Currently reading: The invention of nature by Andrea Wulf 📚
I guess Congressman Chip Roy was technically engaged in a reductio ad absurdum, but it seems wrong to call it that when the beginning premise is already absurd.
Maybe it was tu quoque?
Get to know the pernicious variant of propaganda we’re currently experiencing: “conspiracy bootstrapping.” Jonathan Rauch, The Made-Up Conspiracy - Persuasion
Asbury defended episcopacy by … [f]ollowing Wesley’s lead, … linking [his authority] directly to the apostolic age, transcending the corruptions of the intervening centuries.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.
This strikes me as patent crazy talk.
By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
“You can refute Hegel,” said W. B. Yeats, “but not … the Song of Sixpence.”
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
It has been a long time since I devoured a book as I devoured The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch 📚. I fear that invincibly ignorant populist rabble-rousing, and receptive responses, are as American as apple pie, and that Trump may be mere prologue.
How many times will these bozos from my former party cite public doubts about the election — doubts that they and their Orange leader stirred up, as why they deserve another bite at the apple?
If it was just a matter of who has the cooler helmets, this Rose Bowl would be in the bag for Notre Dame. Unfortunately, they’re playing Alabama.
Finished: A Concise History of the Arabs [Mar 27, 2014] McHugo, John by Mchugo; starting The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch 📚
I had stopped following the Bee, but someone else flagged a good one: 2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History | The Babylon Bee
Boston Dynamics made a video: Our whole crew got together to celebrate the start of what we hope will be a happier year. Happy New Year from all of us at Boston Dynamics.
I’m not ready yet to give up the limbs God gave me, but this is pretty amazing.
I’m probably going to have to settle for watching a young Purdue men’s basketball team develop toward next year. The Big10 had 9 teams in the top 25, and it’s going to be a long season when even Northwestern can come out and lead Iowa early on.
Seen and loved at the recent Jericho March:
I really must read Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
As did Gollum, Trump practiced evil and self-absorption for decades. I don’t think he could stop now if he wanted to — I don’t think he could even want to if he wanted too.
Ecclesiastes 12:1 (KJV) seems apt.
Seeing this reminds me that my Unsubscribe request to the Trump forces apparently has been honored.
A Poem by Marie Howe: What the Living Do - The Atlantic.
Published in 1994, I somehow missed it until yesterday. To my eyes, a splendid example of how poetry can say things prose cannot say, or can say barely and then only verbosely.
Learning to be human
A friend of mine is a well-known economist at a leading American university. He’s also the gatekeeper for an elite doctoral program in his field. Asked once what he valued most in candidates for his program, he said, “an undergraduate degree in Classics.” Homer and Virgil, of course, have very little to do with things like debt-deflation theory. But my friend’s reasoning is, in fact, quite shrewd. Since economics is a human (i.e., social) science, its practitioners should first know how to be actual human beings before learning their specialized skills. A formation in the classics or any of the other humanities is an immersion in beauty and knowledge. It has no utility other than enlarging the soul. But that achievement—the ennobling of a soul, the enlarging of the human spirit to revere the heritage of human excellence and to love things outside itself—is something no technical skill can accomplish.
Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land 📚
It is hard to be a man or woman for others in culture that is dominated by us versus them.
Emma Green, The American ‘way of life’ is unsustainable for so many. Is it time to build radical forms of community? (America Magazine)
Titans at Green Bay with snow. This is the way God intended late-season football to be played. The score is gratifying, too, as I generally root for old “Black and Blue Division” teams.
From the Diary of Anne Frank
All college students are being asked to sign an official statement to the effect that they “sympathize with the Germans and approve of the New Order.” Eighty percent have decided to obey the dictates of their conscience, but the penalty will be severe.
Severe, but nowhere near as bad as getting mean-Tweeted or primaried, right?
How bad has 2020 been? I’ve resorted to watching sportsball again - and enjoying it, even when it’s not Purdue.
The invisible God painted his own portrait on the canvas of the incarnation.
Father Patrick Henry Reardon, The Visible Revelation of the Father
Cooling my jets waiting to sing the 11:15 Matins of Nativity followed with a Midnight Liturgy. Christ is born!
My former party
Republicans were deluding themselves if they thought they could avoid this fight with [Trump]. “It’s the natural progression of the Faustian bargain,” GOP consultant Rob Stutzman said. “You can’t just break up with the devil over text.”