One more photo from Jimmy Dorrell’s last service at Church Under the Bridge: Michael Dionne rejoices at his Easter Sunday baptism in the waters of the Bosque River. (Photo by Justin Hamel.)
My neighbor, a young mother, walking around the block with her dog or by herself, staring at her phone
Me: Come on, friend! See the trees leafing out! Listen to the birds!
Same neighbor, walking around the block this afternoon, staring at a book in her hands
Me: You go, girl!!
It would be difficult to overstress how much Jimmy Dorrell has meant, and will continue to mean, to Waco. May the Lord bless Jimmy in his retirement — though I doubt that he’ll be very retiring.
I've been reading too much on Instapaper. Saving articles for later is a powerful way to manage my time, but it produces a huge pile of content that I then feel obligated to work my way through.
Instapaper has the opposite effect on me. I save many articles there, and when I visit the site the first thing I do is delete the articles I am no longer interested in reading. Usually that’s more than half of the articles I’ve saved. (“Why did I think I wanted to read that?”) Very liberating. The key is not to visit Instapaper too often — twice a week is about right.
Abandoned reading: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist. What an infuriating endeavor. McGilchrist seems to think that he he makes a claim stronger by giving, not three, not five, but forty-seven supportive examples — and that he can’t say what he wants to say about the hemispheres of the brain without pausing to articulate a Theory of Truth. I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 📚
I've had a number of people ask me about this: A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities - by Ted Gioia. I’ll just say that my version would be, not 52 assignments in a year, but one assignment in a year. Pick one vital book and read it slowly. Pause to think. Re-read difficult passages. Take your time, and be willing to set it aside for a while. And remember what Auden said: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.”
And from six years ago, on my old Buttondown newsletter: Easter with Arcabas.
New from me: “Welcome to the party, Christmas and Easter Christians!”
Tech CEO asks
Chatbot why it is frozen.
Chatbot: “You’re frozen.”