Today in the noon Good Friday service our parish choir sang quite beautifully two powerful anthems I hadn’t heard before:
- “Crux fidelis” — by Sarah Macdonald
- "Were You There? — as arranged by Bob Chilcott
(Of course I know “Were You There?” but not this arrangement of it)
Watched: Roman Holiday. Twenty years ago David Thomson write that “Seen today, Roman Holiday is hard to finish, because it has only its charm.” Since it has more charm that any dozen ordinary movies, I didn’t have any trouble finishing it — or watching it again. 🍿
Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - Ars Technica:
So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”
I devoutly — I choose the adverb with care — wish Christians would just stop writing these speculative essays about where Christianity is headed, what the future holds for Christians, etc. etc. We’ve been ordered not to think that way. It’s a half-hearted form of divination, and an excellent way to be distracted from what the follower of Christ is called to be or do right now. Holy Week is a good time to recognize this habit of endless speculation as a form of disobedience and to renounce it.
Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities.
The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world.
Speaking of love or money, Joni Mitchell’s song by that name from her 1974 live record Miles of Aisles absolutely crushes. The band is super-tight, the recording and mixing are superb, and Joni … is Joni.
Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it for love or money. One unexpected revelation of the chatbot era — unexpected to me anyway — is how many writers, especially but not only journalists, dislike writing and are delighted to get someone or something else to do it for them.
Writers love to talk about how hard writing it, what a struggle, what misery, yadda yadda yadda. I have always thought this rhetoric a big smokescreen, a way to avoid admitting that they’re getting to do what they love. But maybe they don’t love it. Maybe they got into because they thought they would love it but it turns out that every job is a grind. And maybe they prefer just laying around on their ass totally watching television.