Podcast appearances and mentions of Alan Jacobs

Wouldn't we all benefit from a better understanding of what it means to think well? If so, why don't we do it? Alan Jacobs is the author of "How to Think." He serves as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He writes, "Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or live or follow. Who needs thinking?" Would you agree? Alan Jacobs finishes his book by giving The Thinking Person's Checklist. This 12-point checklist is designed to help us think well, and have better conversations. This conversation will offer "hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too." Join the conversation, learn to Think Well, and bring your questions so we can put this checklist into practice. Callers are welcome! Content Discussed 0:00-7:52 Announcements, Merch Launch, and upcoming shows 7:53-54:09 The Thinking Person's Checklist 54:10-1:28:30 CALLER 1:28:31-1:45:07 LIVE QUESTIONS

Brian Harnetty's recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty's musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.  In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian's process. Harnetty's audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.  This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we've heard.  (And, of course, we'll have a longer version of the interview and our What's Good segment for our Patrons.) Who was Thomas Merton? Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It's hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948's “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.  Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.” Brian Harnetty Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire). Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University's Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine's “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Brian Harnetty's recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty's musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.  In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian's process. Harnetty's audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.  This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we've heard.  (And, of course, we'll have a longer version of the interview and our What's Good segment for our Patrons.) Who was Thomas Merton? Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It's hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948's “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.  Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.” Brian Harnetty Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire). Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University's Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine's “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sound-studies

Brian Harnetty's recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty's musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.  In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian's process. Harnetty's audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.  This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we've heard.  (And, of course, we'll have a longer version of the interview and our What's Good segment for our Patrons.) Who was Thomas Merton? Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It's hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948's “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.  Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.” Brian Harnetty Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire). Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University's Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine's “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian Harnetty's recent record, Words and Silences, takes voice recordings made by the famed American Trappist monk Thomas Merton and sets them within Harnetty's musical compositions. The meditative and revealing result has been lauded by critics in The Wire, MOJO, and Aquarium Drunkard.  In this episode, we share a Phantom Power exclusive: a brand new narrative piece that Brian created about the making of his record. “Words and Silences: The Thomas Merton Hermitage Tapes” is much more than a behind-the-scenes look at Brian's process. Harnetty's audio diary is its own moving meditation on Merton, solitude, sound, media, and the self.  This is the second piece that Brian has shared with Phantom Power–you may remember his Forest Listening Rooms episode. Like that episode, this is something special. We highly recommend taking a walk in the woods or finding a quiet space to listen to this beautiful meditation. And after we listen, Mack talks to Brian about what we've heard.  (And, of course, we'll have a longer version of the interview and our What's Good segment for our Patrons.) Who was Thomas Merton? Thomas Merton was an author, mystic, poet, and comparative religion scholar who lived from 1915 to 1968. It's hard to imagine a spiritual superstar quite like Merton appearing in America today. His first book, 1948's “The Seven Storey Mountain,” became a best-seller and led to a flood of young men applying to join Catholic monasteries.  Merton had a major influence on spaces such as the progressive Catholic church Mack grew up going to. He was outward facing, committed to leftist causes, and fascinated by other religions, but at the same time, he retreated from his fame into his hermitage in KY. In The New Yorker, Alan Jacobs called him “perhaps the proper patron saint of our information-saturated age, of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return.” Brian Harnetty Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary sound artist who uses listening to foster social change. He is known for his recording projects with archives, socially engaged sound works, sound and video installations, live performances, and writings. His interdisciplinary approach has been compared to “working like a novelist…breathing new life into old chunks of sound by radically recontextualizing them” (Clive Bell, The Wire). Brian is currently a Faculty Fellow at Ohio State University's Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme (2022-23), Harnetty is a two-time recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2021, 2020), and received the A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art in Contemplative Practices (2018) and the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award (2016). He has also twice received MOJO Magazine's “Underground Album of the Year” (2019, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/christian-studies

¡Hola a todos!

