A Newsletter of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville

In this episode of our podcast, we are pleased to bring you audio of a lecture delivered on Tuesday, April 12th by our director, Dr. Richard Horner. Here is how Dr. Horner described the talk:Perhaps no book in the Hebrew Bible has been more difficult to interpret and translate than the book of Ecclesiastes. To what reality does the famous opening phrase point? Exactly what question is the author trying to address? What answers does he give? What wisdom does this book have to offer to us today for how to live well in a broken and troubled but wondrous world?This was no ordinary talk at the Study Center. It was Dr. Horner's final lecture after more than twenty years as the Center's executive director. The evening began with a full house for reception honoring Dr. Horner. Also, as you will hear in the recording, Dr. Horner's lecture was preceded by some brief remarks from Dr. Jay Lynch, the founder, along with his wife Laura, of the center and the president of the Center's board, paying tribute to Dr. Horner's service and God's faithfulness.You can download a PDF of Dr. Horner's handout for the talk here: “Reading Ecclesiastes.” Please feel free to share this talk or any other of our other podcast episodes with anyone you think would be interested.During the summer months, the podcast will be mostly on hiatus, but we will resume in the fall with more interviews and audio from study center events. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this episode of our podcast, we are pleased to bring you audio of a lecture delivered on Tuesday, March 29th by our director, Dr. Richard Horner. Here is how Dr. Horner described the talk: Why does Matthew tell the story of Jesus differently from Mark and Luke? Perhaps he is confused or mistaken, but if not, then what is he doing? Come join us for a brief exploration of this problem, for a glimpse of how the four gospels relate to each other, and for a taste of what we've been offering in “Reading the Gospels” over the past twenty years.Next week, you can look for audio of Dr. Horner's final lecture as executive director, “The Wisdom of Qoheleth: Ecclesiastes as a Meditation on Life in a Troubled World.”Please feel free to share this talk or any other of our other podcast episodes with anyone you think would be interested. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On March 17th, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Scott Hawley of Belmont University at the Study Center for a second talk titled “Taming Chaos: Generative Modeling As a Foil to Human Creativity.”Dr. Hawley is a Professor of Physics at Belmont, and his research interests include machine learning, neural networks, and the ethics of A.I. Last week, we posted his talk on machine learning and classification. Today, we are glad to post his reflections on generative models and creativity. Here is how Dr. Hawley described the talk: “We did it. We finally killed art.” This tweet in the summer of 2021 by Ryan Murdock summarized the feeding frenzy of worldwide activity in generative ‘A.I.'-based artwork since he first paired text prompts with image-generating software last January. The hard-won styles of seasoned masters could be appropriated with little more than a suffix of “in the style of [....].”  Sophisticated generative models of visual art have become increasingly common, with ever-higher qualities of output and speed of execution. Yet these exist along the continuum of the timeline of generative art stretching back centuries. The interplay between randomness and the intentionality of the artist is at the heart of disputes over whether such products constitute artwork and to what extent computational methods mimic or diverge from human creativity. In this talk, we provide a survey of historical and cutting-edge generative art methods, conversations, and opportunities presented by generative models used by humans in the creation of visual, textual, and auditory artistic artifacts.During the talk, Dr. Hawley made extensive use of slides and you can view those here while you listen. You can also follow Dr. Hawley on Twitter @drscotthawley.And finally, here is a link to a recent short essay by Dr. Hawley at A.I. Theology, “Human Mercy Is The Antidote To AI-Driven Bureaucracy.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On March 17th, we had the pleasure of hosting Dr. Scott Hawley of Belmont University at the Study Center for a talk titled “Curves and Categories: Machine Learning, AI, and the Nature of Classification.” Dr. Hawley is a Professor of Physics at Belmont, and his research interests include machine learning, neural networks, and the ethics of A.I. He joined us to explore the fascinating and complex nature of classification and what it reveals about intelligence, human and machine. “Machine learning classification techniques,” Dr. Hawley explained, are increasingly applied to fields as diverse as biology, astronomy, the humanities, law, medicine, the entertainment industry, criminal justice, library science, aesthetics, robotics, and more, in an effort to automate human decision-making on massive scales. The problematic socio-political ramifications of this enterprise are becoming increasingly evident, and merit a closer examination of the philosophies and methods of classification from their origins in antiquity up to present large-scale A.I. systems.During the talk, Dr. Hawley made extensive use of slides and you can view those here while you listen. You can also follow Dr. Hawley on Twitter @drscotthawley. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

Dr. Benjamin Lipscomb is professor of philosophy specializing in contemporary ethical theory at Houghton College. He is the author of The Women Are Up To Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics, which was published in November 2021. Mike Sacasas had the pleasure of talking to Prof. Lipscomb about his book, these four remarkable philosophers, the story of ethics in the 20th century, C. S. Lewis's famous debate with Anscombe, and much else. We trust you'll enjoy the conversation. Below are a few of the titles mentioned during the interview. Mary Midgley: Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature Wickedness The Myths We Live By Elizabeth Anscombe: “Modern Moral Philosophy” Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 3Iris Murdoch: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature The Sovereignty of the Good Philippa Foote: Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine dominating the headlines and the specter of nuclear conflict darkening our imagination, we're glad to bring you a conversation with Dr. Jonathan Askonas, associate professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and an expert in Russian-American military affairs. The conversation covers a lot of ground, beginning with a discussion of the origins of the present crisis and going on to consider the religious dimensions of the Russian nuclear service and the role the internet plays in modern warfare. During the discussion of nuclear warfare, Dr. Askonas referred to Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy by Prof. Dmitry Adamsky. You can read a book review round table moderated by Dr. Askonas here. The day after I interviewed Dr. Askonas, Prof. Adamsky published a commentary on the present situation at Foreign Affairs: “Russia's Menacing Mix of Religion and Nuclear Weapons.” During the final minutes of the conversation, we also discuss the work of the late French theorist, Paul Virilio, specifically The Administration of Fear. We hope you find this conversation helpful and illuminating. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

It was my pleasure to speak with Dr. Alan Noble about his recently published book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World. Dr. Noble is Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and the founder and former editor of Christ and Pop Culture. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vox, Buzzfeed, First Things, Christianity Today, and The Gospel Coalition. Noble's first book, Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age, likewise explored the contours of faith and faithfulness in our contemporary cultural milieu. In our conversation, we discuss some of the major themes of You Are Not Your Own, including how modern society undermines the possibility of human flourishing, the consequences of the relentless pursuit of efficiency, and alternative ways of imagining the good life grounded in our belonging to God. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Also, if you've not done so already, please check out the terrific program we've put together this spring at the Study Center. Best, Mike SacasasAssociate Director This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

The Christian Study Center hosted a kick-off event to launch the spring semester this week, and as part of the event Dr. Richard Horner, our executive director, presented a talk titled, “Why Pascal?—One More Time.” Audio of that talk and an engaging Q/A session that followed is included here. The talk explored the continuing relevance of the thought of Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth century French philosopher and mathematician, who has played a critical role in Dr. Horner's own thinking about the nature of the modern world. This talk also sets up the reading group Dr. Horner will be leading throughout the semester beginning next Friday, February 4th at noon. The group, titled “Pascal and His Heirs,” will meet at the study center and the readings will come from the writings of Pascal, Flannery O'Connor, Leszek Kolakowski, and Merold Westphal. Subscribers to this newsletter should note that our plan is to continue to use this platform to distribute audio from our program, including two other lectures Dr. Horner will be giving this semester, as well as occasional interviews with guest scholars.For more information about our program this semester be sure to visit our website. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In late October, the study center hosted an event for local clergy and ministry leaders. The theme of the event was Rest: What It Is and How to Find It. Even before the pandemic, it was clear that burnout was a widely distributed symptom of a restless culture. After the experience of the past year and a half, it was the all the more clear that we needed to rethink how we are ordering our lives. It was important, too, to think of rest not only as something we do on occasion to renew bodies, but rather as a way of being that we carried into all the facets of our lives. Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas both contributed to the teaching and discussion, which sought to unpack the various sources of our exhaustion, physical and otherwise. In the audio included with this installment, you can listen to a 40-minute clip from the morning session during which Mike explored the assumptions embedded in our economic and technological structures undermining our pursuit of rest and satisfaction. We hope you find the discussion edifying. Below you can read a few of the sources that focused our discussion. “‘Branding' is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes:  a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no ‘off the clock' when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”  — Anne Helen Petersen, “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” “The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.” — Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality “Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, it is not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation. It is, in the first place, an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul.” — Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture “There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.” — Abraham Heschel, The Sabbath  This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

