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.)
ideas
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?"
[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
Writers Who've Stuck with Me (or With Whom I've Stuck)
an ongoing listP.G. Wodehouse • G.K. Chesterton • Dorothy L. Sayers • C.S. Lewis • Frederick Buechner • Kathleen Norris • Alan Jacobs • Terry Teachout • David French • Evelyn Underhill • Garrison Keillor, editor (for his Good Poems collections) • Naomi Shihab Nye • T.S. Eliot • Roger Scruton • John Donne • John Milton • Abraham Lincoln • Anthony Trollope • Jane Kenyon • John McPhee • David Brooks • Li-Young Lee • Tom Stoppard • Michael Chabon • Laurie Colwin • The author of the Johannine epistles • The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews • Witold Rybczynski • Angelo Pellegrini • Calvin Trillin (the "Tummy Trilogy" and beyond) • William Carlos Williams • Christopher Alexander, et al. (A Pattern Language) • Anne Lamott • Yuval Levin • Philip Yancey • Colum McCann • Hilary Mantel • William deBuys • Alex Harris, photographer • Victoria Goddard • Iris Murdoch • Virginia Woolf • Hampton Sides • Louis Menand • Sophocles • Charles Dickens • Jane Austen • Wendell Berrly • John Buchan • Dorianne Laux • Charles Portis • Annie Dillard • Lewis Hyde • Sappho • 📘
maybe
Is this how judgment day will be? "... something that would have been terror, but for the joy, and joy, but for the terror..." -- C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength
Carne
"The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families. And this enfleshed, incarnational part of ... life and work deserves some extra attention now, at least for a little while... " [Tish Harrison Warren, My Hope for American Discourse](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/opinion/saying-goodbye-social-media-prayer.html)(I am not oblivious to the fact that I'm sharing this advice via the very medium that's causing a lot of the need for this advice.)
Manly
"As I get older, I find that I care more and more about being a good man and less and less about career stuff. I think a lot of it is just a product of age. But the fact that I’m the last survivor of the family I grew up in plays a significant part. When my mom passed away last October, the only guide for how I behaved was asking myself how my parents would want me to deal with it..." -- Jonah Goldberg, ["In Defense of Manly Tears," Aug 4, 2023](https://thedispatch.activehosted.com/index.php?action=social&chash=7fb8ceb3bd59c7956b1df66729296a4c.1661&nosocial=1) 💬
Concrete
... the presentation of our bodies is our spiritual act of worship. It is a significant Christian paradox. No worship is pleasing to God which is purely inward, abstract and mystical; it must express itself in concrete acts of service performed by our bodies.
[John StottRomans](https://www.ivpress.com/romans-jsbs) 💬
Teachout on Stoppard
Two-and-half years after his death, I miss reading new essays (and reviews and blog posts and tweets) by Terry Teachout. Here’s a good piece about Tom Stoppard, whom I also will miss profoundly, someday. (He said, perhaps naively).