Get your copy of Wake Up to Love, today!LOVE is appearing as a family vacation right now, and I will return with new episodes on January 6th! I Love you! Listen to the ROSARY, Here and pray the Love every day!Remember who you are when you're in that airport, or doing that last minute shopping trip.When you find yourself in line,find this Peace in that line.Find your smile in that line.Remember (t)His truth in that line,and It will relax your shoulders,It will relax your stomach,It will relax that belief that you're the one standing in that line.That line is happening in you.That store is happening in you,and then you are the Light of that store.Keep catching yourself, and letting yourself go.Catching yourself, and letting yourself go.Catching yourself believing in the world,catching yourself believing in others,catching yourself in fear,catching yourself in worry,catching yourself pretending to be what you're not.You are the Light of the world.You are Amazing Grace.How sweet, Your Sound.I love you,nik Nikki@curlynikki.comp.s. You are the Sun/Son. Everywhere, nowhere.--Our new book, 'Wake Up to Love' is HERE! Get your copy. Share a copy. Be the Love you wake up to!_______________Support GoOD Mornings on Patreon -https://www.patreon.com/c/goodmornings________________QUOTES"I have issued from a Great Powerand visit all who contemplate me;I have been discoveredby those who search diligently.Pay attention, those that meditateupon me, and listen well! All of you who are patiently waiting,take me to your Self.Don't dismiss me from your mindand don't let your inner voicesdespise me; don't forget me at anytime or place; be watchful..."-Alan Jacobs, 'Thunder' from The Gnostic Gospels"When we close our physical eyes we see darkness inside but as we cross this void of darkness following the meditation practice of the Saints, there is Light. Beyond the silence there is Sound."-James Bean via IG @santmat"Be within your body. Light the inner lamp that your within and without may sparkle with Radiance Divine. In Its brilliance let the shadow of your karmas fade. The NAAM help you steer through this ocean of life and death."-Kabir"I Am the Light of the world," declared Jesus (John 8:12), but he also said, 'you are the Light of the world. (Matthew 5:I4). A paradox? Or, perhaps, insight into the essential unity between Christ and creation that forms the foundation of the mystical life?The light that shines in us is the light of Christ shining through us. This is not something we have to make happen; it is something we must allow to happen. Not something we achieve, something we receive.Yet to bask in that Christ-light within, we need to open ourselves to receive it.The sunflower turns over the course of the day so that its blossom always faces the sun. Likewise, mystics continually recalibrate their lives to embrace the Divine light. Illumination may come from within, but its source is heavenly."-Carl McColman, The Little Book of Christian Mystics

QUOTES FOR REFLECTION“When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn't become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there's no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns.”~Alan Jacobs, scholar and literary critic “To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.”~Mark Twain (1835-1910), writer and humorist “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”~Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), English novelist and poet “Happiness is only real when shared.”~Jon Krakauer, writer and mountaineer “Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly.”~Malcolm X (1925-1965), Muslim minister and activist “As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume a [person].”~John Chrysostom (c. 347-407), church leader and preacher “Comparison is the thief of joy.”~Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th president of the United States “Since the love which binds the Trinity together is the same love which binds the church to the Son and the saints to each other, we can rightly conclude that the structure of relationship which constitutes the glory of God or God's internal fullness is the same structure which constitutes the reality of the church…. The re-presentation of the societal and relational structure of God's Trinitarian life in the community of the saints, is, in a manner of speaking, the visibility of the God in the world.”~Krister Sairsingh, university professor, in his Harvard doctoral dissertation, “Jonathan Edwards and the Idea of the Divine Glory: His Foundational Trinitarianism and its Ecclesial Import”SERMON PASSAGEGalatians 5:13-15, 22-23 (ESV)Galatians 5 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. 14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 15 But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another…. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. Matthew 3 13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; 17 and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Isaiah 42 1 Behold my servant, whom I uphold,  my chosen, in whom my soul delights;  have put my Spirit upon him;  he will bring forth justice to the nations. John 15 9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. Philippians 4 4 Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.

