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.
I have a Google alert set for Yuval Levin, one of the calmest and most thoughtful observers of our public life. Who knew that there’s also a basketball player with the same name, playing for the Purdue University - Fort Wayne Mastadons (and that he keeps popping in in obscure sports stories)?
It’s no good to go chasing after meaning as an abstraction; meaning comes in the doing of things … There are robbers stealing the horses of your imagination: Kick them out. This book has been full of hints as to how to do that. If I’m too explicit you will be left with a pamphlet not a story.
Finished Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild. 📚
Quote provided especially for @mwerickson, who wanted to know my impression (which is favorable): the quote is the best summary of the book, by Shaw himself.
Transport-as-a-Service will offer transportation four to ten times cheaper per mile than buying a new car and two to four times cheaper than operating an existing vehicle in 2021. (Source: rethinkx.com)
Long-time pet peeve: What the heck does “two to four times cheaper” mean?
Pet peeve waiting in the wings: broadcast journalists’ “less people” instead of “fewer people.” I’m expecting a hybrid “two to four times less people.”
Whoever would have thought that the Supreme Court’s “Birthright Citizenship” case might turn on the law’s treatment of foundlings?
Provocative but sober and dead serious: Candace Owens must be excommunicated — for the sake of her soul.
I’ve got an RSS feed for old Far Side cartoons. I couldn’t stop laughing at this one today.
Today’s Sunday reflections: Sunday, March 1 – Tipsy Teetotaler ن
I left an online newspaper to check micro.blog.
I love the sanity of this place, it’s ability to ignore most of the “news” that none of us can do anything about outside the polling place.
In my “big blog,” the first two items may be of special interest in understanding what SCOTUS did last Friday and what it’s up to more generally: February 25, 2026. And the second item comes from a source I rarely like, but she caught something nobody else did.
