Some poor, phoneless fool is probably sitting next to a waterfall somewhere totally unaware of how angry and scared he’s supposed to be.

Duncan Trussell via Andrew Sullivan

Holiday indulgence: Re-re-reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. 📚

Exhausted. Two-and-a-half hours of concertizing (chorus) this afternoon.

But: no rehearsals until February 3, when we begin practicing Messiah.

Finished Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity. 📚There were moments of delight and hours of hard (from lack of recent practice) focus on a scholarly text about literary criticism, which is far from my wheelhouse. The conclusion, 14 pages, merit re-reading.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Living with a Calendar

There is nothing that I may decently hope for that I cannot reach by patience as well as by anxiety.

Wendell Berry

Purdue 83, Maryland 78. A great game, closer that you’d think from the score, hard-played, well-officiated. We’re lucky it was in Mackey Arena and that Angel Reese’s brother fouled out.

The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about liturgical forms, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

Today’s useless news from AP: How cat and dog owners vote in 2024: AP VoteCast | AP News

Stanford Review: EXCLUSIVE: The Review Interviews President Levin 

Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

President Levin: There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

The Morning Dispatch

Reading Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity. 📚

The long introduction is very promising. The acknowledgements produced the pleasant surprise that the author is (or was while writing) a capital-O Orthodox Christian. In that smallish world, I’m surprised she’s new to me.

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was embedded in a longer blog post, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

1. First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
2. Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
3. Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
4. Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
5. Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
6. Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
7. Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
8. Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
9. Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
10. Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

A few years ago, I systematically identified all my charitable donees, put them in a spreadsheet and planned how much and when to give each, month by month. I revisit the sheet on the 1st of each month and execute the plan for that month.

Then I disregard all routine emails requesting money. (I sometimes murmur “You’re on the list. Wait for your turn.”)

I also revisit the sheet yearly to update donees, amounts, and funding sources (e.g., Qualified Charitable Distributions from IRAs or anonymous gifting from a Charitable Gift Fund).

(I do pay attention and give specially for relief of specific disasters.)

Maybe you’d feel less “blown to and fro” with a similar approach.

Yes, this. Or maybe I should say, “NO! I’m not going to respond to these any more!” If your employer thinks that’s bad, you should look for a new, saner employer.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Aristocrats: handle only with asbestos gloves!

Oh, man! Giving Tuesday! The mailbox is filling up with email from everyone I’ve given so much as a sideways glance!

I hadn’t seen/heard anybody else say it, so I will. I suspect that Joe Biden was thinking about 1/21/25, with Trump having just pardoned hundreds of insurrectionists while breathing vengeance on his enemies.

I’m glad I still have a gift article because this is really good: Opinion | The Inverted Morality of MAGA - The New York Times.

After nine years, I’m finally starting to understand MAGA “morality.’ I hate it and its short-sightedness.

It. Is. Not. Conservative. In any way.

Acid test passed: our son’s mother-in-law Larissa is extremely allergic to cats. We’ve been feeding our cat a special food to reduce dander (or the allergens). Larissa has been here for three hours with no problems — and just noticed.

All the other trees have dropped their leaves, so this burning bush really stands out .

I laughed out loud, paused the podcast, and wrote down Rituals of Spontaneity, which I’ve now ordered to complement America’s God and The Democratization of American Christianity.

I just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when up pops Androids Dreaming of Electric Sheep, or It’s Hallucinated Turtles All the Way Down.

Ross Douthat, Three Theories of the Trump Cabinet (unlocked). Douthat seldom disappoints me, and this wasn’t one of those occasions.

New useful vocabulary word: Broligarchy. (H/T Brooke Harrington, in the Atlantic)

New phrase encountered: charismatic megafauna. I figured it out from context, but confirmed with Wikipedia