On September, 14th, the Christian Study Center hosted a kick-off event to launch the fall semester. As part of the event, Dr. Richard Horner, our executive director, presented a talk titled, “What Frames What?—One More Time.” The talk revisits a critical diagnostic question, which Dr. Horner has been ask for nearly two decades. Through this question Dr. Horner explores the defining features of modernity and the point to which they have now brought us. It is an exploration not so much of post-modern culture, but of modern culture fully realized. This talk also sets up a reading group Dr. Horner will be leading throughout the semester beginning this Friday, September 24th. The group will meet every other week at noon at the study center and will read some of the key thinkers that have shaped Dr. Horner's understanding of the modern world. This Friday the group will be discussing the first four sections of Descartes's Discourse on Method.Subscribers to this newsletter should note that our plan is to continue to use this platform to distribute occasional audio, like this lecture, and also to publish a monthly installment with an essay, links, and information about the study center. For more information about our program this semester be sure to visit our website. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

During the summer months the newsletter will be mostly on hiatus, but we will be posting a series of interviews with scholars and writers whose work we believe will be of interest to our listeners. In this installment, I'm delighted to share my conversation with Grace Olmstead. Grace is a journalist and writer whose work focusing on farming and localism has appeared in the New York Times, the American Conservative, Christianity Today, and the Wall Street Journal. Most recently, she is the author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left. The book is part memoir, part history of an Idaho farming town, part reflection on place, community, and food. I hope this conversation entices you to pick up Uprooted for yourself. There's much that I learned through the book that we did not get the chance to touch on during our conversation. Grace is also the author of a monthly newsletter, Granola, to which you can subscribe here. During our conversation, Grace referenced two recent papal encyclicals. You can find them here: Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti. She also mentioned the work of Norman Wirzba, professor of theology and ethics at Duke University. Naturally, the work of Wendell Berry was also pertinent to Grace's work and our conversation. Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry's Sustainable Forms by Jeffrey Bilbro serves as a terrific introduction to Berry's work and vision. I hope you enjoy this conversation. You can look forward to others like it in the coming weeks.Peace,Michael SacasasAssociate Director This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This semester, our associate director, Michael Sacasas, gave three lectures on the thought of the 20th-century Christian scholar and social critic, Ivan Illich.The third lecture, “Reclaiming the Senses: Ivan Illich and the History of Perception,” was delivered as a Zoom webinar on Wednesday, March 24th. The audio of that lecture is included here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the tenth and penultimate session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

[Programming note: Over the past week, we encountered technical difficulties uploading audio files. All seems to be in order now, and we are resuming our regular posting with last week's classes.]This is the eighth and final session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Illich's interpretation of the relationship between Christianity and the modern world as presented in The Rivers North of the Future. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the ninth session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the seventh session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Illich's last book, In the Vineyard of the Text. This week's audio includes a time of Q&A. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the eighth session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the sixth session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Limits to Medicine and the art of suffering. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This semester, our associate director, Michael Sacasas, is delivering three lectures on the thought of the 20th-century Christian scholar and social critic, Ivan Illich.The second lecture, “Conspiratorial Friendship: Ivan Illich and the Politics of Conviviality,” was delivered as a Zoom webinar on Wednesday, March 3rd. The audio of that lecture is included here.Introduction: 00:00 - 02:25Lecture: 02:26 - 43:50Q&A: 43:51 - 01:01:36The third lecture, “Reclaiming the Senses: Perceiving the World with Ivan Illich,” will be presented on Wednesday, March 24rd at 8:00 p.m. (EST). Use the link below to register. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the seventh session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.” If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the fifth session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Tools for Conviviality.If you'd like to join the Tuesday afternoon class live on Zoom, please email Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.A number of unpleasant realities have been exposed by the troubles we have endured throughout the past year. Few of these have been as difficult to bear as the reminder, if we needed it, that the world we inhabit is ultimately beyond our ability to predict and to control. This may seem like a banal observation, but I suspect that many of us operate under the implicit assumption that we can and should try to control as much of our environment and our lives as possible. In fact, we might even believe that our happiness and flourishing depend precisely on our ability to bring ever more of the world under our control, even if we might not exactly put it to ourselves that way. However, it is almost certainly the case that acting on the basis of this assumption ultimately undermines both our happiness and our flourishing. If we do believe that our flourishing is directly correlated to our capacity to control our experience, we are merely reflecting one of modernity's core principles. The modern project, dating back at least to the 17th century, particularly in its techno-scientific dimensions, can be interpreted as a grand effort to tame nature and bring it under human control. And, of course, as C. S. Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man, the drive to control nature was eventually turned on humanity itself. More recently, digital technologies have made it possible to imagine that we can measure, quantify, and thus manage ever more of nature and human society than what the founders of the modern world dared to imagine. Indeed, through a host of personal tracking technologies, we have brought this impulse to bear on even the most mundane and intimate aspects of our bodily experience. Yet, it is also apparent that we are increasingly frustrated by a world that eludes our mastery, and one which, paradoxically, grows more unpredictable and uncontrollable despite (and perhaps because of) the panoply of sophisticated tools and systems we deploy to manage it.In his most recent work, a slim volume titled The Uncontrollability of the World, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explores the darkly paradoxical nature of the modern quest for control.The thesis of Rosa's little book is straightforward: “The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern' is the idea, the hope and desire, that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive.” “A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered,” Rosa adds, “would be a dead world.”Rosa's work is an effort to understand why we find it so frustrating and often disheartening to live in a world that often seems, at least for the more fortunate among us, to provide us with a remarkable variety of goods, services, and experiences. Or, as the writer Colin Horgan once put it, “a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.” As I read him, Rosa is suggesting that the fundamental problem is rooted in our orientation to the world, principally in the adversarial relationship that arises from an underlying desire to control, master, or otherwise manipulate the world. Because we strive to make the world controllable, Rosa believes we consequently “encounter the world as a ‘point of aggression' or as a series of points of aggression … as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit.” As a result, Rosa concludes, “the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us.” And, as a further consequence, “this leads to anxiety, frustration, anger and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.” What Rosa calls resonance is a way of relating to the world such that we are open to being affected by it, can respond to its ‘call,' and then both transform and be transformed by it. Consider, by way of example, something as prosaic as an encounter with another person. Such an encounter will be resonant only when we offer ourselves to the encounter in such a way that we can be affected or moved by the other person and when we, in turn, respond in kind to this call. As a result, such encounters transform both of the people involved. One key to such