Austin made this at the Laity retreat last week. So great to hang with him. What a smart, funny, talented guy.
I’ve been trying to figure out how I might resume my thoughts on Douthat’s thoughts on belief, and I’m still musing, but I got a big boost to that musing this morning from this post by Noah Millman.
A usefully long piece on our our cities ended up with so many “aesthetically forgettable but highly profitable buildings.”
Noticing that Jeff Tweedy and A. C. Newman have Substacks now, I’m starting to think that I’m the last person over fifty who doesn’t have a Substack.
I wrote, and then updated, one last post on the ridiculous current kerfuffle about Wheaton College.
Recently on Mac, Spotlight has been failing miserably. I’ll search for a term that appears in dozens of filenames and Spotlight will return two or three, or sometimes none at all. HoudahSpot finds everything, which is great, but I shouldn’t have to buy a 3rd-party app for basic file searches.
Here’s my friend Jono Linebaugh with a lovely reflection on mercy, drawing on Auden’s great long poem The Sea and the Mirror. (I should do an online class about that poem one of these years.)
Mary Harrington on speaking at the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference at London’s ExCel Centre:
As for Excel, I wasn’t the only person to remark on the disjunction between the conference centre’s paradigmatic expression of the nomos of the airport, and the humanising story the conference itself sought to bring to contemporary political and social questions. Perhaps all we can really say to this is, a little tritely, we are where we are and the options for accommodating that many people for a conference are both limited and, more or less by definition, ordered to that nomos.
Maybe those of us who protest the dehumanizing shape and scale of this late modernity we’re living in shouldn’t have conferences of that kind. Maybe it’s not possible to think outside the confines of metaphysical capitalism when you’re operating wholly within the structures of that nomos.