Another of the king’s chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter: “The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thains, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the…
My new favorite treatment of AI in the workplace is S1E37 of Shaun the Sheep , “Helping Hound”.
Buckle up for a long and extraordinary passage of Barthian theological exegesis: If God does not meet us in His jealous zeal and wrath—exactly as He meets Israel according to the witness of the Old Testament, exactly as He meets it later in the crucifixion of His own Son—then He does not meet us at all, and in spite of all our asseverations about divine love, man is in actual fact left to himself.…
Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow :
Socrates had it exactly backwards. It is not that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Rather: there is no lived life that is not worth examining .
Brad Littlejohn has out today a clever five-part vehicular typology of LLM use , riffing on Steve Jobs’ famous description of the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Brad’s five are: bicycle, motorcycle, car, mobility scooter, and exercise bike. But he overlooked Josh Brake’s sixth option: LLMs as an e-bike for the mind .
When I encounter something foreign to me, I do not want to see only that which is my own. Instead, it is like building up the layers of a gorgeous violin varnish : I cook the pigments from different substances and shade it with metal salts, then put it in my little mill and grind it all up into the finest of grain-sized pieces. … If you apply another thin glaze of orange over the first…
Jason Staples’ Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites was one of my favorite reads of last year; a really path-breaking work in Pauline scholarship, that clears up a great many confusing issues surrounding St. Paul’s ongoing relation to “the Jews” and “Judaism” and stimulates numerous further questions. So I was pleased, last…
When writing the First Piano Concerto , surely Brahms must have been thinking of the Mozart D minor Concerto and Chopin’s G minor Ballade .
No, I still haven’t read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine — it feels like a book I am “supposed to have read by now,” a feeling which always activates my contrarian impulse to keep on not having read it (“what do you mean, you never went to a single high school football game?”) — but, that crucial disclaimer aside, I shared Brad East’s slightly…
This is a fascinating story in The Atlantic on the scholarship (and, inevitably, politics) of “experiential relativity” — the hypothesis that human emotional and affective experience differs dramatically, perhaps almost incommensurably, between times and places, and that only in globalized Enlightened modernity do we take for granted that, say, “sadness” or…
The investigative practices of the early modern sciences, when they function solely as regulative instruments for isolating discrete areas of investigation from every larger interpretive context, definitely allow for an enormous range of discoveries and advances and predictive power on the parts of researchers. After all, Newtonian physics suffices for many calculations, even if it only…
In Exodus 33:12–13, Moses famously pleads with the LORD to not abandon Israel after her apostasy with the golden calf — but he pleads in a curious manner: See, you say to me, ‘Bring up this people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. Yet you have said, ‘I know you by name, and you have also found favor in my sight.’ Now therefore, if I have found favor in your sight, please…
It is not at all that the word of man in the Bible has an abnormal significance and function. We see from the Bible what its normal significance and function is. It is from the word of man in the Bible that we must learn what has to be learned concerning the word of man in general. This is not generally recognised. It is more usual blindly to apply to the Bible false ideas taken from some other…
Most time-tested schools of thought ultimately converge, in some form, on one of two answers about the fundamental, generative reality of (depending on the field being analyzed) a person, society, culture, or the universe: either conflict or love. Every logically subsequent decision — which is to say, everything — hangs on this determination. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an emphatic,…
“[Perhaps] it’s true that the surest path to certain kinds of scientific knowledge is the construction of strictly third-person accounts of things; but we mustn’t forget that there really is no such thing as a third-person perspective . All perspective is, by definition, first-person. The third-person vantage is a methodological fiction without any objective existence. It’s a mere distillate of an…
In a fabulous essay on the ambiguities of Paul Kingsnorth’s lifelong project as summed up in his new book, Against the Machine , Adam Smith takes a stab at defining “the Machine”: There are various ways to explain what the Machine is, but one way is to start with that fact. If writing books about it is a trap, it’s because the Machine is the sort of thing—though crucially it is not an actual…
A spectacular (and spectacularly long) passage from Barth on the church: To understand this we must above all try to see that over against Jesus Christ the Church is not a chance, i.e., an arbitrary construction. It is not created, formed and introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority and insight. It is not the outcome of a free undertaking to analyse and come to terms with…
I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St. Paul, St. Augustine (of Hippo) — as a Protestant. (Asked, to be clear, in a non-hostile way!) Here is my response, edited and expanded from its original format. Normally, in practice, I use that honorific for those recognized as saints in the pre-Reformation Latin church. The main group are those…
As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius , take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg . Here is a — wonderful and energetic! — performance of the Prelude . Wagner pitches it in a faux-Baroque register and dials back the adventurous harmonies a few ticks, such that it sounds by far the most conventional of his…
The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950. By “dipole” I am not picturing a Venn diagram but something more like a magnet: As in the magnetic field, classicism and expressivism are dialectical and…
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘ This our son is stubborn and rebellious;…
A fantastic essay from Zac Koons , including this stellar line: “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish. All we have to do is not use it .”
The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises. Home improvement stores, flower shops, and furniture stores assure us that we can design our own homes in such a way that they begin to sing, while travel agencies and real estate brokers inform us that the world sings somewhere else. And at a secondary level, local history…
Sketch for a longer reflection: St. Paul’s supposedly negative statements about the Law are in fact positive summaries, drawn from considering the narrative of Scripture in the retrospective light of Christ’s death and resurrection, of what the Law must have been meant for in the first place.
A genius little summary from St. Irenaeus, near the close of his great book, of the seven essentials (as he sees it) we receive from the tradition: [The] path of those belonging to the Church circumscribes the whole world, as possessing the sure tradition from the apostles, and gives unto us to see that the faith of all is one and the same, since all receive one and the same God the Father, and…