encounters, however, is a measure of uncontrollability. As some of us may know from experience, any effort to manufacture a “resonant” encounter with another person is almost certainly destined to fail. Similarly, if an object or a person were altogether subject to our control or manipulation, the experience of resonance would also fail to materialize. They would not call to us or be able to creatively respond to us. Indeed, Rosa argues, whatever is wholly within our control we experience as inert and mute. As a result, the farther we extend the imperative to control the world, the more the world will fail to resonate, the more it falls silent, leaving us feeling alienated from it. This particular observation recalls Simone Weil's observation in her profound analysis of the Iliad that “force” is “that x that turns anyone who is subjected to it into a thing.” Interestingly, Rosa, who otherwise develops his argument in strictly sociological language, nonetheless notes an analogy to religious insights. “Religious concepts such as grace or the gift of God,” Rosa writes, “suggest that accommodation cannot be earned, demanded, or compelled, but rather is rooted in an attitude of approachability to which the subject-as-recipient can contribute insofar as he or she must be receptive to God's gift or grace.” “In sociological terms,” he adds, “this means that resonance always has the character of a gift.” We cannot fabricate or manage the resonant encounter or experience—the encounter or experience that will speak to us deeply, satisfy us, enliven us, renew us, delight us. Such encounters and experience are, to borrow a line from Walker Percy, like “some dim, dazzling trick of grace.” In one of his Sabbath poems, Wendell Berry reminded us that “we live the given life, not the planned.” I can't think of a more pithy way of putting the matter. By the “given life,” of course, Berry does not mean what is implied by the phrase “that's a given,” something, that is, which is taken for granted. Rather, Berry means the gifted life, the life that is given to us. We are presented with a choice: we can receive the world as a gift or we can think of it merely as raw material subject to our managing, planning, predicting, and controlling. Naturally, the word “merely” is doing a lot of work in that last line. I am not arguing, and neither is Rosa, that there is no place for wise planning or the exercise of prudence in the choices we make. What matters is that we pursue these tasks not only reasonably but also in the spirit of humility, which accords with our creaturely status. We might even find that in relinquishing the impulse to control the world, we will learn to receive it as the gift that it is. Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesIf you're receiving this newsletter, then you are also receiving audio of our director's classes. Additionally, Mike Sacasas is offering a lecture series on Ivan Illich. The third lecture will be held on March 24 at 8:00 p.m. as a Zoom webinar. If you have any questions about our program, please contact Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org.Recommended Reading— Stephanie Bennet on “why the soul needs silence”:Silence is a necessary counter to the relentless preoccupation of our multitasking minds – something that should provide a contra­puntal rhythm to the steady beat of our busy human brains. Just as we are wise to protect the earth's vulnerable woodlands from overdevelopment, so we must protect the sanctuary of our interior lives. Speech, relationships, the soul: they begin with, and are sustained by, silence.— Brad East reviews two books that we have been a part of our Christian Imagination reading group, Alan Jacobs's Breaking Bread with the Dead and Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought: Hitz and Jacobs have spread us a feast, but they are more than hosts. They are part of the meal. Though living, their own ideas are now of a piece with all other ideas on offer. Their books, though new, will one day be old. They will, if we let them, insert themselves into our ever-expanding circle of fellow thinkers. We need neither eat nor think alone. Not every book is worthy of friendship, but for the purposes of thinking-with, these two make for good company. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the sixth session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.”If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the fourth session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Tools for Conviviality.If you'd like to join the Tuesday afternoon class live on Zoom, please email Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fifth session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.”If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fourth session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.”If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the third session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The topic of this class is Illich's best known book, Deschooling Society. If you'd like to join the Tuesday afternoon class live on Zoom, please email Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This semester, our associate director, Michael Sacasas, is delivering three lectures on the thought of the 20th-century Christian scholar and social critic, Ivan Illich. The first lecture, “Ivan Illich, Our Present Crisis, and the Possibilities of a More Convivial Society,” was delivered as a Zoom webinar on Wednesday, February 10th. The audio of that lecture is included here. IntroductionBrief sketch of Illich's life — 4:12Limits and Scale — 13:15“Tool to work with” — 30:01Manufactured Neediness — 38:34The second lecture will be presented on Wednesday, March 3rd at 8:00 p.m. (EST). Stay tuned for a link to the webinar registration form. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the third session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.”If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

This is the second session of Mike Sacasas's director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. The essays discussed in the session include “To Hell With Good Intentions.” If you'd like to join the Tuesday afternoon class live on Zoom, please email Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org.Also, it is not too late to register for Mike's evening talk via Zoom tonight at 8PM (EST) on Illich. It is the first of three talks on how Illich's work illuminates our present world. You can register here for the webinar. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.Of late, I've had occasion to turn again to the work of Jacques Ellul, the 20th century French scholar and lay theologian, regarded by some as the most prolific and insightful Christian social critic of the last century. Specifically, I was reminded of his critique of what he called “technical humanism” by the recent discussions of both the documentary The Social Dilemma and the Center for Humane Technology with which the film is associated. Several individuals connected with the center, former Google employee Tristan Harris most prominent among them, appear in the documentary about the social ills of social media. Writing in The Technological Society, which was first published in 1954, Ellul noted that “the claims of the human being have thus come to assert themselves to a greater and greater degree in the development of techniques; this is known as 'humanizing the techniques.'” But Ellul, who had up to that point in his book gone to great lengths to demonstrate how technique had thoroughly captured society, was not impressed.Ellul defined technique as “the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” Ellul understood that what mattered most about modern technology was not any one artifact or system, but rather a way of being in the world. This form of life or fundamental disposition precedes, sustains, and is reinforced by the material technological order. When we consider the question of human flourishing, we do well to ask, as Dr. Horner has taught us so well, “What frames what?” What sets the terms for what counts as human flourishing? Today, there are many examples of new devices, apps, and tools that promise to help us lead healthier lives, make better decisions, find peace of mind, and much more besides. But these technologies, seemingly designed with our good in mind, do little to change the status quo that rendered them necessary. Would we need mindfulness apps if we weren't already living in a sea of digitally mediated distraction? Would we need to count our steps if we lived in places built at a more human scale and which invited walking or held jobs that did not involve sitting endlessly behind a screen. Rarely is there an effort to ask what is good for the human being as such. Instead, as Ellul already recognized more than half a century ago, the real concern is to keep the human component of the larger technological order working marginally well, even if that larger order is fundamentally inhospitable to human beings.So, for example, Ellul went on to observe that if we seek the “real reason” for humanizing technology “we hear over and over again that there is ‘something out of line' in the technical system, an insupportable state of affairs for a technician. A remedy must be found." But, Ellul invites us to ask, “What is out of line?” “According to the usual superficial analysis,” Ellul answers, “it is man that is amiss. The technician thereupon tackles the problem as he would any other. But he considers man only as an object of technique and only to the degree that man interferes with the proper function of the technique.”In other words, he continued, “Technique reveals its essential efficiency in discerning that man has a sentimental and moral life. These factors are, for technique, human and subjective; but if means can be found to act upon them, to rationalize them and bring them into line, they need not be a technical drawback. Of course, man as such does not count.”This humanizing of technology presumes the existing techno-social status quo and ultimately serves its interests. It only amounts to a recalibration of the person so that they may fit all the more seamlessly into the operations of the existing techno-economic order of things. That techno-economic order is itself rarely questioned; it is taken mostly for granted, the myth of inevitability covering a multitude of sins.I'm not sure we can say that contemporary proponents of humane technology reason precisely by this logic. But neither do I think that they avoid ending up in much the same place, practically speaking. Consider the proliferation of devices and apps, some of which the Center for Humane Technology promotes, which are designed to gather data about everything from our