Apparently the place for relics of Roman Britain is the Carlisle Cricket Club.
And finally, the Rio Grande as it emerges from the Santa Elena Canyon (whose walls reach 1500 feet in height) at the western end of the park.
The previous photo was of the Chisos Mountains in the center of the park; this one of the Rio Grande at the park’s eastern boundary.
This photo from Big Bend made me think about some of my own photos of the park, for instance this one.
I call my big blog the Homebound Symphony – for reasons explained here – but what does that Symphony hope to do? It hopes to build and celebrate the Vernacular Republic.
A lovely video of my buddy Jon Guerra, in a clearing above Laity Lodge, singing about Jesus.
This is the last day of my Great Texts in Christian Spirituality class, and I’m having my students read this 2007 sermon by Rowan Williams – largely because, better than any other text I know, it sums up the hope I live by.
I wrote about Dorothy L. Sayers as a middlebrow writer – in future posts I’ll be exploring the “brows” and asking whether that language is still useful (indeed, whether it ever was).
Leah Libresco Sargeant: “The struggles of much bigger tech companies to make their AI corrigible suggest Catholic Answers won’t have a reliably orthodox chatbot any time soon. But the problem with the project goes deeper: To imagine that a chatbot can be a catechist at all indicates a profound misunderstanding of how evangelization works. … God invites us to imitate him as sub-creators. It is a profound misuse of that invitation to build tools to take over our most human and relational tasks.”
Finished reading: Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. Teaching this today. It is, every time I read it, a dazzling and disturbing book. 📚
Finished reading: 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan. A brilliant book, but in its later stages immensely sad. 📚
Read this by Ted Gioia in conjunction with my everyone knows post. Twenty years from now, nobody will believe parents who say “But I had no idea that giving my five-year-old a smartphone would be harmful!” People will say, “You knew, but you didn’t care.” And they’ll be right to say it.
Brent Nongbri on Candida Moss’s recent work: “Overall, this book has an effect that is similar to that of E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Even if you don’t agree with every interpretive move the author makes, the collective force of the book’s examples leaves you with what can only be described as a new perspective. In other words, if the field takes God’s Ghostwriters seriously (and it should), then there is no going back. And the way forward will involve greater effort to pay attention to the enslaved people who played important parts in producing, promulgating, and preserving the writing of the Roman world.”
If I’m irritible over the next few days, it’s because Apple’s forced reset of my password means that all of my app-specific passwords have been erased and now I have to create new ones. Great.
This award-winning building … is a glass cuboid. The world’s ten billionth glass cuboid.
What happened to Michael Tsai also happened to me today. Annoying as heck. All my Apple devices are confused.
Re: this list of sites that prohibit your linking to anything but their home page — I wonder how it would play out if a dispute about this policy went to court here in the U.S.? What if I linked to a page on Bill Gates’s site and he sued me? What would be the legal basis for his suit, and what would be the best legal defense of my Right To Link? (I suppose my lawyer would have to say something more than “You posted this on the open web, dumbass.")
Like almost every other writer in America, I’ve weighed in on that Elle Griffin nobody-buys-books post – or one implication of it anyway.
Taken in SE Colorado, March 2023.
Live webcam at Valles Caldera, New Mexico. The webcam is cool but it’s one of those places that simply can’t be appreciated except in person — a photo doesn’t capture the scale of the place.
Reading this because it’s discussed, with considerable energy, in Sayers’s Gaudy Night. 📚
This morning I wrote my most boring post ever! It’s about citations of a literary critic.