Alan Jacobs

Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism. Piety has always been singled out for the hardest onslaught of hellish aggression. The empty slopes of the wilderness became the lists for an unprecedented single combat, lasting forty days and nights, between the leaders of either faction; when the Thebaid filled up with hermits, their presence at once attracted a detachment of demons, and round the solitary pillar of St. Symeon the Stylite, the Powers of Darkness assembled and spun like swarming wasps.

— Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence

Earlier today I tweeted: “Gap that needs to be filled: the journalism that journalists ignore while spending all day every day insulting each other on Twitter.”

I’m serious about this. I only follow one account on public Twitter (a truly vital one), but I had for some time a Twitter list called “Politics” that contained the accounts of some of the reporters I have the most respect for. I just deleted that list because all these people do is snark at each other and at commenters. They call each other names, they trade insults with random people who criticize them, they RT most such insults — basically, America’s political reporters think and act like sixth-graders. And they’re on Twitter all the time. You can’t learn a damned thing by following any of them — or any of the ones I know of, anyway.

Journalists are always saying that they have to be on Twitter because that’s where the information is. I think that’s bullshit. Twitter is where the childish bickering is, and that’s what seems to make journalists happy. I’m now going to begin my search for journalists who aren’t on Twitter, or are rarely there: those are the ones who are more likely to be doing some actual research and reporting.

Mesut Özil creates an impossible situation for his manager. He can go for long periods — and by “long periods” I mean several weeks — in a kind of fog, trotting aimlessly up and down the pitch, rarely seeking the ball when the Gunners are in possession and rarely presuming to interfere when the other team is on the attack. But then, even in the midst of one of those funks, he can do what he did today: make the inch-perfect cross — or through-ball, or reverse pass, or surprising incisive run — that creates the goal that wins the match.

You just never know what you’re going to get from Özil. Wenger has to be greatly tempted to sit his ass on the bench for a couple of games … but, especially with Santi Cazorla out, he really doesn’t have anyone else who has that level of creativity. Heck, there aren’t ten players in the world with Özil’s level of creativity. (Creativity in this case being the imagination to see a possibility on the pitch and the technique to make that possibility happen.)

And then Wenger has to be thinking, Maybe, just maybe, I can find the key that will turn his motor on once and for all. Indeed, earlier this year it looked like he had found that key, as Özil went on a kind of scoring spree, producing a series of skillful and beautiful goals. But now he has lapsed back into his fog — and the fear now has to be that he will never come out of it.

All in all, and I have to say that I’ve gone back and forth on this point, I don’t think he’s worth the money he will command when his contract is up; whereas I do think Alexis is worth the money he will command. So I say: sign Alexis, let Özil go, use that money to buy two or three players, at least one of whom has a chance of replacing the aging Santi.

Another photo from that NYT story on the restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece. I have long dreamed of writing a comprehensive theology of culture — one to replace Richard Niebuhr’s overrated and conceptually rigid Christ and Culture, one founded in a truly thick theological anthropology, one that reckons with the full inheritance of modernity. So, so much of what I would want to say in such a book is already said by this image.

Story in the New York Times. Click the photo for a larger image.

When I discovered, as I related in a Text Patterns post, than Thomas Pynchon claimed to have been influenced, as a young writer, by Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, I decided to find that book and read it. But wouldn’t it be cool, I thought, if I could get an edition that Pynchon might have read?

AbeBooks to the rescue. Isn’t that cool?

4-year-old was screaming on our walk, so I gave him my notebook and pen and told him to write down his problem. [Translation: THE PROBLEM IS NOT ME]

A photo posted by Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) on Dec 22, 2016 at 3:18pm PST

The human condition in one sentence: The Problem Is Not Me.

Speaking as an interested outsider to recent intra-Catholic disputes, I find this article completely incomprehensible. Gaillardetz tells us that Pope Francis is all about building a “listening church” and the “decentralization of authority” — but how is that description compatible with Francis’s refusal to answer questions from Cardinals of the church, and his repeated mockery of traditionalists, even to the point of calling out priests wearing more formal vestments than he prefers as effeminate? In these matters Francis may be right or wrong, but I can’t see anything to suggest that he listens or wants to decentralize power. Rather, on every issue he seems to speak not just with confidence but also with contempt of anyone who disagrees with him.

With the 500th anniversary of the Reformation coming on, I’m already seeing pieces — they annoy me too much for me to link to them — that see the anniversary as an opportunity to take sides, to say The Reformation is good because it supports this thing I approve of or The Reformation is bad because it supports this thing I disapprove of or This good thing just happened and thanks be to the Reformation which after all caused it or This bad thing just happened so curses upon the Reformation which after all caused it. It’s going to be bad enough when serious Catholics and Protestants use the anniversary to cudgel one another — that’s already started — but everyone else is going to want a piece of the action as well.

We could strive to understand the Reformation, to open up a very complex and multilayered phenomenon for reflection, to break down simplistic caricatures, to discover unexplored (or underexplored) possibilities. But taking sides is what our cultures seems to do with everything now. Everyone seems to be asking of every phenomenon, though with their own tribal affiliation substituted, “Yes, but is it good for the Jews?" So what does the Reformation mean for feminism, LGBTQ rights, transgender rights, race, Republicans and Democrats, Muslims in Europe? That’s what we’re going to be hearing for the next year: a few words on Martin Luther and then that’s enough about him, let’s talk about us and figure out whether Luther is for us or against us. Whatever is happening in this very moment will be the interpretative key people will use to (they think) unlock the meaning of the Reformation. For those of us who are more seriously interested in history and the complicated ways it does and does not shape the present, this is not going to be fun.