steps to our sleep habits in order to help us optimize, maximize, manage, or otherwise finely calibrate our bodies and our minds. The calibration becomes necessary because the rhythms and patterns of our industrialized and digitized world have proven to be inhospitable to human well-being, while, nonetheless, alleviating certain forms of suffering. One might say that while, for many, although certainly not all, modern technological society has managed to supply various material needs, it has been less adept at meeting many of our non-material needs. And it would be a serious mistake to imagine that only our material needs mattered. So now the same techno-economic forces present themselves as the solution to the problems they have generated. In Ellul's terms, the answer to problems generated by technique is the application of ever more sophisticated and invasive techniques. The more general technological milieu is never challenged, and there's very little by way of a robust account of what human flourishing might look like independent of the present technological milieu. “It seems impossible to speak of a technical humanism,” Ellul concluded after some further discussion of the matter. It was more likely, in his view, that human beings would simply be forced to adapt to the shape of the technological system. “The whole stock of ideologies, feelings, principles, beliefs, etc. that people continue to carry around and which are derived from traditional situations,” these Ellul believed would only be conceived as unfortunate idiosyncrasies to be eliminated so that the techno-economic system may operate ever more efficiently. “It is necessary (and this is the ethical choice!) to liquidate all such holdovers,” he continued sarcastically, “and to lead humanity to a perfect operational adaptation that will bring about the greatest possible benefit from the technique. Adaptation becomes a moral criterion.”Now, while readers of The Technological Society would be forgiven for assuming that Ellul was overly fatalistic, providing neither a path forward nor any measure of hope, that was not exactly true. It's just that Ellul intended for readers to engage the whole of his corpus (over 40 books!) and read his sociological works in dialectic tension with his theological reflections, in which Kierkegaard and the Swiss theologian Karl Barth loom large. One might even say that, in this expectation, Ellul was, in fact, overly optimistic! In any case, he did make an argument for the value freedom as it arises out of a condition of perceived necessity presented by contemporary technology. It was precisely against the background of necessity that freedom could exist.To one interviewer he said, “I would say two things to explain the tenor of my writings. I would say … that as long as men believe that things will resolve themselves, they will do nothing on their own. But when the situation appears to be absolutely deadlocked and tragic, then men will try and do something.” Seen in this light, Ellul's work was an effort not simply to instruct but also to provoke. And it is to provoke us toward the realization of a measure of freedom available only when we fully reckon with the reality that opposes it.I would only add this note in closing. We ought to understand freedom as having two dimensions: freedom from and freedom for. Too often we fail to consider that freedom is fully realized only when it is conceived not only as a freedom from restraint, but also as a freedom to fulfill a deeper calling toward which freedom itself is but a penultimate means. The two are related but not identical. What Ellul would have us see is that the modern technological order tends to promise the former while simultaneously eroding the latter.Mike SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesOur spring program is in full swing this month. Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas are each teaching director's classes. If you receive this newsletter in your inbox, then you are also receiving the audio from those classes. We also have two reading groups in progress. The Dante reading group is completing its journey through the Divine Comedy with Paradiso, and our Monday evening reading group will be discussing the second half of Alan Jacobs's Breaking Bread With the Dead at its next meeting on February 15th. Finally, Mike Sacasas will be presenting the first of three lecture on the work of Ivan Illich next Wednesday, February 10th at 8PM. The talk will be offered as a Zoom webinar and you can learn more about the series and register for the lecture here. If you have any questions about our program, please contact Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org. Recommended Reading— Timothy Larsen on “Why George MacDonald Matters”:To this day, readers often find Phantastes to be a deeply strange novel. Nevertheless, we are steadied and orientated by all the fantasy literature that has grown out of it like realist novels suddenly animated by magic. We have Tolkien, but Tolkien only had MacDonald and his followers. To put the point bluntly, no MacDonald, no Tolkien.  It is still a curious book, but as it was the starting point of something new, Phantastes was immeasurably weirder for its original readers.  — A helpful introduction to the work of Jacques Ellul from David Gill, “Jacques Ellul: The Prophet as Theologian.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the second session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.”If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this first session of Mike Sacasas director's class on the life and work of Ivan Illich. In this session Mike provides a brief sketch of Illich's life as a frame of reference for subsequent classes tracing the development of his thought. If you'd like to join the Tuesday afternoon class live on Zoom, please email Mike at mike@christianstudycenter.org. You can expect audio of the class to arrive in your inbox on Wednesdays. The second session of Dr. Horner's class on the gospels will be available on Thursday. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the first session of Dr. Horner's director's class for this semester, “Reading the Gospels: The Road to the Cross.” You can look for the audio versions of this class to land in your inbox on Thursdays. If you'd like to join Dr. Horner's class live via Zoom either Wednesday mornings at 10:40 or Wednesday afternoon at 3:00, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week ten of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which concludes the semester. This class covers Peter's confession of faith, the nature of Jesus's identity, what it means to follow Christ, and the Transfiguration. Dr. Horner will be teaching the second half of the class during the spring semester. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the tenth and final session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class opened with a discussion of what we require of place and what place requires of us. It concluded with reflections on the difference between inhabiting place in the mode of a tourist, on the one hand, or in the mode of a pilgrim. Finally, the class wrapped up with a consideration of our relationship to place in theological perspective. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.Jane Jacobs opened her mid-twentieth century classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, with a discussion of the peculiar nature of cities. In the course of this discussion, she devoted all of three chapters to a single aspect of city life: the uses of sidewalks. I've always found the second of these three chapters especially interesting. In it, Jacobs examines the myriad incidental contacts generated among people who daily make use of a shared sidewalk—the nods, the smiles, the brief conversations, etc.Let's think for a bit about Jacobs's analysis and take the sidewalk as an example of what I recently called the material infrastructure of social life, and, more specifically, as a space of public rather than private consequence. As Jacobs observes, the point of “the social life of city sidewalks” is precisely that it is public, bringing together, as she puts it, “people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.”In other words, Jacobs is describing the multiple, usually brief and inconsequential, contacts people who live on the same city street will have with one another over an extended period of time. These contacts are mostly with people who are not necessarily part of our circle of friends, but who, because of these contacts, become something more than mere strangers. And that seems like a crucial, often ignored category because it informs, as Jacobs recognizes, whatever vague understanding we have of the public writ large.Jacobs acknowledges, of course, that, taken separately, these contacts amount to nothing, but the sum of such contacts, or their absence, becomes absolutely consequential. At stake, in her view, is nothing less than the trust that is essential to any functioning civic body.“The trust of a city street,” she writes, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop ….”Again, as Jacobs explains, most of these contacts are “utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands […]—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”“The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street,” she insists. And, what's more, “Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized.” In the course of her analysis of the little publics sustained by the city sidewalks, she also offers an astute observation about the nature of suburban social life. As a built environment, the suburbs make it very difficult to cultivate the casual acquaintanceship generated by the countless contacts that inevitably arise from the shared city sidewalk. In a suburban setting, you either invite people into your home or, with vanishingly few exceptions, they remain strangers altogether, and Jacobs is realistic about how few people we are likely to invite into our homes. The materially induced tendency, then, is to know relatively well those who are most like us and, those who are not, hardly at all. What is lost, we might say, is the category of what Aristotle called civic friendship.All of which raises the question: From where exactly will “a feeling for the public identity of people” arise? How might “a web of public respect and trust” be fostered? We'll come back to that in a bit, but first let's consider how these dynamics have been impacted by our contemporary technological milieu.On this score, I'm particularly struck by the degree to which we are encouraged to displace or outsource the sort of micro-interactions, which generate the human contacts Jacobs finds so valuable. Sometimes this is a matter of