This $100 million gift to Spelman College ought to be praised to the skies. The megarich need to direct their money towards institutions that can seriously benefit from it. Giving money to Harvard is like giving money to Microsoft.
John Gruber – aka @gruber – on a theme I discussed yesterday, the difference between Apple’s view of the Mac platform versus iOS/iPad: “Developer uncertainty regarding the viability of selling Mac software is the last thing needed for a platform that is already facing a dearth of new original native software. Apple doesn’t have to make a platform-destructive money-grab policy change to ruin the Mac. They can ruin it simply by planting the seed of doubt that they might.”
Robin Sloan says of me, “Alan can make anything sound terrific, when he loves it,” which is one of the best things anyone has ever said about me. I’m not even sure it’s a compliment, but I like it anyway. (And I hope Robin reads Cahokia Jazz, which really is wonderful.)
What Dracula is
If, as some think, deepfakes will become undetectable, that just might force a long-overdue reckoning with our reliance on online “information” and “evidence.”
I added some links, fixed some bad links, and generally updated things at my home page.
I think DHH is right about Apple.
Lazy day.
DHH is exactly right: Apple has become too powerful, and with that power has come a sense of entitlement, and with that sense of entitlement has come a shortsighted pettiness and vindictiveness. I don’t want to support such a company, in part because I don’t have the bandwidth to go full Linux at the moment, but in. Larger part because, while I don’t want to support Apple, I do want to support the amazing developers who have created the software that makes my Mac a joy to use: people like Bare Bones, Panic, and Rogue Amoeba.
It’s noteworthy, I think, that all three of those developers are either exclusively or primarily focused on the Mac as opposed to iOS, and it’s with regard to iOS that Apple has behaved most despicably. So maybe the best approach for me is to try to go all-in on the Mac and avoid iOS — a move I’ve long been tempted to make anyway.
Also: I just realized that I first wrote about using Linux twenty-two years ago. If breaking from the Mac was hard then, it’s nearly impossible for me to contemplate now.
Just discovered that Terrence Malick, Marilynne Robinson, and Joni Mitchell were all born in November 1943.
Origen may … have been the first church father to study Hebrew, “in opposition to the spirit of his time and of his people,” as Jerome says; according to Eusebius, he “learned it thoroughly,” but there is reason to doubt the accuracy of this report. Jerome, however, was rightly celebrated as "a trilingual man" for his competence in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and Augustine clearly admired, perhaps even envied, his ability to “interpret the divine Scriptures in both languages.” […] But it seems safe to propose the generalization that, except for converts from Judaism, it was not until the biblical humanists and the Reformers of the sixteenth century that a knowledge of Hebrew became standard equipment for Christian expositors of the Old Testament. Most of Christian doctrine developed in a church uninformed by any knowledge of the original text of the Hebrew Bible.
Whatever the reasons, Christian theologians writing against Judaism seemed to take their opponents less and less seriously as time went on; and what their apologetic works may have lacked in vigor or fairness, they tended to make up in self-confidence. They no longer looked upon the Jewish community as a continuing participant in the holy history that had produced the church. They no longer gave serious consideration to the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament or to the Jewish background of the New. Therefore the urgency and the poignancy about the mystery of Israel that are so vivid in the New Testament have appeared only occasionally in Christian thought, as in some passages in Augustine; but these are outweighed, even in Augustine, by the many others that speak of Judaism and paganism almost as though they were equally alien to "the people of God" — the church of Gentile Christians.
Surely this de-Judaizing is the most important (and troubling) way in which the era of the early Church Fathers differed from the Apostolic beginnings of the Church. It is fascinating to contemplate an alternate history of Christendom in which Jews and Christians remained in regular conversation and debate.
Something I often think, prompted tonight by seeing Jamal Murray (6'4") standing next to Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid (both 7'0"): If you’re an NBA guard, you spend your working life around people who make you look tiny, but then everywhere else you’re an unusually large person. The contrast must be weird.
