Alan Jacobs

In June, racist Dylann Roof massacred nine black Christians meeting for a mid-week Bible study. He hoped to launch a race war, as he explained in a manifesto you can read over at Mother Jones. The second paragraph of the manifesto begins, “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case.” He talks about all the media coverage of the case and how it radicalized him. Some in the media immediately linked the shooting in Colorado Springs to videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing human organ harvesting and trade as part of their abortion business. The implication — if not outright claim — is that people shouldn’t talk about what Planned Parenthood does, much less speak against the injustice of abortion, because some people might take such discussions the wrong way. But you may remember that nobody in the media suggested that they shouldn’t have highlighted the killing of Trayvon Martin for fear that some racist might be set off of by the discussions. And that’s a good thing, because the idea that the media shouldn’t cover news because someone might be so bothered by it that he goes on a rampage would be very stupid.

— Mollie Hemingway

This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was changing. You can get anywhere in the dark-pink section in the middle within five days – to the Azores in the west and the Russian city of Perm in the east. No surprises there: you’re just not going very far. Beyond that, things get a little more interesting. Within five to ten days, you can get as far as Winnipeg or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. It takes as much as 20 days to get to Tashkent, which is closer than either, or Honolulu, which is much farther away. In some places, a colour sweeps across a landmass, as pink sweeps across the eastern United States or orange across India. In others, you reach a barrier of blue not far inland, as in Africa and South America. What explains the difference? Railways.

— Time travel | Intelligent Life magazine

In 1904, more men of talent in Alabama than California — so at least some things haven’t changed.

— Rebecca Onion, Map of the Most Intellectual States in the Early-20th-Century US

… that political rhetoric leads to violence only when some people are talking. 

I might as well put this on record: 

1. I don't believe that there is a Second Amendment right to personal gun ownership; that's a politically motivated reading of the text. 
2. I'd like to see much stricter gun laws everywhere in America, even here in Texas. 
3. But stricter gun laws would do nothing at all to reduce the numbers of mass shootings; guns will remain obtainable by people who are willing to break the law, and those who plan to shoot and kill their fellow human beings aren't worried about that. 
4. Desperate, twisted, alienated people who want to be heard and heeded are given powerful incentives to murder by our media, including our social media. 
5. In the aftermath of mass shootings, people shout louder and louder about gun control as a way of distracting themselves and others from the real problem, which is insatiable curiositas. 

  via Steven Kawalit

I’m an edge case. I want an untangled web. I want everything I do to copy back to a single place, so I have one searchable log for each day’s thoughts, images, notes and activities. This is apparently Weird and Hermetic if not Hermitic.

I am building my monastery walls in preparation for the Collapse and the Dark Ages, damnit. Stop enabling networked lightbulbs and give me the tools to survive your zombie planet.

— Warren Ellis

This essay by Jacqueline Rose on the Oscar Pistorius trial is powerful and provocative, and I commend it to you without reservation. What follows is not, therefore, meant to deter you from reading it.

At several points in the essay Rose refers to a tattoo Pistorius wears on his back, which she refers to as “one line of a verse from Corinthians.” Here’s her fullest discussion of the tattoo and its context:

The full citation from Corinthians tattooed on Pistorius’s upper back reads:

I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air; I execute each stride with intent; I beat my body and make it my slave I bring it under my complete subjection To keep myself from being disqualified After having called others to the contest.

The line about making my body my slave is not in most translations from Corinthians, nor is subjection described as ‘complete’. Pistorius was raising the stakes.

A little research would have revealed to Rose, or to the editors of the LRB, that “the line about making my body my slave” is indeed in every translation of that text; it’s just that many translations are not that bluntly literal. A little attention would have suggested that the word "stride" makes no sense in the Pauline context, though it surely does in that of Pistorius. A little curiosity would have set them on the path to discovering what translation Pistorius used, and how (if) he modified it; and from there it would have been only a short step to asking what Christian groups or denominations prefer that translation; and that knowledge in turn might have led to something worth knowing about Oscar Pistorius.

But neither Rose nor the editors of the LRB were interested in any of that. They weren’t sufficiently curious about such matters even to discover that there are two books of the Bible that contain the word “Corinthians.”

If we wish men to practise virtue, it is worth while trying to make them love virtue, and feel it an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects. It is worth training them to feel, not only actual wrong or actual meanness, but the absence of noble aims and endeavours, as not merely blamable but also degrading: to have a feeling of the miserable smallness of mere self in the face of this great universe, of the collective mass of our fellow creatures, in the face of past history and of the indefinite future the poorness and insignificance of human life if it is to be all spent in making things comfortable for ourselves and our kin, and raising ourselves and them a step or two on the social ladder.

— John Stuart Mill at the University of Edinburgh (1867)

I probably ought to be deeply sympathetic to this this post by Jay Nordlinger. I didn’t come from a background as impoverished as the high-powered lawyer Nordlinger knows, but my circumstances were significantly humbler than almost anyone I know in my line of work. So if I wanted to bristle when people talk about “white privilege,” I could — and sometimes I’m tempted, especially when people who attend Ivy League schools want to lecture me about it. And Nordlinger is right that such privilege is unevenly distributed, and that that is not recognized nearly often enough.

But here’s the thing: I have no doubt that being white has helped me enormously in my academic career. Once I learned to sand off some of the sharper corners of my redneck accent and put on some decent professional clothes, no one could know anything about how I grew up unless I told them. The differences in my social class and background became invisible and inaudible; and that’s a major benefit when you’re, say, applying for jobs. Just ask yourself: Would things have gone the same way for that lawyer Nordlinger met if he had been black? I’m not confident they would have.

Sometimes it seems to me that there are really only two types of Christian books: Platitudes and Planners. The Platitudes tell us with great earnestness what everyone already knows and no one would contest: that the secret to the Christian life is to love God with all our heart not just part of it; that one of the ways we demonstrate our love for God is by caring for His creation; that we do damage to our Christian witness unless we show respect for all persons. The problem with the Platitudes is not that they are wrong, but that they are uselessly correct. They tell us what we already know, but skillfully (or in some cases not so skillfully) avoid the sticky wicket of how exactly we’re supposed to live up to the things that we know to be true.

The problem with the Planners is just the opposite. The Planners have the virtue of acknowledging that putting our beliefs and convictions into practice is the really hard part of the Christian life, but they are relentlessly (sometimes insanely) cheerful about this. They tell us that we just need to organize ourselves properly and follow an invariant sequence of simple steps in order to do and be everything that Jesus wants us to do and be. For the Planners, Christian life is the simplest thing there is: it just requires … planning.

My fellow Christians seem to have an endless appetite for both Platitudes and Planners. Platitude-pushers seem to do especially well on Twitter: if you want to get yourself tens of thousands of followers, just utter banal words of exhortation, challenge, or encouragement with an air of profundity (and, of course, in fewer than 140 characters). The prophets of planning tend to have enormously popular Facebook pages, and make lucrative careers of speaking before very large audiences.

The Christian writers who are serious enough to get beyond platitudes, but also honest enough to acknowledge the inevitable vagaries of Christian living and the consequent limitations of our organizational impulses, are hard-to-find. In more than 30 years of reading Christian writers I have found only a few of them. They are pearls of great price.

At some point I’ll make a list of the ones who have meant the most to me. Ordinarily I hate doing that kind of thing, but it might be that making such a list will help me to see what they have in common.