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Two Kinds of New We say, “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” in one breath, and commonly refer to this time of year as the “Holiday Season”, as if it were all one singular event. There is an interesting irony in lumping the two celebrations together …
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Song of Zechariah In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high will break upon us
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace. -
As impersonal systems play increasing roles in information-gathering and decision-making, the personal element can be summed up as “human error.” … [T]hen of course the fields concerned with human nature—specifically, all the ways it is not predictable—are unseated, too…
[I]t is simply better to be a human when a personal God is at the heart of the universe. Human lives are easier to defend. Human joys have cosmic significance. Human foibles are “a feature, not a bug.” Human creativity is more arresting. Human language can be savored. Human stories must be told.
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A Treasure Malcolm Guite is posting poems he’s collected in his Advent Anthology, Waiting on the Word. I love to hear Malcolm read (and speak). Today’s offerings, a poem by Robert Hayden, and art by Linda Richardson, are particularly lovely.
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What Might This Look Like in America? An imaginative conservatism should see in Scruton’s centring of beauty in architecture and design a natural affinity with the articulation of craft as a political and economic ideal in the likes of William Morris. There is a politics and an economics of conservatism to be forged, but it requires making of itself more than an aesthetic gloss of Reaganism.
Sebastian Milbank, “Don’t Idolise Roger Scruton”, The Critic, 03.Nov.2024
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…well, we’ll live right on… From my friend, Dan Wilson:
… whatever the outcome… “well, we will live right on.” We will all go about doing what we do, get the kids off to school, go to work, do the laundry, and go about our lives. And that is as it should be because the greatest impact on our world does not come out of Washington anyway. It never has. Ultimately, it comes from each of us and how we live out our ordinary lives, our good deeds, humility, loving our neighbor, and loving God.
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The Christian Gospel in a Nutshell Luke, Chapter 15. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost boy. All wonderful. But the best is at the top in v.2: “… the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.'” Good news, huh?
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Two yearsMy mom died September 1, 2022: 4 months and 4 days shy of her 99th birthday.
I think of her and Dad all the time. The best is when they're in my dreams.
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Preach, Jaroslav
Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.
—Jaroslav Pelikan
(h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)
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When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.
He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)
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Talking about faith
A thesis: “When considering faith, it’s helpful to ask, ‘Is this right?’ or ‘Is this good?,’ as a way to discover ‘Is this true?'” (None of this is new; but it’s stuff I like to work out in writing.)
Consider this analogy: When we think about entering into a relationship, say a marriage (but it could be a friendship or even, taking a job at a company), we don’t ask, “Is this step true?” We ask, “Could this step be good? Could this be right?"* And we only discover the answer after we’ve (1) committed to the relationship and (2) lived out that commitment over time. (See Leslie Newbigin’s reading of Michael Polyani for more.)
This knowledge of the goodness or rightness of a relationship through lived experience would typically be seen as subjective knowledge. But, turning now to faith, let’s not discount experience. If a lot of other people, living over the course of centuries and in a range of families, countries, and cultures, also experience that the relationship with God is good and right, doesn’t that suggest the goodness or rightness are reliable, even if they’re known subjectively? (Is that one reason why Christians live their faith in community, in a “cloud of witnesses”?)*
Moreover, even in a one-to-one relationship, such as a marriage, i.e., Megan’s and my marriage, I am pretty confident in knowing that our marriage is good, though it sounds weird(ish) to say, “Our marriage is true." And like a marriage, our experience of faith probably changes over time (and, one hopes, grows). It’s not static.
Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” so truth is crucial. But, because the modern era tends to subject truth claims to the scientific method (or something like it), I think formulating faith in terms of what’s good and right is an important way we discover what’s true.
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By “good” and “right,” I mean not only “good for me”, but also, “fit, apt, appropriate, etc.” for a purpose (which requires knowing the purpose), and also “imbued with an inherent goodness and rightness” that transcends my personal benefit and, even, the aptness for a purpose.
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Of course, other faiths can make the same claim, so this isn’t a support for Christianity, per se; it’s just an argument for shared experience being some evidence of a possible truth.
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Richard Diebenkorn, c. Nineteen fifty-seven
Happy Easter!
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Good Friday 2024
Jesus, my brother, Jesus, my maker, Today, you paid my bills. What can I do, but fall on my face, And thank you for your grace? Jesus, my Lord.
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Fellowship - Christian Wiman
Tragedy and Christianity are incommensurable, he declared, which we’d have chalked to bluster had he not, within the month, held a son hot from the womb but cold to his kiss, and over a coffin compact as a toolbox wept in the wrecked unreachable way that most resist, and that all of us, where we are most ourselves, turn away from. Bonded and islanded by the silence, we waited there, desperate, with our own pains, to believe, desperate, with our own pains, not to. -
Whatever Happens This Year /I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace.
In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
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