If you’ve been smitten by Aaron Renn’s positive world, neutral world, negative world taxonomy (I was only impressed, not smitten), I strongly recommend this as a corrective: What Happened When My Church Encountered Negative World.

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” (St. Clive the New Academic)

Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven

‘Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names—Achilles’ wrath and Coriolanus’ grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride.’

(C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce)

Reading the late Tom Howard’s Chance or the Dance. 📚Jarringly, the Foreword to this edition was by Eric Metaxas, writing in 2017 on the brink of his descent into Election Denialism and hectoring as faux-Christian Nazi collaborators anyone who won’t descend with him.

I’m now officially not reading Septology any more. Not to say I finished it, mind you. 📚

I didn’t hate it. I think I understood what the author was doing. But I didn’t want to spend weeks and weeks doing it with him.

Matthew B. Crawford, Why the meritocracy is not viewed as a legitimate ruling class. This one merits re-reading. (It’s a Substack and may not be public).

I’m now officially reading Septology by Jon Fosse. 📚Probably won’t start tonight, though.

The founders of Poems Ancient and Modern are Joseph Bottum, a writer living in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Sally Thomas, in the Western Piedmont of North Carolina. Acutely sensitive to copyright (violated by far too many online postings), we will be limiting ourselves to works that are in the public domain (currently those from before 1929)

Here We Stand - Poems Ancient and Modern

Despite my schadenfreude, I was troubled by the $83.3 million libel verdict against you-know-who. That’s an implausible amount of harm.

Well, maybe they were burying this key tidbit deeper in the stories than I read: $65 million is punitive damages, not compensatory.

Well this is a first: the Readwise engine appears to be down. I can’t see my daily highlights or go mining highlights from some of my favorite books.

I recall how, decades ago, I was having trouble figuring out what this “hyperlink” thing was and what was it good for. And 36 years ago, I did the same thing with the idea of an office network (went to a tech show and saw all this Novell stuff).

#SlowLearner

I had never even heard of Fred Chappell, Admired but Unsung Writer of the South until his obituary. Naming him in context of Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O’Connor piques my interest, but will it earn him a place on my preposterous list of books to read?

“He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower,” the Anglican Ralph Inge remarked ….

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

After reading about all the caffeine in energy drinks and Panera’s “Charged Lemonade,” I’m feeling fine about my consumption of dark-roast black coffee, sans cream or sugar.

Jack of All Trades - by Steve Robinson. I thought of @patrickrhone when I read this.

I don’t always share my “big (WordPress) blog,” but I’m fairly pleased with *Conservatisms *– Tipsy Teetotaler ن.

Finished Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone. 📚

I just re-read Abigail Shrier’s Three New Year’s Resolutions for Americans. Glad I did. She turns her critical gaze toward both left and right.

I feel affirmed.

Most of the Amicus briefs in Trump v. Anderson (the Colorado case kicking DJT off the ballot) concur with me that, maybe counter-intuitively, the president is not an “officer of the United States” as intended by the constitutional proviso at issue.

Beat him in November.

Very much enjoying the podcast documentary series The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.

It was fascinating and instructive to learn of the fallings-out among the New Atheists when they tried to offer something more humane than “there is no God” (see episode 2: Elevatorgate).

Do you know, my child …

I’ll be posting this as part of my Sunday WordPress blog, but I don’t always link to it here:

Do you know, my child, why the clouds are closed when the fields are thirsty for rain, and why they open, when the fields have no desire for rain?
Nature has been confused by the wickedness of men, and has abandoned its order.
Do you know, my child, why the fields produce heavy fruit in the springtime, and yield a barren harvest in the summer?
Because the daughters of men have hated the fruit of their womb, and kill it while it is still in blossom.
Do you know, my child, why the springs have gone dry, and why the fruits of the earth no longer have the sweetness that they used to have?
Because of the sin of man, from which infirmity has invaded all of nature.
Do you know, my child, why a victorious nation suffers defeats as a result of its own disunity and discord, and eats bread made bitter by tears and malice?
Because it conquered the bloodthirsty enemies around it-self, but failed to conquer those within itself.
Do you know, my child, how a mother can feed her children without nourishing them?
By not singing a song of love to them while nursing them, but a song of hatred towards a neighbor.
Do you know, my child, why people have become ugly and have lost the beauty of their ancestors?
Because they have cast away the image of God, which fashions the beauty of that image out of the soul within, and removes the mask of earth.
Do you know, my child, why diseases and dreadful epidemics have multiplied?
Because men have begun to look upon good health as an abduction of nature and not as a gift from God. And what is abducted with difficulty must with double difficulty be protected.
Do you know, my child, why people fight over earthly territory, and are not ashamed to be on the same level as moles?
Because the world has sprouted through their heart, and their eyes see only what is growing in the heart; and because, my child, their sin has made them too weak to struggle for heaven.
Do not cry, my child, the Lord will soon return and set everything right.

(St. Nikolai Velimirovich, Prayers by the Lake, XXXIX)

Are there counterparts on the Left?

Encountered today in what passes for a conservative magazine today:

“Adolescents with very conservative parents are 16 to 17 percentage points more likely to be in good or excellent mental health compared to their peers with very liberal parents.” So concludes Jonathan Rothwell in a new study, “Parenting is the Key to Adolescent Mental Health,” sponsored by the Institute for Family Studies and Gallup. The crucial factor contributing to good mental health is clear discipline combined with parental love. Children need a warm authoritarian family culture. The problem among progressive parents is not affection. Liberal parents manifest parental love at only slightly lower levels than conservative parents. (The survey asked for responses, among other things, to the statement, “I hug or kiss my child every day.”) But liberals are significantly less likely to impose discipline than are parents who identify as conservative. (This assessment is based on responses to statements such as “I find it difficult to discipline my child” and “My child often gets their [sic] way when we have a conflict.”) Put simply, the liberal ideal of an affectionate permissive family culture is bad for children, whereas the old-fashioned view of authority is good.

And not just for children. In the twentieth century, the rise of the permissive family culture correlated with anxieties about “adolescent rebellion,” the purported cause of troubled relations between parents and teenage kids. Rothwell notes that survey data show that conservative parents enjoy the strongest relations with their adolescent children, while liberals suffer the worst. It’s interesting to note that parents who are “very liberal” as opposed to “liberal” have nearly as good relations with their adolescent children as do conservatives. In my estimation, this positive outcome stems from the fact that “very liberal” means adherence to doctrinaire progressivism, which has its own authoritarian character, as we see at universities. Ironically, the key to successful parenting by the “very liberal” is the progressive taboo: authority.

R. R. Reno, First Things

Would I be correct in assuming that the Left has equivalent studies extolling the scientifically verifiable superiority of its tribes?

If you act with integrity but do so quietly, if you make a difficult choice and let it stay difficult, if you do the moral thing and no one’s around to celebrate you for it, did you ever really act at all?

Freddie deBoer on the performative departures from Substack. He’s really on fire.

Very glad I forewent the Eighth Day Symposium in Wichita this weekend, from which I would be trying to return by air today had I gone.

Shared with me:

My main blog is the Tipsy Teetotaler, http://intellectualoid.com.