Dash Crofts has died. Few here may remember him, but Seals & Crofts made distinctive, gentle music in the late 60s, early 70s. They weren’t my first exposure to Bahai, but they were appealing enough for me to say back then “if I weren’t a Christian, I think I’d be Bahai.”
Just finished listening to this week’s The Dispatch Podcast, titled A Strategic Stalemate in Iran. I definitely came away feeling better-informed (they fleshed out my skeletal knowledge) about what’s going on, though what’s going on isn’t very encouraging.
Baffling: How did 2 bulletins for an All Saints Day Service November 2, 2022, at Christ the Redeemer Anglican Church in Danvers, MA just surface in the basket by my easy chair? One of them is marked up, even.
That’s a rhetorical question, but hilarious theories are welcome.
There is value in reticence. When you are in a group discussion, you can listen without “disappearing.” In an online conversation, you disappear if you aren’t always contributing.
(Nicholas Carr on Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 167, on how social media affects our brains and our relationships).
I have never before seen anything like that dark blue band running from west-southwest to East-northeast as two fronts collide
Finished Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. 📚
Reading George Eliot, Middlemarch. 📚
Spring cleaning a little early. Dropped 20%+ of my Substack subscriptions. Most were “Meh.” One has become offensive.
Oh, my! More Boomer Music! Judy Collins will be swinging through My Fair City November 1 on her farewell tour!
A week ago, I would not even have picked Purdue to get to the Big 10 final. After a really crappy regular season end, they just handed Michigan its second loss of the year, winning the Big 10 Championship - decisively. I smelled a win at halftime, but not by this margin.
Our federal judges are longsuffering, but this one has run out of mercy: “If the Defendants Continue the Practice, It Will Not End Well for Them”.
Protestantism rose with the printing press and fell with immersivity. It inhabited one specific form of literacy: in a world where people can no longer read—with attention and depth—you can only have post-Protestants. That there are Christianities focused again on a single form of literacy does not make them Protestant, if the single form is different. It does not make them Catholic either, of course—that is, it makes them bad Catholics.
Maybe the most provocative lines in Ross McCullough, The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster. Still processing it.
If you’re lucky, you learn something new every day. Sometimes, that something is the “Aha! moment” of connecting dots.
I already knew that Psalms were once identified by their opening lines, which invoked the whole Psalm. So My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me? may not mean what I thought.
My wife is a walking barometer - mood, joint pain, etc. I didn’t understand.
I woke today, in a March thunderstorm, with some of my worst-ever joint pain (though I’m pretty sure that “worst-ever” is at most a 2 or 3 on a 10-point scale; but it’s worst in the thumb of my dominant hand).
I’m over the moon! Icons, icons, icons! We’ve waited a long time for them.
Okay, trivia question: who else (who grew up drinking commercial milk) remember the days when milk would taste a bit grassy for a while in the Spring?
More sunlight comes in springtime regardless of daylight saving time
Jeanine Santucci
USA TODAY
Why do I feed this beast that insults me so?
Reading Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. 📚
Last time I tried reading it, I quit about 20% of the way in because I felt like a voyeur spying on a family quarrel. I think my motivation is sufficiently different now.
Per Ted Gioia, Spotify is filling up with terrible slop impersonations of jazz greats and AI illustrations with stuff like white guy and a guy with three hands playing upright bass and sax at the same time.
To the thesis of @eastbrad that Protestantism is dead, Ross McCullough adds an indictment of immersivity-over-literacy for the killing.
I love playing with ideas, and this gives me a new toy.
Orthocardia
Put simply, if the primary American divide is between right and left, then [Texas Democrat U.S. Senate nominee James] Talarico isn’t that interesting. There’s a long history of progressive religious activism in the United States, just as there is a long history of conservative religious activism. White evangelicals might be overwhelmingly Republican, but American Christians are remarkably diverse politically, and we’ve been arguing with one another for a long time.
Yet if the primary American divide is between decent and indecent, then the equation changes. Talarico shines.
Or, to put it another way, Talarico is one of the few openly Christian politicians in the United States who acts like a Christian, and by acting like a Christian he reveals a profound contrast with so many members of the MAGA Christian movement that’s dominated American political life for 10 years.
…
It does really matter whether a politician is pro-life or pro-choice, but there is no spiritual or political scenario where you can abandon Christian virtue for the sake of the alleged greater good, and if a Christian politician abandons Christian virtue, then Christian believers should abandon him or her.
David French, James Talarico Is a Christian X-Ray (shared link because there’s a lot more stuff worth considering)
Well this seems kinda important, doesn’t it? Something New Is Happening in Lebanon - The Atlantic. The something new is Lebanon cracking down on Hezbollah, apparently for real.