Damon K: “A positive, progressive change to this system benefiting more people is not going to come from the top - that is what these latest facts and figures illustrate above all. It is up to the rest of us to find a way to make streaming technology work for the majority of musicians. At UMAW, we have been developing a plan to bring more streaming income to more recording musicians, and we will be going public with details very soon. Support us when we do. And join us if you can!”
The mysterious Roman dodecahedra.
A wonderful collection of Milton Glaser book covers.
Listening to the legendary Bill Evans Trio Village Vanguard sessions. Forty-five years later, I got to hear Motian play with Bill Frisell and Ron Carter a few blocks from the Vanguard at the Blue Note. They were wonderful. 🎵
Blizzard conditions in Waco
I wrote a bit about what I’m teaching this term and how it will affect my blogging.
looking ahead
Lately I’ve been posting in How to Think mode — HTT as the tag here calls it: I’ve been writing about various common-all-too-common errors in reasoning and how they might be avoided. But I’m about to change direction for a while.
When I was a young faculty member at Wheaton College, a college that prides itself on “the integration of faith and learning,” I quickly realized that there was a fundamental mismatch between my knowledge of my academic discipline, which was fairly sophisticated, and my understanding of the Christian faith, which was woefully underdeveloped. I was only 25 years old when I began teaching at Wheaton; I had not grown up in a Christian home and indeed had only been a Christian for around five years; I had a lot to learn. But at least I grasped that point.
And I was richly blessed in my neighbors, for I worked in the same building with Mark Noll, Roger Lundin, Bob Webber, and Arthur Holmes, among others. I relentlessly peppered them with questions, and especially sought recommendations for books I could read to give me an adequate understanding of the full range of Christian thought. I did not understand that I was asking for something that I couldn’t achieve in a lifetime. Gradually it dawned on me that Christian thinking about the arts and humanities was richer and deeper and more extensive than I could have imagined; and then, also gradually, my scholarship and non-scholarly writing too became more and more informed by and rooted in that great and complex tradition.
My experience was somewhat like that of the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, who when invited to teach and write about pastoral care could but draw on what little he knew about then-contemporary models of psychological counseling. It was only when he asked himself whether Christians, who had been doing pastoral care for 2000 years, might know a little bit about the subject that he began the great series of books on pastoral theology for which he is best remembered. Like me, Oden discovered that the Christian tradition in his chosen field was more extensive and powerful than he had anticipated, and he drank deeply from the well of that tradition for the rest of his life.
Well, for me one thing led to another, and I now have one of the longest job titles in the American academy: the Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program. The second half of that title I’ve had for a decade now; the first half is new. I am pleased and honored and excited by the prospect of becoming an official advocate for the great Christian tradition that I have been talking about in this post.
Partly because of this new role, and partly by accident, I am this semester — for the first time, in a teaching career that now exceeds forty years — teaching only Christian writers. (I have had many semesters in which I didn’t teach any Christian writers at all, though usually there’s been a mix.) I am teaching, for Baylor’s Great Texts program, a course called Great Texts in Christian Spirituality; and I am teaching a new course, one I designed to express my chief interests as the new Harrod Chair: The Christian Renaissance of the Twentieth Century.
The new course is devoted to exploring the extraordinary outburst of distinctively Christian creativity — in all the arts and humanities — that occurred especially in the first half of the twentieth century, but has continued in certain forms ever since. It is a ridiculously ambitious and indefensibly wide-ranging course, since we will look (sometimes briefly, sometimes in detail) at painting, architecture, music, literature, philosophy, philosophy, and filmmaking. Basically we’ll go from G. K. Chesterton and Jacques Maritain to Marilynne Robinson, Arvo Pärt, and Terrence Malick. (Though as it happens, on Day One we’ll discuss Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil.) It’s gonna be utterly insane, and also, I think, a lot of fun. I hope to learn much in this first iteration that I can apply when I teach the course again — and I hope to teach it every year, student interest permitting.
Between that course and the Christian Spirituality one — which will go from the Didache and Maximus Confessor to Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm — I will have on my mind, for the next few months, an vast agglomeration of works in Christian theology, philosophy, and all the arts. There will be a lot to process, and this here blog is where I do much of my processing, so — if you like that kind of thing, then this will be the kind of thing you like. If not … well, sorry about that.