unintended consequences; sometimes it is a matter of intentional design and expressed preferences.As an example of the former, consider one unintended consequence of GPS. We tend to think of GPS displacing the paper map, which is true enough but not quite the whole story. The paper map was not the only method we used to find our way when we were in need of directions. We were just as likely to ask someone for directions to where we wanted to get. And, if it happened that I lost my way or that my directions proved inadequate, I'd likely pull over or stop someone to ask directions. In other words, in circumstances where we would have had occasion to interact with another person, we now turn to a device.As an example of the latter, consider the move toward automated tellers, online banking, or self-checkouts in retail spaces. In these cases, a fairly common opportunity for a brief human interaction has been lost. The proliferation of home delivery services and online retail also promise to relieve us of the need to venture out into the spaces that previously presented us with opportunities for casual human contacts. We've tended to frame these developments with questions about employment and labor, which are perfectly legitimate frames of analysis, but Jacobs encourages us to imagine a different kind of cost, which is also much harder, if not impossible to quantify.Consider as well how digital devices confront us with the subtle temptations of telepresence. We have the capacity and perhaps the proclivity to take partial leave of our immediate surroundings, including a tacit permission to forego the sorts of contacts Jacobs discussed by presenting as one who is presently conducting business elsewhere or otherwise preoccupied.In fact, the trajectory toward a situation where we find ourselves ensconced within relatively comfortable zones of affinity, familiar at first hand chiefly with those who are mostly like us, is longstanding. One might see it, as Richard Thomas did in a manner not altogether dissimilar from Jacobs's analysis of the sidewalk, in the architectural shift from front porches to back patios, and all that such a shift entails and implies about our social lives.As Thomas observed, “Nineteenth century families were expected to be public and fought to achieve their privacy. Part of the sense of community that often characterized the nineteenth-century village resulted from the forms of social interaction that the porch facilitated. Twentieth-century man has achieved the sense of privacy in his patio, but in doing so he has lost part of his public nature which is essential to strong attachments and a deep sense of belonging or feelings of community.” The chef's kiss comes with the advent of the doorbell camera, which casts our gaze into the public as a mode of surveillance rather than civic interest.It's not that any one instance of these cases is significant or necessarily “wrong.” Rather, as Jacobs suggested, it is the case that they become consequential in the aggregate. In other words, we should be attentive to the sort of people we become as a result of the mundane social liturgies, engendered by our material environment, which we daily enact with little or no reflection.I should grant that Jacobs had in view not merely chance interactions, but recurring encounters with people who shared a city block over time and thus would gradually become familiar to one another. For those who have not lived on a city block in this manner, of course, these recently outsourced human interactions are simply a further attenuation of our public lives, that is to say of our lives insofar as they intersect with those who are not a part of our private circles.But let's return to the question of how we imagine the public when we have so severely constricted the contacts we might have had with those who are not part of these circles. What most interested me in Jacobs's discussion was her insistence that these casual sidewalk contacts were mostly with people with whom we do not ordinarily desire any deeper relationship. Given the material structure of suburban life, people tend to operate with two categories of relationships: those they know relatively well and those who remain strangers altogether. There is little or no space in between. And, naturally, those in the class of people we know relatively well would tend to be more like us than not. All of which is to say that some of our most pronounced “filter bubbles” emerged long before the advent of social media.What matters here is that we will still operate with some mental model of the other. We will still conjure up some generalizations about the people who are not like us. When we enjoy a high frequency of contacts with the public such that some of them become more than mere strangers although less than friends, then our conception of the public is anchored in particular flesh and blood human beings, thus, in theory, tethering our imaginings more closely to some approximation of reality.However, when we lack such contacts, when our experience of others too readily divides into friends and strangers, then our image of the public tends toward abstraction, a blank screen onto which it may be tempting to project our fears, suspicions, and prejudices or, perhaps more benignly and naively, our own values and assumptions.But the situation seems to be a bit worse than that. It's not just that we lack the sidewalk as Jacobs experienced it, or some similar public space, and are thus left with a wholly inchoate image of the public beyond our affinity groups. It is, rather, that our digital media feeds and timelines have become our sidewalk, our trivial and incidental contacts, very different indeed from those Jacobs observed, transpire on digital platforms. This has turned out to be, how shall we say, a suboptimal state of affairs.The problems are manifold. We are tempted to mistake our experience of a digital media platform for the full breadth of reality. While in-person contacts tend to be governed by operative social norms, digital platforms foster a comparatively high degree of irresponsible and anti-social behavior. Untethered by civic friendships, our image of the public may be filled in for us by those who have an expressed interest in sowing division and fear. Relatedly, and perhaps most significantly, social trust craters on digital media. It would be hard to overstate the damage done by the weaponization of bad faith at the scale made possible by digital media. It's far worse than the mere proliferation of lies. It undermines the very plausibility of a politics sustained by speech. And it is utterly untouched by fact-checking.In short, our most public digital sidewalks tend toward open hostility, rancor, and strife. Little wonder then that so many are fleeing to what what might think of as the digital suburbs, relatively closed, private, and sometimes paywalled spaces we share with our friends and the generally like-minded. But I suspect this will do little for the public sphere that we will still share with those who remain outside of our circles, be they digital or analog, and who do not share our values and assumptions.Civic virtues, as it turns out, do not spring up out of nowhere. All virtues and vices arise from habits engendered by practices, which, in turn, reflect the material infrastructure of our social lives. Right now it seems as if that infrastructure is increasingly calibrated to undermine the possibility of civic friendship. Which brings us back, once again, to Ivan Illich staking his hope on the practice of hospitality: “A practice of hospitality recovering threshold, table, patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friendship on the one hand. On the other hand radiating out for possible community, for rebirth of community.”Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesAssociate Director Michael Sacasas, has revisited the work of Ivan Illich in a new essay for Breaking Ground. Illich, who died in 2002, was an eclectic scholar, activist, and social critic. In his essay, Mike makes the case that Illich is a relevant and essential resource for us as we try to think about our cultural moment. Next semester, Mike will be making that case at the study center through a Director's Class and a set of lectures on the life and work of Ivan Illich. Stay tuned for more!The last meeting of the Christian Imagination reading group for the semester will be on Tuesday, December 1st at 8PM via Zoom. This time around we will be discussing C. S. Lewis's essay, “The Weight of Glory.” Recommended Reading— At The Point, Alan Jacobs is interviewed about his most recent book, Breaking Bread With the Dead, which we will be reading together next spring in the Christian Imagination reading group:I have long been an advocate of the idea that what we read matters less than how we read it—I wrote a whole book about this, many years ago, and I have often had cause in the intervening years to remind my students (and sometimes their parents) that there's nothing automatically ennobling about reading the classics. But the relentless presentism of our moment, as social media keep us on an ever-turning hamster wheel of outrage and horrified fascination, makes it valuable to get off that wheel in any way we can. Reading anything other than social media and news feeds is already a victory, even if you read badly. It's a step towards reclaiming your attention. Going for a walk without your cell phone, taking a few minutes to meditate, prepping dinner without digitally transmitted sound in the background—all of these are small acts of rebellion. Reading old books and reading them with charity—the subject of my long-ago book—is an especially powerful way to reorient the frame of your consciousness, but almost anything that disconnects you is a step in the right direction. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week nine of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which continues to explore the ministry and teaching of Jesus as presented by the gospels with a special focus on the theme of bread. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the ninth session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class discussed virtual spaces, religious varieties of mediated presence, and more. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.In the weeks leading up to our national election I found myself thinking more than ever about the question, “What frames what?”