mumby road

  • 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

  • True in every era; yet, it’s a smack in the face

    … the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.

    – Joan Didion - (h/t @ayjay)

  • Exhausting, Exhausted

    Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was, while I might have thought folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad either.

    But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”

    And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.

  • A Thought

    Extraordinary people in arts, business, etc., can be so focused that their relationships suffer. Maybe that’s the price of excellence. But those who nurture relationships also pay a cost. They may be less successful at making money or art. Might that be a price of deeper connections?

  • More Mysterious

    “By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins….

    The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.”

    Jamil Zaki

  • 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)

  • Leah Bayans:

    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)

  • Wait, what's the question? /

    Annie Dillard: “We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing… We have been as usual asking the wrong question… The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?”

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • Albert Brooks on Writer's Block

    Writing is solving one problem and then the next. It’s like building a house. Once you start, you have to finish… If you hired an architect and a year later you said, “What happened?” And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’

  • The Good of Counting

    BOSWELL. Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he remembers having a thousand people in a year to dine at his house ...

    JOHNSON. That, Sir, is about three a day.

    BOSWELL. How your statement lessens the idea.

    JOHNSON. That, Sir, is the good of counting. It brings every thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.

  • The Honest Broker /

    I’m sure many of you already follow Ted Gioia. But for those who don’t, he’s one of the country’s most perceptive cultural critics, as well as being the world’s preeminent jazz historian. Check him out. It’ll be well worth your time.

  • Things I Really Like: an Ongoing List /
    • Birdsong
    • Tottenham Hotspur Football Club
    • Archie
    • Tamales
    • Black licorice
    • Woodsmoke
    • Good Table Talk (more often, actually, Bar Talk)
    • a Ploughman's Lunch in a pub's garden
    • a 5:1 Martini, with a dash of orange bitters and 3 olives
    • Wind Chimes
    • Telephone calls with my out-of-town kids
    • Tacos with my in-town kid (and kid-in-law)
    • [Resident Taqueria](http://www.residenttaqueria.com/), Dallas [see immediately above
    • Heat
  • from The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg /
    ... the third place tavern combines drinking with conversation such that each improves the other. The talking/drinking synergism is basic to the pub, tavern, taverna, bistro, saloon, estaminet, osteria -- whatever it is called and wherever it is found... [J]ust as conversation is enhanced by the temperate use of alcohol, the artful and witty game of conversation moderates consumption of liquor. As Tibor Scitovsky remarked with respect to those who know how to use a public drinking facility, "a half-pint of beer is to talk as bed is to making love -- one can do without, but does better with.”
  • Not a bad mission statement /

    “We aim to humanize those who have been objectified.”
       – Jessie Kornberg, Director, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles

  • 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.
  • Third Places
    American suburbs provide an excess of privacy, but deny proximity to those places upon which a community life depends.

    Ray Oldenberg, The Great Good Place

  • For 2024

    Ten days in, my theme for 2024 is: “Be attentive”:

    • Pay attention to what I pay attention to, and jettison stuff that doesn’t pay back with value.
    • Improve focus on stuff that is valuable. (Takes practice!)
    • Be attentive and responsive (or least present) to others.

    (NB: They all take practice.)

  • from Symmetries & Asymmetries - W.H. Auden
    Could any tiger
Drink martinis, smoke cigars,
And last as we do?
  • Pitiable, foolish, and cruel, all at once

    Louis Menand: “[Sontag] forbade her son to look out the window when they rode in a train; he needed to read about a place if he wanted to understand it. She never looked out the window herself.”

  • not so funny anymore
    Mike Godwin:
         ... has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis...
         We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.
  • A thought
    Generally, the world says, "Work first, and benefits come after." (E.g., exercise, then fitness.) That's good, because, even for bad work, anticipating the reward eases the pain. But if you must pay after, that looming bill taints the enjoyment of the thing enjoyed. (Of course, taking joy in the work is best of all.)
  • You are what you eat
    David French: We’re misinformed not because the government is systematically lying or suppressing the truth. We’re misinformed because we like the misinformation we receive and are eager for more.... The market is very, very happy to provide us with all the misinformation we like. Algorithms recognize our preferences and serve up the next video or article that echoes or amplifies the themes of the first story we clicked.... It’s important to recognize that no person or movement is immune to the temptations of bespoke reality. We’re all vulnerable... That means following as many or more people who disagree with me as agree with me. That means reading the best and smartest people I can find who disagree with me. These practices help both challenge me and humanize my opponents.
  • A difficult question
    Jonah Goldberg: "If Hitler’s bunker was in a hospital in 1945, you can be sure we would have flattened it from the air (no doubt after dropping leaflets—just as Israel has). But Israel has not done that. Nor should it do anything of the sort. They sent troops in—carrying incubators by the way—to minimize collateral damage...
    [What's a real solution to] the very real problem of Hamas using Palestinian babies to protect their murderers and rapists?"
  • All In or All Out

    There is little excuse for pretending eloquence about the meaning of the Resurrection while holding reservations about whether the event really happened. The assertion that Jesus was raised from the dead cannot at the same time be theologically true and historically false.

    Andrew Christiansen, paraphrasing Carl Braaten - Covenant blog

subscribe via RSS