One day he was so happy, so healthy, and the next….
In Christianity Today my colleague SJ Murray has an essay on why Christians need to rediscover Boethius. See also her very cool Boethius Project.
The tiniest hint of autumn here
The miracle at Cana isn’t water becoming wine — any old magician could do that sort of thing. Whatever it was that Jesus was about, it wasn’t stupid party tricks. The miracle is that the Ruler of the Universe cared about such a little thing as the social anxieties of a bunch of nobodies in an obscure little corner of the world of no particular importance, and that He loved them the way a father loves his children — and what kind of father offers just enough at a time like that when he has, at his disposal, the very best? The best robe, the gold ring, the fatted calf, the wine that was better than any wine the local whatever-was-Hebrew-for-sommelier had ever tasted? The supernatural stuff is one thing, but consider the magnificence of that gesture, the sheer audacious style of it. I do not care if you are the most cynical atheist walking the Earth — it is impossible not to admire the panache. He bends reality into a new shape, makes the universe follow new rules, to help out a friend, and He does it cool — nobody even knows what happened except for the waiters.
Fara Dabhoiwala: “And then, a few months ago, everything changed. On a hunch, I asked the V&A for the ultra-high-resolution scans that had been made of the painting’s surface. Within a few hours of opening those on my computer I found something completely unexpected. And that in turn catapulted me into the most exciting series of intellectual discoveries I have ever made.”
Currently listening: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Oboe Concerto 🎵
I wrote about why writing on Substack, though cool in many ways, is not going “indie.”
Why do so many songs present the phrase “caught in the middle” in exactly the same (musical) way? Adam Neely has a brilliant answer.