—not at some abstract level but in very personal ways. Most obviously, the intensity of our political divide had me thinking. For several years now I have felt a genuine sympathy for those whose largest framework for understanding human experience is politics. That has to be a hard place to live—even if you are on the winning side of the election. I remain concerned both for those who will see the results of this election as a disaster and for those who will celebrate it. I'm not sure that political solutions ever deliver at the levels we want them to, and I remain convinced that there are much larger frameworks in place. It is not just politics, however, that has been pushing me to ask, “What frames what?” Dante Alighieri has been pushing me too. If you read our Monday morning emails, you know that several of us are reading his Divine Comedy this year, and in recent weeks he has been doing some important work in my life. I won't pretend that reading Dante has always been fun or always satisfying, and it certainly hasn't been easy, but this fall we are reading the Purgatorio and with each ascending circle of purgatory, Dante's great poem has become richer and richer and pushed me more and more at a personal level. I have had to admit that while I ask other people “What frames what?” I rarely probe as deeply as I might into my own answer to the question. I want the answer to the question to be biblical and Christ-centered, but when I examine my life, and extrapolate from what any given week actually looks like in order to figure out what my real framework for living is, I have had to wonder. As Jesus so succinctly put it, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and yet not do what I say?”Reading Dante does raise one of the questions that many of us face when we read books worth reading. Namely: How important is it that you agree or disagree with the author? One of the lessons I've had to learn over the years is how to let authors, with whom I have significant disagreements, challenge and enrich my thinking. So often, I fear, we tend to think that the point of reading a book is to decide whether we agree or disagree with the author. We plod along simply trying to determine whether the author is “getting it right” or not. Please don't misunderstand. I think truth matters—in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, of seeking a right understanding of reality. Having said that, however, I am so thankful that God has taught me to let a wide variety of voices inform and inspire me and take me deeper than I would otherwise go. The fact is that Michel Foucault has informed my reading of the psalms, Friedrich Nietzsche has deepened my understanding of the Ten Commandments, and Judith Butler has deepened my reading of Genesis three, so I am quite willing to let Dante lead me through purgatory. As Alan Jacobs observes in How to Think, we do best not when we “think for ourselves” but when we think together with people who will stretch us a bit. As my son-in-law recently observed, “Iron sharpens iron.”I don't always agree with Dante. In fact, I don't think there is such a place as purgatory, and yet Dante's reflections on purgatory are doing a lot of good work for me. He is making me think about what frames what in my own life, and he is enriching my thinking about becoming the person God calls me to be. Dante has me thinking about my own sanctification, about growing in holiness, about purging—or putting away—vice and cultivating virtue. Dante is exposing my idols, my indifference, and the poverty of my thinking about godliness. He has become a means of grace that God is using to remake me in the image of His Son.It hasn't hurt, in this case, to have Mike Sacasas providing guidance and offering the occasional gloss on Dante's text. Since Mike's earliest presentations at the Study Center a year ago, he has been encouraging us to see the moral life as a life of rightly ordered loves—of loving what we ought to love, not loving what we ought not to love, and of loving what we ought to love in the right ways and in the right order. Mike draws this way of thinking from ancient, medieval, and modern sources, and in recent weeks it has become clear that these sources include Dante. I am a novice with regard to Dante, so take my reflections with a large grain of salt, but one of Dante's arguments that has caught my attention is that as love is natural to God, so it is natural in his creatures. We are created to love, Dante notes, and this natural love endures in each and every one of us. I would see this as an expression of the imago Dei, but Dante just focuses on the fact that as God is love, so we are all made to love. “As fire, born to rise, moves upward,” and “just like the zeal in bees for making honey,” so “this primal inclination” is innate in each of us. (XVIII, 28-29, and 68-69)What's in question, however, is how we direct this love. While it is directed to the primal good,knowing moderation in its lesser goods,it cannot be the cause of wrongful pleasure.But when it bends to evil, or pursues the goodwith more or less concern than needed,then the creature works against his Maker. (XVII, 97-102)To bend to evil, in Dante's view, is to give in specifically to the sins of pride, envy, and wrath—three ways by which we do harm to our neighbor, but that is only the beginning of the story.Often, our sinfulness lies not in pursuing evil but in failing to pursue the good in right measure. We pursue what is good, but “with more or less concern than needed.” This can take the form not only of loving too little but of loving too much. The fact that work or marriage or food or drink are all fundamental goods does not mean that we should allow any of these secondary goods to rise to the level of the supreme Good. The true goods in life need to be rightly ordered, and rightly loved. As we have just noted, when we lose sight of the “primal good,” and pursue “lesser goods” with more “concern than needed, then the creature works against his Maker.”On the other hand, we can also fall short of loving as we ought, of giving less concern than needed. In fact, we often fail to give ourselves fully to goods that are truly good and that deserve our full attention. This is the sin of sloth or acedia, in which we love what is rightly loved but with less zeal than the good object of our love rightly calls for. We love with “a love of good that falls short of its duty.” We pursue “the good in faulty measure” and pull “the slackened oar,” not giving ourselves fully to the good that deserves our full attention. (XVII, 85-87)We should beware, however, of thinking of sloth as simply being lazy. As Mike and others who reflect on the nature of contemporary culture have shown us, the sin of acedia can easily hide behind a great deal of busyness—busyness that consumes us and distracts us from the true goods we ought to be pursuing in any given moment. And while our digital technologies play a major role here, we ought not use them as an excuse for our own failings. My “to do” list, for instance, all too often created routinely and with little thought, can keep me busy, make me look good, and even help me feel good about myself, while also keeping me from the single, simple good to which the Spirit of God calls me in any given moment of the day. Paradoxically, getting free from busy slothfuness will almost certainly require stopping—doing nothing long enough to reflect and discern what we actually ought to be doing. Freeing ourselves from sloth may, ironically, require that we slow down, become more settled, unhurried, deliberate, but neither lazy nor frantic.Ultimately, the issue of sloth, whether in its lazy or frantic form, matters not just in regard to how well we give our attention to any number of lesser goods, but with regard to our pursuit of the very highest of goods—the supreme or primal Good that is God and who alone gives true peace. He is that Good which frames all in all. “Everyone can vaguely apprehend some good in which the mind may find its peace,” Dante writes. “With desire, each one strives to reach it.” Sadly, we tend to seek that greatest Good in lesser goods that cannot give true peace. Our “appetites are fixed on things that, divided, lessen each one's share,” and so our hearts fill with envy rather than with peace. As Pascal would put it several centuries later, when we reflect upon the nature of the sovereign good, we recognize that it is “impossible that this universal good, desired by all men, should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. [We] realize that the true good must be such that it may be possessed by all men at once without diminution or envy.” (pensée #148)Dante then takes us a step beyond Pascal, suggesting that when we fix our hearts on loving God, not only is the Good not diminished by being shared, it grows instead. The love of God is amplified as we give ourselves fully to him. Giving us this wisdom through the voice of Virgil, Dante writes: ‘Because your appetites are fixed on thingsthat divided, lessen each one's share, envy's bellows pushes breath into your sighs.‘But if love for the highest spherecould turn your longings toward heavenly things,then fear of sharing would pass from your hearts.‘For there above, when more souls speak of ours, the more of goodness each one owns,the more of love is burning in that cloister.Dante, the pilgrim, then asks:‘How can it be that a good, distributed,can enrich a greater number of possessorsthan if it were possessed by few?To which Virgil responds:‘Because you stillhave your mind fixed on earthly things,you harvest darkness from the light itself.‘That infinite and ineffable Good,which dwells on high speeds toward loveas a ray of sunlight to a shining body.‘It returns the love it finds in equal measure,so that, if more of ardor is extended, eternal Goodness will augment its own.And the more souls there are who love on high,the more there is to love, the more of loving,for like a mirror each returns it to the other. (XV, 49-75)Dante runs deep and always calls for still more careful reading, but perhaps it would help to see these lines as Dante's gloss on the Apostle Paul's image that at present, “we see in a mirror, dimly (enigmatically),” but in that day of heavenly glory we shall see “face to face” – to face to face to face. We will be like a hall of living mirrors in which the glory of God is reflected and amplified. And it should be noted that this thought from the Apostle comes as the conclusion to his own reflections on the primacy and enduring character of love.Whether you are celebrating the outcomes of the recent elections or fearful that the sky is falling, I encourage you to keep asking, What frames what? What provides your most basic understanding of human experience and history? If, like me, you want the answer to this question to be richly theocentric and rooted in biblical wisdom, let me ask you what I ask myself: Does your life confirm or call into question that biblical framework?I also want to encourage you to ask, “With whom am I in conversation?” This is the second of the two questions that I have asked students over the years, and the more we all settle into our comfortable feedback loops, the more I want to ask it.  