Alan Jacobs

The good folks at Plough have produced an e-book featuring two early Christian texts, and Rowan Williams has written an introduction to it that I believe essential reading for Christians in our moment. I love this kind of piece — a clear and patient exposition of ideas from the past that never once mentions current events but brilliantly illuminates the questions that face us. Please do read it all, but here are some choice nuggets: 

• “If you look at the eyewitness accounts of martyrdom in these early centuries – ­documents like the wonderful record of the martyrs of Scilli in North Africa in AD 180 – you can see what the real issue was. These Christians, most of them probably domestic slaves, had to explain to the magistrate that they were quite happy to pray for the imperial state, and even to pay taxes, but that they could not grant the state their absolute allegiance…. What made their demand new and shocking was that it was not made on the basis of ethnic identity, but on the bare fact of conviction and conscience. For the first time in human history, individuals claimed the liberty to define the limits of their political loyalty, and to test that loyalty by spiritual and ethical standards.”  
• “The early Christian movement … was not revolutionary in the sense that it was trying to change the government. Its challenge was more serious: it was the claim to hold any and every government to account, to test its integrity, and to give and withhold compliance accordingly. But it would be wrong to think of this, as we are tempted to do in our era, in terms of individual conscience. It was about the right of a community to set its own standards and to form its members in the light of what had been given to them by an authority higher than the empire. The early Christians believed that if Jesus of Nazareth was ‘Lord,’ no one else could be lord over him, and therefore no one could overrule his authority.” 
• “The theology of the early centuries thus comes very directly out of this one great central conviction about political authority: if Jesus is Lord, no one else ultimately is, and so those who belong with Jesus, who share his life through the common life of the worshiping community, have a solidarity and a loyalty that goes beyond the chance identity of national or political life…. Humans love largely because of fellow-feeling, but God’s love is such that it never depends on having something in common. The creator has in one sense nothing in common with his creation – how could he? But he is completely free to exercise his essential being, which is love, wherever he wills. And this teaches us that we too must learn to love beyond the boundaries of common interest and natural sympathy and, like God, love those who don’t seem to have anything in common with us.” 
• “One of the lasting legacies of the early church, then, is the recognition that doctrine, prayer, and ethics don’t exist in tidy separate compartments: each one shapes the others. And in the church in any age, we should not be surprised if we become hazy about our doctrine at a time when we are less clear about our priorities as a community, or if we become less passionate about service, forgiveness, and peace when we have stopped thinking clearly about the true and eternal character of God.” 

the design of time - by Sara Hendren:

The learner, whether student or reader, can come with you from their current zone, what they already know, to the next developmental place. But if you try to jump them further than that place — beyond [Lev Vygotsky’s] Zone of Proximal Development, too fast or too carelessly — you’re likely to lose them. Not because folks aren’t sophisticated or smart or even willing. It’s just a simple fact of cognitive load and scaffolding: To introduce a novel or surprising idea, you have to build the conceptual bridge from what’s provisionally shared to the new and unexpected.

I think about this all the time. Who are my readers, and what assumptions might already be in their minds, and what’s the next possible leap we could make together? I didn’t think the audience for an article about time and design in a pandemic could travel all the way with me to crip time. It’s there in the disability literature for folks who want to go deeper but couldn’t be seamlessly reached in my piece.

It’s not as if all reading is teaching in a unidirectional, condescending way, from writer to reader — far from it. Every writer is writing precisely to think through and try to understand some set of ideas better, for her own sake as well as the reader. But the Zone should still be in one’s mind, no matter your narrative medium. And too often writers get tied up in an inside-baseball version of their topic, because the tacit reader in their mind’s eye is their peers: the people they speak to in professional development contexts, or the other books in their field, or their various social circles. But the scaffolding for a wider audience requires a much more rigorous attention to the Zone of PD — if, that is, you want to reach the reader who’s not already with you.

I love this whole post from Sara. But it occurs to me that there really aren’t very many writers who are interested in reaching the reader who’s not already with them — maybe, even, fewer today than in the past. When you (consciously or unconsciously) perceive the business of writing and reading as the consolidation of group identity, then reaching out to the unconvinced is not only difficult but perhaps undesirable.

from Caught by the River

Edward Mendelson: 

Many academics are far too sophisticated to take seriously the thought that literature is a special form of intimacy. Academic discourse tends to think of literature in impersonal, collective terms, typically as something that almost everyone, it seems, calls ‘cultural production’. It is of course true that works of literature are artefacts of cultural production, but true in the same trivial way that persons are artefacts of genetic production. It omits everything that makes a work interesting in itself, everything that makes it matter. The whole idea of literature as impersonal production rather than as a form of intimacy seems intellectually self-defeating. 

Well, my abandonment of this blog lasted less than a month. Here’s why, in a word: tags. When I decided to move quotes and links, as well as photos, to my micro.blog page, I forgot that I have been tagging my posts here for a long time, and that anything I post to micro.blog, where that tagging system doesn’t exist, will certainly be forgotten and will probably become effectively irretrievable. And anything worth posting is worth finding. So I am going to be posting quotes and links here where I can read and use them later. I’ll continue to use micro.blog for photos. 

I still plan to take an extended break from blogging as such, that is, from using this site to develop my own thoughts. But I now think that someday I will return to real blogging here. That’s largely because of all the kind messages I got after I announced my hiatus. It turns out that people read what I write here and profit from it. Who knew? (Certainly not me! I estimate that 95% of the messages I have received about the site over the years have been significantly or harshly critical. I really didn’t think that more than a dozen people read this site and liked it.) 

I have reposted here on this site a number of my essays and reviews, originally published elsewhere, that I’d like to preserve:

• “Reverting to Type” (a long autobiographical essay)
• “Choose Life” (about what church might be)
• “Raising Kael” (on Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane)
• “From the Abundance of the Heart”
• “The Devil’s Bargain” (a groping-my-way-forward essay I still think about)
• “On Loren Eiseley”
• A review of Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road 
• “Against Stupidity”
• Reviews of the sixth and seventh Harry Potter books
• “The Re-invention of Love” (on Anne Carson and Sappho)
• A review of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission
• An assessment of evolutionary accounts of literary art
• An essay on the greatness of Les Murray
• An outline of an anthology I wasn’t allowed to edit
• A review of a delightful book on maps of imaginary worlds 
• An essay-review on dictionaries 
• An essay-review on Auden’s prose
• “Giving Up on Baseball”
• An essay on literary executors
• The introduction to a collection of my essays, in which I think about what the essay is and does
• “The Thrilla In Manila And The End Of Boxing”
• “London Letters” — written by Brett Foster and me
• “Beyond the Wild Wood” — an essay-review on two editions of The Wind in the Willows 

I’ll update this post whenever I add more essays, which I expect to do from time to time.

Here’s a terrific conversation at The New Atlantis about whether it’s possible to write good fiction about climate change.