I think it was 2005 when Ross Douthat first said “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” This is apropos of nothing except that I ran across this prescient quip just now.

I have a browser plug-in to download web pages in markdown, with key metadata in a header. Whoever tags articles at the Atlantic must be one of the stupidest humans on the face of this earth. Tags are seemingly arbitrary snippets.

I have finally internalized the lesson that the press is too biased to merit reliance. All of them.

So how is one to know what’s going on in the world? Curate the least unreliable?

Next lesson: we’re not meant to know what’s going on far, far from kith and kin.

A classical school teacher talks with his 12-year-old daughter about rich cosmopolitans.

Watched Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. 🎥 I’m becoming part of his fan club.

Basic Writings of Nietzsche status report. On the one hand, if I force myself to finish I can say I’ve read some Nietzsche. On the other hand, if I force myself to finish, I will lose many hours that I’ll never see again on a task neither pleasing nor edifying. Moving on. 📚

A long podcast that I enjoyed very much (and I probably should listen to the first 40 minutes again, making notes this time). Wesley Yang On The Successor Ideology - by Andrew Sullivan - The Weekly Dish

Heaven help me! At age 72, I’ve never deliberately (only coincidentially, second-hand) read any Nietzsche, but I’m increasingly struck by how brilliant and important he was. So here goes: Basic Writings of Nietzsche. 📚

Finished Wendell Berry’s Nathan Coulter. 📚

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill from Christianity Today has been riveting thus far. But dare the flagship publication of a movement of mostly independent churches ultimately indict Mark Driscoll’s D.I.Y. independence itself as a major cause of the spiritual damage?

Chattering class gotta chatter.

This story on “D.I.Y. Christianity” reads as if it was written by Rip Van Winkle.

There is nothing whatsoever new in American “Christianity” being idiosyncratic, individualistic, and almost reflexively opposed to any authoritative voice.

Finished Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water. 📚 Classic.

Not everything needs to be instrumental — especially when the “good” instrumentally served is making more stuff, or doing more stuff at work. Stop Treating Leisure as a Productivity Hack ( The Atlantic)

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates. 📚 My brain needed a vacation after my last very long, dense read.

There’s a self-referential culture war over who started the culture wars. I never should have allowed myself to go down the rabbit-hole. I need no other explanation than this: Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.

I’m in the very early stages of planning a solo trip (my wife resists foreign travel) to Paris in the Fall. I was there in June 1968 and May 2018. This time, it’s going to be extra fun because my “must see” bucket list got filled in 2018.

Finished, after 29 days, Iaia McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary 📚 Highly, highly recommended with the caveat that the first half of the book is foundational, requires close attention, and that my ebook’s estimate of 25.5 hours of reading time was way too low.

I think the Heinekan ad playing during Euro 2020 (the one with That’s Life as the soundtrack) is one of the cleverest TV ads I’ve ever seen.

Just about the only thing I find cool about billionaires racing each other to “space” is that Purdue-trained astronauts — women, actually — are one-third of the crew doing the technical astronauting for Richard Branson.

The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens. Hauerwas is one of a handful of Protestants who can still stir my Orthodox soul.

As I approached the Orthodox Church almost 25 year ago, I was astonished at how different it was in “feel” from anything I’d previously encountered. Timothy (Now Bishop Kallistos) Ware provides a glimpse:

Orthodox feel thoroughly at home in the language of the great Latin hymn by Venantius Fortunatus (530 – 609), Pange lingua, which hails the Cross as an emblem of victory: Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle, Sing the ending of the fray; Now above the Cross, our trophy, Sound the loud triumphal lay: Tell how Christ, the world’s redeemer, As a victim won the day. They feel equally at home in that other hymn by Fortunatus, Vexilla regis: Fulfilled is all that David told In true prophetic song of old: Among the nations God, said he, Hath reigned and triumphed from the Tree. But Orthodox feel less happy about compositions of the later Middle Ages such as Stabat Mater: For His people’s sins, in anguish, There she saw the victim languish, Bleed in torments, bleed and die: Saw the Lord’s anointed taken; Saw her Child in death forsaken; Heard His last expiring cry.

The Orthodox Church

Expounding that glimpse is above my pay grade, but I’m pretty confident that it reflects a non-Anselmian view of atonement.

Murder & mayhem suddenly dominating my local TV news. May I remember that when I’m tempted to mock the feather-lightness of said TV news on most days.

‘The President’s Daughter,’ by BIll Clinton and James Patterson book review - The Washington Post

What (some) American Orthodox are doing for the 4th of July – Tipsy Teetotaler ن

Dear Sam’s Club:

Please re-stock Morningstar Farms Chipotle Black Bean Burgers.

If I want hamburger, I’ll eat hamburger, not some imitation hamburger engineered in a lab and built in a factory. If I don’t want hamburger, I don’t want an imitation, either.

Thank you.

Buddhism, I’ve found, is how to live in Hell without becoming a devil. The competent man who guards his thoughts and emotions and stays calm and studies differential equations and provides for those around him financially even while living among very unhappy and unhealthy people—that is how the Aristocracy of the Competent is formed. When the Competent beta males rise to the top, that is when we will have a Renaissance.

James Howard Kunstler, Living in the Long Emergency.

I had completely forgotten ever having read this. Thanks, Readwise!