What conversation partners are feeding your thought processes these days? Do you read and listen to only what you know will confirm the opinions you already hold? Do you stop reading or listening the moment you encounter a disagreement? Is there a Dante in your life? I'm not asking you to be wishy washy. I'm not even asking you to change any of your views. I'm just asking you to give yourself to thoughtfulness and to recognize how hard it is to do this if you don't have thoughtful friends feeding your thoughts. Thoughtfulness is a worthy goal, and nothing keeps us from it more effectively than the slothful sin of staying busy, busy, busy.So, let me grant Dante the final word in pointing us to the sovereign Good who frames all in all and who is the source of greatest peace. Beware “the slackened oar,” He tells us. Let not “the love that draws you on” be “laggard to know or have that peace.” And if you want some help in finding worthy conversational partners, allow me to invite you to join us in “Breaking Bread with the Dead” this spring.Richard V. HornerNovember 6, 2020Study Center ResourcesAt the end of his essay, Dr. Horner invited you to join us in “breaking bread with the dead” next semester. In doing so, he was alluding to our reading of Alan Jacobs's recent book by that title, which encourages us to connect with authors from the past in order to better ground our experience in the present. That same reading group is currently concluding another book by Jacobs,  The Year of Our Lord 1943. You can join our Zoom discussion this Monday, November 9th at 8:00 p.m. You can join the meeting with this link. The group is open to the public, so feel free to join in.Associate Director Michael Sacasas was recently interviewed on the podcast of the The Institute for Policy Research, an interdisciplinary policy research center of the Catholic University of America. Recommended Reading— Craig Bartholomew on biblical wisdom for uncertain times:Wisdom is not a technique that you simply take and apply so that you have it. It has to be lived, and we have to be formed into wise people. Job's struggle is different from that of the Preacher. Job's is existential whereas the Preacher's is intellectual. Both are excruciating experiences, and both felt that their very existence was at stake. How did they find resolution?The answer, but never simplistically, is God. Experiences like that of the pandemic bring us quickly to the very real limits of our own wisdom. That is the message of Job 28. But does this mean wisdom amid uncertainty is unavailable? No, because as Job 28:23 says,God understands the way to itand he alone knows where it dwellsGod knows the way to wisdom because God is wisdom. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week eight of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which explores the ministry and teaching of Jesus as presented by the gospel according to John. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the eight session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class talked about place and memory as well as the relationship between place and community. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week seven of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which continues to explore the ministry and teaching of Jesus as presented by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the seventh session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class talked about how we the experience of being grounded in a place, how devices mediate that experience. We also began our discussion of place and memory, which will carry over into next week This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.I've been thinking about tables of late, literally and figuratively. Chiefly, what I've had in mind is the table as an emblem of hospitality, and, relatedly, as an example of the material infrastructure of our social lives, the stuff of life that sustains and mediates human relationships. As we think about the conditions of human flourishing, it's important that we consider not only the ideas that shape our moral, political, and theological assumptions. We should consider as well the material structures of our experience, which often do more to shape our lives than most of us realize. Thinking about the table has drawn me back to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, first published in 1958. This work is notable for Arendt's discussion of the distinctions among, on the one hand, private, public, and social life, and, on the other, among the activities which Arendt calls labor, work, and action. I won't take the time to explain all of those distinctions at great length here—it's a dense book—except as they relate to Arendt's use of the table as a recurring metaphor, a metaphor which will, I think, usefully illuminate aspects of our digitally mediated experience and certain of its characteristic disorders. “To live together in the world,” Arendt wrote, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”Our life together in the world is built upon a world of things, which, like a table, gathers and distinguishes us. The point may at first seem somewhat trivial, until we do a little work to unpack the meaning that Arendt has given these terms.“The term ‘public' signifies the world itself,” she explains, “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.” She goes on to clarify that the world is not simply synonymous with the earth, which she thinks of as related to our “organic life.” The world, in her sense, is related “to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.” We might say that the world as she means it is more or less co-extensive with what the historian Thomas Hughes called the human-built world, it is our cultural habitat and also what I'm calling the material infrastructure that sustains it. In this light, then, the table is not simply a metaphor, it is a case in point, a microcosm of the larger social order, which itself takes shape around an array of material artifacts. This world of things turns out to have important psychological and epistemological functions in Arendt's analysis, and this is were her line of thinking gets really interesting. We might say that Arendt takes the world of common things to be an epistemic backstop that keeps us from sliding into pure subjectivism, nihilism, or egoism. As we'll see in a moment a world of common things grounds a common sense. So, for example, she writes, “The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”This is quite a remarkable claim. The inverse correlation she posits between an intensification of subjective emotion and private feeling, on the one hand, and an assurance of the reality of the world on the other seems particularly striking given present concerns about the degree to which Americans appear to have not only conflicting beliefs, but to live in alternate realities. Elsewhere in The Human Condition she writes, “the existence of a public realm and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”Arendt's insistence on a measure of permanence and stability across time naturally recalls to my mind Simone Weil's discussion of a stable ground upon which a human life may be rooted. In The Need for Roots, Weil argued that rootedness was an essential human need and, she added, “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”For Arendt the permanence of the world of things not only grounds our common experience of the world but also human identity. “The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life,” Arendt wrote, “and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”But let's come back for a moment to the epistemic implications of Arendt's notion of a common world. Arendt argues that to live an “entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life.” She expands on this by explaining that it means one is “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective' relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.” Here again is the notion of being gathered and separated but with an emphasis on an “objective” relationship with others. Of course, it is not the nature of reality itself that is at issue here. Rather, Arendt has in view our experience of reality, or, to put it another way, the measure of certainty we attain from knowing that we inhabit a shared reality with others. We see and hear and are seen and heard in turn, and somehow the intermediation of the common world of things is essential to this dynamic. This certainly does not at all preclude vigorous and intense disagreement about what is good, right, and just; but it does suggest that such debates can unfold meaningfully within shared horizons of the real. And this is what Arendt understands as “common sense,” which she calls “the sixth and highest sense.” Common sense was not just a set of mundane observations that are widely assumed to be true. Rather, it was common in the sense that it was the product of the senses working in tandem on a world held in common with others. “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.” However, in the modern world, Arendt argued, common sense “became an inner faculty without any world relationship.” “This sense now was called common,” she continues, “merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds.” This is a critical point aptly stated. Moreover, she observes that “a noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.” Again, she does not mean alienation from the earth, but alienation from a common world of human things that constitutes a public space of appearance within which a common sense can take hold and bind individuals to a commonly shared reality. Without a common and stable world of things to ground our experience with others, without the table around which we might gather, the mind is cut off from a common sense and set loose upon itself in ways that become self-destructive. Thus, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she also makes the following argument: Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. [Emphasis mine.]Only, along with “totalitarian propaganda” let us also include “conspiracy theories” and the relevance of this analysis will be all the more apparent. The loss of a common world and the common (or communal) sense it sustains engenders not only heightened subjectivity but also leaves individuals susceptible to propaganda and conspiracy theorizing. What especially interests me, however, is the degree to which our digital media environment differs from the older analog order of things, specifically with regard to its role in sustaining a common world and public life. I'm tempted to speak of this difference