Alan Jacobs

When, therefore, we see in Him some things so human that they appear in no way to differ from the common frailty of mortals, and some things so divine that they are appropriate to nothing else but the primal and ineffable nature of deity, the human understanding with its narrow limits is baffled, and struck with amazement at so mighty a wonder and knows not which way to turn, what to hold to, or whither to betake itself. If it thinks of God, it sees a man; if it thinks of a man, it beholds One returning from the dead with spoils after vanquishing the kingdom of death. 

— Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John

Jessica Martin's Maundy Thursday homily at Ely Cathedral.

From Ely today, The Preaching and Proclamation of the Cross.

Via Ken Myers, an absolutely superb 30 minute overview, with key excerpts, of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

The Rock Church, Cranfills Gap, Texas

It’s rare for me to disagree with Ross Douthat as thoroughly as I disagree with this reflection on Christian intellectuals. I disagree not because I doubt his particular judgments, but because I think he has misconceived the entire subject. He has done so, I believe, by approaching the role of Christian intellectual as a matter of strategy, when it is more properly a matter of vocation. As the bearer of a vocation — a particular calling within the general calling of the Christian life — the Christian intellectual engages in a practice — and (following MacIntyre here and therefore following both Aristotle and Aquinas) to be a practitioner in this sense means that your calling is circumscribed by the requirement to exhibit certain virtues, virtues the possession of which enable you to follow your calling faithfully — and, therefore, virtues the absence of which will compromise or vitiate your ability to fulfill your calling. And for the Christian those must be, to start with, the core Christian virtues. (To which are added certain specifically intellectual virtues.)

To me, then, it’s noteworthy that some of the people he singles out as exemplary Christian intellectuals are people notorious for their belittlement of, their mockery of, their contempt for pretty much anyone, Christian or not, who disagrees with them. Douthat’s exemplary Christian intellectuals seem often to think that, because (in their view) they hold the right positions, and have the right strategy, they are therefore exempt from any of the Biblical commandments about how to deal with our Christian siblings and our enemies alike.

That habitual sneering at dissenters is not especially relevant if you think of the Christian intellectual life simply as a mater of strategy; but it matters very much if you think of that life as a vocation which has certain standards intrinsic to it, standards that emerge from the Christian account of the virtuous (the Christlike) person. Considering Christian intellectual life as a matter of vocation might lead to a different list of exemplary figures than the one Ross employs — and would demand a different conceptual framing too.

It’s only the ambidextrous who are truly pure! As an ambidextrous person, I endorse this verdict. Though — if I must be truthful — I’m not in any straightforward sense ambidextrous, because while there are things that I do much better with my left hand and things I do much better with my right hand, there is almost nothing that I do equally well with both hands. I think I would’ve been more left-handed except that my parents when I was very young encouraged me to use my right hand for things they noticed, like writing and throwing. But things that they didn’t pay attention to  — brushing my teeth, combing my hair, shooting pool, archery — I did, and do, with my left hand. (Well, not brushing my hair, because my hair is too short to brush. But when I buzz my head or trim my heard, I hold the clippers in my left hand.) In general, my right hand is the Hand of Power, and my left hand is the Hand of Precision. Anything that requires fine motor skills: left. Anything that requires strength, like opening a tightly-sealed jar: right.

I’ve known Erin Kissane virtually for around a decade now — our IRL paths almost crossed a few years ago when she was still living in New York City and I gave a talk at Vassar, but that’s as close as we’ve come — and I have always had enormous admiration for her kind heart and steel spine. I was reminded of that admiration when I read her summing-up post for her year as the managing editor of the Covid Tracking Project. I strongly encourage you to read it all, and pay particular attention to these three sentences:

I suspect that intentional constraints on scope and scale allow for deeper, more satisfying, and ultimately more useful work. I suspect that a disciplined commitment to messy truths over smooth narratives would also breathe life into technology, journalism, and public health efforts that too frequently paper over the complex, many-voiced nature of the world. And I suspect that treating people like humans who are intrinsically motivated to do useful work in the world, and who deserve genuine care, allows far more people to do their best work without destroying themselves in the process.

I would love to see more institutions, whether in crisis time or in “normal” time, think long and hard about those three lessons, so beautifully articulated by Erin. Now I hope she can get some rest!

Can’t tell y’all how excited I am about this.

Like many other people, I’m not happy with the terms “woke” and “wokeness,” but I haven’t been sure what a good alternative is. Then, just the other day, as I was reading a few of the thousands of op-eds that have recently been written about Christian “purity culture,” I realized that what people typically call “woke” culture is really a different sort of purity culture, one for the secular left. Just as the messages of Christian purity culture are

• that you must be eternally vigilant in maintaining your purity;
• that you must sign up to pledges of purity;
• that you must denounce and separate yourself from those who are impure;
• that if you lose your purity you can never get it back, your defilement marks you forever;

— well, the parallels are more than obvious. So instead of “wokeness” I will from now on refer to Left Purity Culture (LPC). I’ve altered the relevant tags for this blog accordingly.

UPDATE: My friend Brad East points out that his colleague Richard Beck wrote six years ago — as a self-described progressive Christian — about “The Purity Culture of Progressive Christianity.” It’s a really interesting post, and there’s an equally interesting follow-up.

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has a problem. Their business depends almost wholly on showing movies from the pre-woke world — movies that cannot possibly survive the strict moral scrutiny to which our major media institutions now must subject all artworks. So what to do? Well, show the movies but tag them as problematic; acknowledge the difficulties but try to defend the films anyway. We’ll see how that strategy works out. 

As I have said on a number of occasions, I think LPC (Left Purity Culture) will burn itself out, as it always does. In the end, when there’s no one left to execute, Robespierre has to guillotine the executioner: 

But who knows when that day will come? Meanwhile, I realized after I read the stories I link to above, I don’t have my own copy of John Ford's The Searchers — I had better remedy that deficiency. 

I’m also going to make a list of (a) great films that (b) I do not own and that (c) Amazon and other guardians of the virtue of late capitalism may decide to blackball. Then I’m going to buy one of them each month. 

Re: this plan for rewilding large chunks of Great Britain, I like the focus on a handful of very large landowners who, theoretically at least, don’t need to exploit the lands they own to sustain a business. I wonder what approach a similar endeavor in the USA might look like.