Finished reading: The Theological Imagination by Judith Wolfe 📚
Finished reading: The Theological Imagination by Judith Wolfe 📚
Miles Smith on Russell Kirk’s tragic sense of life:
Conservatives, Kirk knew, had to live with tragedy more than golden ages, and it was that knowledge of tragedy that made someone truly conservative. … Kirk understood that, paradoxically, only a conservatism aware that it too will inevitably fail might stand a chance of lasting through the ages.
Finished reading: Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare 📚
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
– Wendell Berry
“One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.”
– Robert Farrar Capon
Cheered and celebrated with our 3 y/o tonight because we finally met Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Such great fun.
Recent arrivals
🎧 Leonard Cohen - Suzanne
Samuel James on writing (and thinking) in paragraphs:
Writing styles are not neutral. They are expressions of intellectual commitments. Sporadic prose privileges speed and emotional reaction over rumination. … There is something about this style that will always make progressive theology seem more plausible.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
– Aldous Huxley
Emile Doumergue, Iconographie calvinienne: ouvrage dédié à l’Université de Genève
“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”
– C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time”
Currently reading
“Children are indicators of our faith in the world itself, they are emissaries of optimism, charging into the future with their pockets full of hope.”
Austin Kleon on his weekly family pizza + movie night
🎧 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Into My Arms
Finished reading: Working by Robert A. Caro 📚 Devouring my summer reads.
“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money.”
– David Foster Wallace
Finished reading: Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis 📚 Charming, obsessive.
I’m loving micro.blog so far. It’s every bit as good as Alan Jacobs and Brad East made it out to be. No ads, no slop, no metrics or algorithm. I’m just here to post interesting things for no one’s sake but mine.
I discovered only today that the actor Joe Keery (who plays the lovable Steve Harrington in Stranger Things) also makes music as Djo and is really good! I can hear Beatles, Carpenters, and Phoenix influences.
John Ehrett on Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth:
This is the one great, brutal, bittersweet fact that Kingsnorth’s book—for all its erudition, moral seriousness, and rhetorical force—simply cannot bring itself to confront. People chose the Machine—choose civilization and modernity and technology and change—because they wanted to live.
My first book of 2026 – superb
