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One more photo from Jimmy Dorrell’s last service at Church Under the Bridge: Michael Dionne rejoices at his Easter Sunday baptism in the waters of the Bosque River. (Photo by Justin Hamel.)
My neighbor, a young mother, walking around the block either with her dog or by herself, staring at her phone
Me: Come on, friend! Look at the world around you! See the trees leafing out! Listen to the birds!
Same neighbor, walking around the block this afternoon, staring at the book in her hands
Me: You go, girl!!
It would be difficult to overstress how much Jimmy Dorrell has meant, and will continue to mean, to Waco. May the Lord bless Jimmy in his retirement — though I doubt that he’ll be very retiring.
I've been reading too much on Instapaper. Saving articles for later is a powerful way to manage my time, but it produces a huge pile of content that I then feel obligated to work my way through.
Instapaper has the opposite effect on me. I save many articles there, and when I visit the site the first thing I do is delete the articles I am no longer interested in reading. Usually that’s more than half of the articles I’ve saved. (“Why did I think I wanted to read that?”) Very liberating. The key is not to visit Instapaper too often — twice a week is about right.
Abandoned reading: The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World by Iain McGilchrist. What an infuriating endeavor. McGilchrist seems to think that he he makes a claim stronger by giving, not three, not five, but forty-seven supportive examples — and that he can’t say what he wants to say about the hemispheres of the brain without pausing to articulate a Theory of Truth. I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 📚
I've had a number of people ask me about this: A 12-Month Immersive Course in Humanities - by Ted Gioia. I’ll just say that my version would be, not 52 assignments in a year, but one assignment in a year. Pick one vital book and read it slowly. Pause to think. Re-read difficult passages. Take your time, and be willing to set it aside for a while. And remember what Auden said: “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.”
And from six years ago, on my old Buttondown newsletter: Easter with Arcabas.
New from me: “Welcome to the party, Christmas and Easter Christians!”
Tech CEO asks
Chatbot why it is frozen.
Chatbot: “You’re frozen.”
The other day I wrote, “Chatbots’ brains don’t have a right hemisphere.” Several people — surprisingly many — have asked me to expand on that. But I dunno: expanding on it feels like a very left-hemisphere thing to do.
My advice for the new Archbishop of Canterbury | Rowan Williams:
It might sound odd to approach Easter thinking about fear. But it’s striking that the earliest gospel finishes by telling us that the women who came to the tomb of Jesus and found it empty initially ‘said nothing because they were afraid’. Nothing is going to be the same again: being afraid is the most natural reaction. We are all on the back foot: the ‘cultural Christian’, who likes to have a little bit of Christian decor in the house; the Christian nationalist, who wants non-Christians to know their place; the liberal Anglican, who wants everyone to feel comfortably at home. If what is said to Mary and what is done on Easter Day are indeed world-changing matters, we do well to be apprehensive. Only then can we begin to see just what we are to be thankful for. Release. Transformation.
The key point about all these “high agency” people is that they’re agentic in relation to existing institutions and human beings but mimetic in relation to money. They do whatever money wants. They want to be money. They put money where their mouth is. And it talks.
Today in the noon Good Friday service our parish choir sang quite beautifully two powerful anthems I hadn’t heard before:
- “Crux fidelis” — by Sarah Macdonald
- ”Were You There?” — as arranged by Bob Chilcott
(Of course I know “Were You There?” but not this arrangement of it)
Watched: Roman Holiday. Twenty years ago David Thomson write that “Seen today, Roman Holiday is hard to finish, because it has only its charm.” Since it has more charm that any dozen ordinary movies, I didn’t have any trouble finishing it — or watching it again. 🍿
Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - Ars Technica:
So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”
I devoutly — I choose the adverb with care — wish Christians would just stop writing these speculative essays about where Christianity is headed, what the future holds for Christians, etc. etc. We’ve been ordered not to think that way. It’s a half-hearted form of divination, and an excellent way to be distracted from what the follower of Christ is called to be or do right now. Holy Week is a good time to recognize this habit of endless speculation as a form of disobedience and to renounce it.
Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities.
The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world.
Speaking of love or money, Joni Mitchell’s song by that name from her 1974 live record Miles of Aisles absolutely crushes. The band is super-tight, the recording and mixing are superb, and Joni … is Joni.
Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it ...
The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one ani...
My dear friend Wesley Hill is going to Wycilffe College at the University of Toronto — this, I predict, will be a great thing for the college and the professor alike.
Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.
It seems that temps perdu doesn’t just mean “lost time” but also “spare time.” Proust in search of spare time?
The Bills That Destroyed Urban America — The New Atlantis:
Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.
The sequel is here.