Alan Jacobs

[gallery] The International Space Station at night is kinda scary. Via c|net.

Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | William Langewiesche

Edwards as a Christian theologian begins with belief in a creator, whose role in existence and experience no doubt elaborated itself in his understanding as he pondered the imponderable problem he had posed to himself. The intuition is sound in any case. It places humankind in any moment on the farthest edge of existence, where the utter mystery of emergent being makes a mystery of every present moment even as it slides into the mysterious past. This by itself elevates experience above the plodding positivisms that lock us in chains of causality, conceptions of reality that are at best far too simple to begin to describe a human place in the universe. Edwards’s metaphysics does not give us a spatial locus, as the old cosmology is said to have done, but instead proposes an ontology that answers to consciousness and perception and feels akin to thought. I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards’s vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty, for a universe that is orderly without being mechanical, that is open to and participates in possibility, indeterminacy, and even providence. It taught me to think in terms that finally did some justice to the complexity of things.

It is not given to us to be as close to those we love as God is. We are always a little separate from one another, always something of a mystery. That is the wonder of loving someone else – that you never know them through and through. Only God knows each of us in the blood and the bone and the heartbeat, in the millions of passing thoughts which make up each individual life, the great multitude of actions small and large – brushing teeth, or running a marathon, or bearing a child – which become someone’s personal history. We are allowed to see some of them, and we celebrate what we know and what we never quite understood, both together, when we give thanks for the people we love and now see no longer….

But in God’s sight every moment and every thought of every person’s life is so soaked through with the light of God’s own seeing that it simply is. Nothing is lost, or hidden, or forgotten. Where God is, there is no room for the darkness of death, because in him is no darkness at all. In God the dead live; in the bed of the grave the light of life springs upwards, though we cannot yet see it. The great cloud of witnesses are shot through with light perpetual.

Our seeing is only partial. Saint Paul said that, ‘we see in part’, and he compared to it a reflection in a dark room: ‘through a glass, darkly’. ‘But,’ he says, ‘one day I shall see face to face: I shall know, even as I shall be fully known.’ Those we name today know more than we do now, and see further than we can; but we are joined with them through love, which lights up the darkness like a candle flame and springs out of bare ground like new shoots in spring. So tonight we express our love through candle flames and in the sprigs of rosemary, the herb of memory, and we name those we love and cannot see, trusting that in God’s sight their lives and selves are full of unimaginable and everlasting light, and that one day, by the grace of God, we shall be like them.

— Sermon for All Souls’ Day, by Jessica Martin. My beloved father-in-law was buried on All Souls’ Day, and in light of that I can’t tell you how much these words mean to me.

Contraception, sleeping around, co-habitation, and gay sex are done in private. By and large, over the last few decades the Church in the West has adopted a don’t ask/don’t tell policy. Marriage is different. It is by definition a public institution. You can protest that recognizing gay marriage does not mean approval, but actions have symbolic meaning whether we want them to or not.

I’m sure Pius XII would have denied that signing a Concordat with Hitler’s Germany meant he approved of Nazism. But it conferred legitimacy and dramatically undercut any basis within the Church for resistance. The same goes for the concordat many Catholic institutions are signing with gay marriage. It confers legitimacy on the sexual revolution and undercuts resistance.

I can understand why Pius XII sought the Concordat with Hitler. He hoped to secure a stable basis for the Church’s ministry in Germany. I can also understand why many Catholics (including, perhaps, Pope Francis) want to make their peace with the sexual revolution, putting “divisive” culture-war issues behind them so that they can go on with the work of the Gospel and so forth. Moreover, Hitler in 1933 didn’t look so bad—and respectable gay couples don’t seem a threat to marriage or anything else.

But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American, 2) covered up torture, 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations, 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes, 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so) 6) let high-ranking national security officials break the law with impunity, and 7) persecuted whistleblowers–confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in ten Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.

Michiko Kakutani, who writes reviews for The New York Times, is the same way. She’ll review a book like David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, which is one of the best novels of the year. It’s as good as Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, has the same kind of deep literary resonance. But because it has elements of fantasy and science fiction, Kakutani doesn’t want to understand it. In that sense, Bloom and Kakutani and a number of gray eminences in literary criticism are like children who say, ‘I can’t possibly eat this meal because the different kinds of food are touching on the plate!’

“It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship in house churches. By contrast, overseas Christian groups often inflate them. There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between 23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m Catholics. Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.

Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire.”

I don’t think avoiding Twitter is pragmatic if your audience is there, but it’s also unwise to dump all of your writing into bite-size pieces that are almost immediately skimmed over, forgotten, and lost to the vast depth of the mostly unsearchable, practically inaccessible Twitter archive.

Twitter is a complementary medium to blogging, but it’s not a replacement….

By knocking down a few walls and moving some furniture around, blogging is preparing for a comeback, and we’ll all be better off for it.

[gallery] Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges