expenditure of enormous resources. It’s not necessarily backwards-thinking, or anti-technology, or anti-exploration, to wonder if those resources could be better employed. The fantasy of a future new life for the species allows us to shrug off climate change and other global challenges with the thought that if we fail to make this planet livable for the billions of people who inhabit it, another is promised for us somewhere else."

It's a little funny looking back, but I was a little nervous to share something from Christianity Today, not knowing how it would be perceived. But Alissa Wilkinson is SO GOOD. Can Our Art Deal With Our World? "Today, our consumption habits are shaped by our own curation... Most people who read the Internet are seeing things posted by their Facebook friends—and frankly, few of us have Internet friends who don't think like us. A Pew Research study published on October 21 points out that liberals and conservatives inhabit different corners of the Internet. Liberals are more likely to defriend someone because of their conservative politics; conservatives are more likely to not be friends with liberals at all.
This also shapes how we engage with media. We click through, read, and watch things our friends watch. What we see is shaped by what we already like. In other words, our Internet lives function as echo chambers for what we already believe."

Edward Mendelson on The Secret Auden for the New York Review of Books: "By refusing to claim moral or personal authority, Auden placed himself firmly on one side of an argument that pervades the modern intellectual climate but is seldom explicitly stated, an argument about the nature of evil and those who commit it.
On one side are those who, like Auden, sense the furies hidden in themselves, evils they hope never to unleash, but which, they sometimes perceive, add force to their ordinary angers and resentments, especially those angers they prefer to think are righteous. On the other side are those who can say of themselves without irony, “I am a good person,” who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own. This view has dangerous consequences when a party or nation, having assured itself of its inherent goodness, assumes its actions are therefore justified, even when, in the eyes of everyone else, they seem murderous and oppressive."

From Neil Gaiman's great novel American Gods: "'No man,' proclaimed Donne, 'is an Island,' and he was wrong. If we are not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes -- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever really looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.
Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, 'casualties may rise to a million.' With individual stories, the statistics become people -- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us that a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain on our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.
Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
A life that is, like any other, unlike any other."

Some tragic local news closed out the year: Cyclist Killed in Roland Park; How Can We Make Baltimore Safer for Bikes? (Baltimore Fishbowl - Rachel Monroe) "People who ride bicycles already take protective steps. It is up to people driving cars to recognize that a person on a bicycle has a full right to be in the road, and to drive carefully and safely at all times, not just when around people on bicycles....
We don’t call crashes like this 'accidents.' Distracted driving is not an accident. Leaving the scene of a crash is not an accident. This was a completely avoidable crash."