I am experiencing some joyful sorrow.

Warren Farha, founder and owner of the greatest Christian bookstore in America, died Wednesday. He had worried about business succession, none of his children being interested in forsaking their chosen course in life.

I had the perfect answer, but for a task so life-changing, it seemed to me that the Holy Spirit was going to need to seal the deal. When I first blogged about Warren’s death, I just noted that “There is a fine group of thoughtful and voracious Christian readers in Wichita, organized loosely around the Eighth Day Institute, several of whom would be plausible proprietors of maybe the greatest Christian bookstore in the World.”

But I had someone particular in mind, a quiet young poet with other attributes best not shared even in this discreet forum. And today, I got email from Eighth Day Books, signed by “Joshua Alan Sturgill & Eighth Day Books staff.”

Joshua was my “perfect answer”! My heart is full!

You can read the New York Times story on Warren and the store at this gift link.

Free associating: During an administration a few decades ago, I put a bumper sticker on our car that said “My contempt with the current administration cannot be expressed here.” Then it became my wife’s car as I got something else.

She was irate when I presumed to remove the sticker from her car.

The Pennsylvania Constitution protects the right to earn an honest living free of unreasonable regulations. Who knew?

The Institute for Justice is checking its teeth.

This morning’s Epistle reading (Acts 20:7-12) reminds me that Christianity Today used to have a fortnightly potpourri column, anonymous if memory serves, titled Eutychus and His Kin - sort of like First Things’ While We’re At It in spirit.

“Remind me of the pros and cons on X” (where X is fairly well-defined and the context of the question is given as well) has proven a fairly productive question to AI chatbots.

If you think that’s lazy, well life is too short to “do your own research” on every little thing.

USPS has gone to electric delivery vans on my route. I just saw my first big, new, unmarked (?!) electric Amazon van.

The Great Divorce is probably the most consequential book in my life, Bible aside.

It made me ask “what are you doing to avoid becoming one who refuses Heaven’s invitation?” I saw no answer in traditions that said “you don’t need to do *any*thing.” Surely ego must be mortified!

Steven Willing Reflects on Pride in The Great Divorce

I had too many gift links for this late in the month, so I share this unusual column from Ross Douthat, superficially about sports fandom. But read between the lines, too.

Avoiding the sun for medical reasons for another day. It’s been a long time since I listened to a Bill Evans mix as I worked on computer reading. 🎵

A fitting companion to Ozymandias, albeit more light-hearted about the whole sorry affair.

The late Barney Frank made me crazy 40 years ago, but he towers over today’s typical Congressman, who hires more media mavens than legislative assistants.

I hope Democrats heed some of his last advice.

It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that I’m a bit obsessive about a nearby primary election, but I think I’ve written something worth sharing: MAGA Influence in Indiana Elections: A Case Study – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

The Longest Internet Blackout in History Is Crippling Iran’s Economy - WSJ

via John Ellis News Items (paywalled).

The bigger news, illustrated by Open AI’s disproving “Paul Erdős’ planar unit distance conjecture,” is that Artificial Superintelligence has arrived: “AI models … capable of having original ingenious ideas, and then carrying them out to fruition.”

Ellis News is a no ephemera zone, chock-full of stuff that maybe incites just a bit too much chin-scratching for “popular” media.

I tend to suffer software FOMO, but the latest in my periodic looks at the very popular Notion software re-confirms that it would be more a geeky hobby for me than a real tool.

I like Kanban in theory (one of Notion’s powers) but there are simpler ways for me to organize – I think.

Indiana doesn’t register by party, so I thought one could take whichever primary ballot one wished.

Not so.

There are byzantine rules to prohibit that, including scrutiny of your past primary ballots and your subjective intentions about voting in the upcoming general election. But there is no practical way to check those in real time on election day.

So the loser in Indiana’s nationally-famous 3-vote-margin State Senate race (*i.e., the MAGA challenger) is alleging 14 illegal crossover votes, and trying to take depositions of all of them as part of her “recount.” Some of them shot off their mouths on social media about crossing over; I can just about guaranty that no Democrats crossed over to vote for the loser.

But what’s so wrong about crossing over to assure that the less bad opponent wins the other tribe’s primary?

I reject the MAGA “solution” of registering by party. That would potentially disenfranchise me in primary elections, where I continue pulling Republican ballots partly to vote for the few remaining non-ideological positions (County Clerk, for instance) and for the lesser evils in other races.

I’m generally skeptical of stories about how it takes a bajillion dollars to raise a child, but my son is currently replacing all four tires on his car after one year. “I’m quite certain I didn’t scrub all the useful tread off brand new tires in 13 months.”

In dark times, I’m glad I’ve got a subscription to a comics aggregator. Some rueful chuckles at political folly, some groaner wordplay from Frank & Ernest, and usually some pleasant surprises.

Minor epiphany: I so detest Trump that I reflexively admire and support any Republican who he targets for revenge, despise his chosen alternative.

That is foolish. Both Bill Cassidy and Thomas Massie were candidates I’d struggle to support but for the targets Trump painted on their backs.

Our leaders are not like us: they play by their own rules.

Early War Goal Was to Install Hard Line Former President as Iran’s Leader - The New York Times

The dream is recurrent, and yes
the dream can leave me weeping,
waking with a start, confused,
and pressing my wet face hard
into the pillow. That is to say
the dream is very bitter.

The scenes are various, the gist
unchanging: my father returns,
and we all are at once elated
that his death was apparently
an error, that he had simply
been away, a visit to the shore.

Then, increasingly, I grow
uneasy about how deeply
he has changed. He is both frail
and distracted (or it could be
that he withholds some matter
habiting his mind), and none of us

dares speak, neither of his death nor
of his sudden, startling return.
We share other confusions as well:
He has arrived in the camper truck
he drove when I was a boy, but my wife
and children are also here to greet him,

even my son, whom he has never met.
Often, in the dream, I am the one
who first suspects he cannot stay.
I am the one who sees but cannot say
his visit will be brief. And just
as I suspected, as I feared, I wake.

(Cairns, Scott. Idiot Psalms: New Poems (Paraclete Poetry) (pp. 18-19). (Function). Kindle Edition.)

The morning news smacked me in the face with the “highly unusual agreement” of between Donald Trump, an aggrieved person, against the IRS, now in Trump’s “unitary executive” control. I was speechless.

Thank goodness there are cartoons.

What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?

If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are.

W. Aaron Vandiver, Trump and the Furies of Empire (Front Porch Republic)

This hit me harder, again and again, than anything I’ve read in a long while on the political state of the world. It’s chock-full of quotable stuff, but the quote above could be an epigraph.

I began saying almost a decade ago that “Trump v. Clinton has God’s judgment written all over it.” I wasn’t wrong, but if you prefer “furies” or “Karma incarnate,” well you do you. If you think these days are our nadir, remember that Trump is more the eventuality than the cause of our flaws.

Stumbled Upon this sly dig from almost ten years ago

About some things, I have no FOMO: “Rededicate 250” Held on National Mall Yesterday.

In The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg surveyed television shows inspired by a classic William Golding novel: “It’s easy to recognize that ‘The White Lotus’ has always been ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with turndown service.” (Via Frank Bruni)

Never watched it, but that sounds spot-on from the reviews.