Rowan Williams: 

We’ve tried over Christian history, in all sorts of ways and contexts, to imitate other kinds of militancy. And my feeling about that is: well that worked, didn’t it! I want to ask: how does Christ change things? One thing I think you can be fairly sure about in the New Testament is that he doesn’t use the techniques of available power systems. ‘This is how the kings of the gentiles work.’ What we do in our militancy for the faith, that is our committed and courageous attempt to witness to what we’ve been given and make it available to others, we do by lives of holiness — which means an awful lot of hard work for the vast majority of us who are nowhere near that level and who resort to shortcuts all the time. 

My endorsement of this — and of his comments on the demonic in political life — is absolute. 

I have Thoughts about the Battle of Arnhem.

The funny thing about Matt Taibbi's summary of Samuel Moyn’s new book — “Old People Suck and We Should Take Their Stuff" — is that it's 100% accurate. That is precisely what Moyn argues. 

Hal Foster:

Looking at a painting is a welcome respite from scanning a screen. In that sense, this exercise is reactive: I labor in the small cottage industry of attention that has sprouted up in the cracks of the massive complex of distraction all around us. A phenomenological turn often occurs at times of intensive mediation, but the point is not simply to have our perceptions mirrored back to us. T. J. Clark has put the aim nicely: “When I am in front of a picture the thing I most want is to enter the picture’s world: it is the possibility of doing so that makes pictures worth looking at for me.” To look at a painting is also to exit our world for a while, and then to return to it cast in a different — distant — light. The time travel is often wonderful, and almost free.

Currently reading: Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock. Bullock is obviously drawing on Plutarch — and the story of how widely read Plutarch used to be versus how completely unknown he is today is a story worth telling — but he also says this in his preface: “Looking back, I cannot think of a better preparation for writing about Hitler and Stalin than the familiarity I acquired at Oxford in the 1930s with Thucydides, Tacitus, and those sections of Aristotle’s Politics that deal with the Greek experience of tyranny.” If we today had the lessons of ancient history ready to hand we could have much more productive political debates. People who know only the present — i.e. almost everybody — have no means of comparative measurement and so live by the feels. 📚

Hank Green’s timeline of Artemis mission photos is great.

I’m getting a start on my critical edition of Auden’s Nones, and reflecting that one of the chief pleasures of doing this work is the requirement that I own and consult the original Random House and Faber editions of the volumes. I’m amassing an interesting collection. 

It’s the bester Bleistiftspitzer.

A post on being fair to Harvey Mansfield.

I do love me some Caslon 

“Influencers” and “content creators”: People who want to affect others in unspecified ways for unspecified reasons by unspecified means.

Postcards

This biographer of C. S. Lewis has no comment.

Currently reading: A Company of Readers Uncollected Writings of W.H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from The Readers’ Subscription and Mid-century Book Clubs. It’s odd to think that Auden and Barzun were born in the same year, two years after Trilling, and the Barzun lived until 2012. 📚 

Barton Swaim: I am reminded by the appearance of this delightful magazine that my own desultory education happened in large measure in the pages of periodicals. Many were the hours I sat at coffeeshops and bars, or in my little apartment over cheap dinners, reading the Time...

This announcement of Delays Ahead on Cosmos Malick — complete with an Albertina Walker shout-out — is relevant to readers of my other blogs also.

Finished reading: Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet, from 1975. Nisbet has long been an important writer for me, but this, the only one of his major books I hadn’t read, is a disappointment, vague and full of moot assertions. There’a a provocative point in the Preface,...

One lawn down the street from us is filled this evening with fireflies! — or lightning bugs, as we called them in Alabama when I was growing up. It’s so wonderful to see them: they are rare now (I hadn’t seen any for years) but they filled the summer evenings of my childhood. Sitting cross-legged on the porch and watching the lightning bugs under the pecan trees was one of the defining experiences of my whole sensibility.

Gianni Benvenuti, illustration from Winny-Puh (the Italian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh). 

Gianni Benvenuti

British footy announcers identifying a player from the U.S. when he does something impressive: “the Fulham left-back,” “the Juventus midfielder,” etc.

British footy announcers identifying the same player when he does something wrong: “The American.”

From an earlier essay on Elizabeth on the alternative to thinking of every social/cultural political situtation as a pitched battle:

Warriors are right that this world is certainly full of problems, and sometimes battles must be fought. Nobody can shrug them off or pretend that they don’t exist. But losers don’t in fact shun the active life. Instead, they are engaged in activity that takes place in a much deeper stratum of consciousness than political and journalistic warfare. They invest energy in existentially permanent activities, like loving and caring for other people: children, students, family, neighbors, colleagues. They work as musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists. Beautiful losers renew and pass on the art, literature, and manners that constitute the best of our culture.

My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey: Certainly the professoriate leans leftward. But it turns out that people from right and left can agree on many things despite our differences: for example, what to read in our courses, pedagogical practices, and how to care for our s...

On the right tools for the (or my) classroom job.

I say this every couple of years, and it’s time: The next time someone tells you that René Girard is a great genius, before you decide you believe it please read this essay by Joshua Landy.

Sylvia Pixley

Sara Hendren: It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, tha...

Freddie: The most telling thing about the LLM moment is what this technology is actually good at. LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any ...

Emma Green’s long report on the College of St. Joseph the Worker is just wonderful. Jacob Imam, the college’s founder, was our student here in Baylor’s Honors College — and my son’s classmate — and we all knew he was destined for great things, but we couldn’t have predicted this Great Thing. 

Is this church open?