as a move from a material order to an immaterial order, but I realize that this is not quite right. After all, digital media is a thoroughly material reality built on tubes, cables, satellites, servers, and rare-earth metals mined at great human cost, none which are any less material in nature simply because they are ordinarily hidden from public view. Nonetheless, it is important to account for how digital media reconfigures the material infrastructure of social life such that the dynamics of human experience are also transformed. And a good deal of this transformation involves the scrambling of the relationship between bodily presence and action. What happens, for example, when large swaths of our social world no longer emerges within a world of things we simultaneously occupy. In other words, the question may be simply this: What are the consequences of a social life increasingly dependent on varieties of tele-presence? Which is to say, unmediated by a common world of present physical things.Tele-, as you may remember from some long-ago middle school vocabulary lesson, is the Greek root that means far or distant and suggests operating at a distance. Consider three common words: telegraph, telephone, television—writing at a distance, voice at a distance, sight at a distance. All of these are varieties of telepresence, and, as the example of the telegraph suggests, telepresence is not uniquely tied to digital media. Digital media, however, has made it possible for telepresence to mark more and more of our experience. Early debates about the internet were sometimes framed by an opposition of digital activities to “real life.” It seems to me that we would have better spent our time had the question of telepresence framed our discussions. Regarding life online, “Is this real?” now seems to me to have been a far less interesting question to ask than “Where am I?” When we gather, as we so often do now, on a service like Zoom, where exactly are we? Where is the interaction happening? And, what difference does it make, say, that there is no here we can easily point to and much less is there a table? What sort of world is this that now harbors so much of our social and political life, and how might we distinguish it from the world of common things, which for Arendt was so important to meaningful public life?It is clear that the digital realm lacks the permanence that Arendt thought was essential to a common world in which individuals could appear and be seen. Consequently, it fails to stabilize the self in the manner Arendt attributed to a common world of things. It also seems that Arendt's fears about the epistemic consequences of the loss of a common world of things were well grounded. By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbols, digital tools appear to undermine our capacity to experience a common world which generates a common sense. Increasingly, we come to feel that individuals are occupying altogether different realities. There are, of course, many more questions to be asked about how digital tools transform human experience, but reckoning with the seeming worldlessness of the digital realm and its abstraction of experience from bodily presence may help us better understand some of the challenges we face as we seek to faithfully navigate this digital world together.Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesThis week, we especially want to draw your attention to our Zoom reading group on Monday, October 26th at 8:00 p.m. This will be our first discussion of Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943. You can join the meeting with this link. The group is open to the public, so feel free to join in. Recommended Reading— Brazos Fellows hosted a discussion [video] with Alan Jacobs and others about Jacobs's new book:Our time is characterized by information overload, hot takes, and a preoccupation with the immediate. What's more, there seems to be a growing consensus that history needs to be left behind—that the past has nothing to teach us. In this moment, why read old books? What, if anything, can we learn from the voices of the past?Alan Jacobs, Elizabeth Corey, and Paul Gutacker discuss these questions in honor of the release of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind.— In “Democracy and the Nuclear Stalemate” at The New Atlantis, Taylor Dotson and Michael Bouchey tackle nuclear energy as a test case for the broader and vexing issues undermining the prospects of democratic governance in the face of large scale problems:America's nuclear energy situation is a microcosm of the nation's broader political dysfunction. We are at an impasse, and the debate around nuclear energy is highly polarized, even contemptuous. This political deadlock ensures that a widely disliked status quo carries on unabated. Depending on one's politics, Americans are left either with outdated reactors and an unrealized potential for a high-energy but climate-friendly society, or are stuck taking care of ticking time bombs churning out another two thousand tons of unmanageable radioactive waste every year.…If we cannot make headway on nuclear power — and do so democratically — there would seem to be little hope for similarly complex challenges: climate change, artificial intelligence, collapsing biodiversity, sending humans to Mars. We must end the nuclear stalemate. Whether we can is a crucial test for democracy, and for humanity. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week six of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he reviews key episodes in the ministry of Jesus as presented in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the sixth session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class talked about how we inhabit a place through attentiveness and self-directed navigation, including a discussion of how our disposition or way of being in the world shapes our experience of place.The latter part of the class reviewed Ari Schulman's excellent 2011 essay, “GPS and the End of the Road.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify. It was my pleasure to interview Matthew Lee Anderson for our podcast last month. I'll start with the usual introductory matters. Matt is an Assistant Research Professor of Ethics and Theology at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion and the Associate Director of Baylor in Washington. He's also an Associate Fellow at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Oxford University, where he completed a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics. As you'll hear in the interview, Matt is the author of two books:  Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter To Our Faith and The End of Our Exploring. Matt is also the founder of Mere Orthodoxy, a site that has consistently published thoughtful, irenic, and theologically informed Christian writing for over 15 years. Moreover, Matt's writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Finally, Matt's newsletter, The Path Before Us, offers moral and theological analysis of contemporary culture and politics. In our conversation, we ranged over a variety of topics, but I'd say that reflection on the moral life was a unifying theme. Below is an outline of the conversation with timestamps so that you can navigate your way to places of interest. I especially enjoyed our discussion of the role that literature can play in shaping our moral imagination beginning at the 40:34 mark. 1:54 — Matt's vision for Mere Orthodoxy and the nature of writing online10:20 — Earthen Vessels, issues related to the body19:05 — The End of Our Exploring, the distinction between doubt and inquiry, and the art of asking good questions28:13 — The work of theologian Oliver O'Donovan, author of Begotten or Made? and Resurrection and Moral Order35:37 — The task of moral reasoning40:34 — Literature and the moral life51:33 — Shakespeare1:01:47 — The value of memorization We hope you enjoy this conversation. You can look forward to others like it in the coming weeks and months. Peace, Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesOur Readings in the Christian Imagination reading group is now reading Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943, which focuses on the work of five Christian intellectuals—C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil—who, in the middle of World War Two, turned their attention to the question of education and the life of the mind. We will discuss the first half the book on Monday, October 26th over Zoom at 8:00 p.m.The rest of our program is in full swing. Our Director's classes are meeting via Zoom and in-person and our Dante group meets via Zoom on Wednesday afternoons. If you have any questions about taking part in these events, please email Mike Sacasas at mike4416@gmail.com.Recommended Reading— Samantha Rose Hill explains why Hannah Arendt believed that loneliness could make individuals susceptible to totalitarianism. ‘Totalitarian solutions,' she wrote, ‘may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.' When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror' to Origins in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.— Earlier this year, Jay Parini reflected on his meeting with W. H. Auden:"I've learned a little in my life," he said. "Not much. But I will share with you what I do know. I hope it will help."He lit a cigarette, looked at the ceiling, then said, "I know only two things. The first is this: There is no such thing as time." He explained that time was an illusion: past, present, future. Eternity was "without a beginning or an end," and we must come to terms with what underlies time, or exists around its edges. He quoted the Gospel of John, where Jesus said: "Before Abraham was, I am." That disjunctive remark upends our notions of chronology once and for all, he told me.I listened, a bit puzzled, then asked: "So what's the second thing?""Ah, that," he said. "The second thing is simply advice. Rest in God, dear boy. Rest in God." This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fifth week of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he discusses the ministry of Jesus as presented in the first several chapters of Mark's gospel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fifth session of Michael Sacasas's Director's Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”The class explores the how the relationship between the body and the experience of place has been splintered by new media technologies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the fourth week of Dr. Horner's class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he discusses the gospel accounts of John the Baptist and the opening of Jesus's public ministry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com