Remember who you are when you're in that airport, or doing that last minute shopping trip. When you find yourself in line, find this Peace in that line. Find your smile in that line. Remember (t)His truth in that line, and It will relax your shoulders, It will relax your stomach, It will relax that belief that you're the one standing in that line. That line is happening in you. That store is happening in you, and then you are the Light of that store. Keep catching yourself, and letting yourself go. Catching yourself, and letting yourself go. Catching yourself believing in the world, catching yourself believing in others, catching yourself in fear, catching yourself in worry, catching yourself pretending to be what you're not. You are the Light of the world. You are Amazing Grace. How sweet, Your Sound. I love you, nik  Nikki@curlynikki.com   ________________________________________ Today's Quotes: "I have issued from a Great Power and visit all who contemplate me; I have been discovered by those who search diligently. Pay attention, those that meditate upon me, and listen well! All of you who are patiently waiting, take me to your Self. Don't dismiss me from your mind and don't let your inner voices despise me; don't forget me at any time or place; be watchful..." -Alan Jacobs, 'Thunder' from The Gnostic Gospels "When we close our physical eyes we see darkness inside but as we cross this void of darkness following the meditation practice of the Saints, there is Light. Beyond the silence there is Sound." -James Bean via IG @santmat "Be within your body. Light the inner lamp that your within and without may sparkle with Radiance Divine. In Its brilliance let the shadow of your karmas fade.  The NAAM help you steer through this ocean of life and death." -Kabir "I Am the Light of the world," declared Jesus (John 8:12), but he also said, 'you are the Light of the world. (Matthew 5:I4). A paradox? Or, perhaps, insight into the essential unity between Christ and creation that forms the foundation of the mystical life? The light that shines in us is the light of Christ shining through us. This is not something we have to make happen; it is something we must allow to happen. Not something we achieve, something we receive. Yet to bask in that Christ-light within, we need to open ourselves to receive it. The sunflower turns over the course of the day so that its blossom always faces the sun. Likewise, mystics continually recalibrate their lives to embrace the Divine light. Illumination may come from within, but its source is heavenly." -Carl McColman, The Little Book of Christian Mystics Support the show Beginning Aug 7, 2023 - 'GoOD Mornings with CurlyNikki' will host pre and post roll ads within the back catalogue.

Chelsea get battered was the chant emanating from Stamford Bridge on Saturday as the Bees won their third match in a row in Chelsea. With the euphoria almost blown over, Billy the Bee Grant and Dave Laney Lane sat down in the virtual joint to relive that brilliant afternoonOn the show today

The evangelical world today suffers from apologetic anemia. Despite the fact that holy Scripture calls believers to give a reason for the hope we have in Christ (1 Peter 3:15; see also Jude 3), we sadly lack a public voice for truth and reason in the marketplace of ideas. We do not have a strong intellectual presence in popular or academic culture (although some areas, such as philosophy, are more influenced by evangelicals than others). The reasons for this anemia are multidimensional and complex. These are the six enemies, which the podcast addressed biblically. Indifference Irrationalism Ignorance Cowardice Arrogance or intellectual vanity Superficial techniques Recommended Reading Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, 2nd (InterVarsity-Academic, 2022). Douglas Groothuis web page: DouglasGroothuis.com Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds (Baker, 1994). Alan Jacobs, How to Think (Currency, 2017). P. Moreland, Love Your God with All Your Mind, 2nd ed. (NavPress, 1997; 2013). Both editions are worth having, since the second edition left out good material contained in the first. Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994). John Piper, Think (Crossway, 2010). Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of nineteen books, including Fire in the Streets (a critique of critical race theory or wokeness) and Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith. Find more from Dr. Groothuis at www.DouglasGroothuis.com. Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Amber Cullum and Amy Fritz have an honest conversation about the importance of critical thinking and open dialogue within Christian communities, which they discuss as a result of watching the Amazon Prime docu-series, "Shiny Happy People." They discuss some dangers of blindly following beliefs, the power of questioning, and the complexities of raising children with a strong faith foundation.  Key Take Aways Learn why fostering critical reasoning is essential in nurturing healthy Christian communities. Understand how to strike a balance between honoring mentor advice and adhering to Christ's teachings. Navigate through the complexities of homeschooling, considering its potential pitfalls and promises. Engage with different perspectives on the challenging notion of modesty within the Christian context. Appreciate the value of open conversations and examining diverse interpretations in deepening one's Christian faith. Resources Book: How to Think by Alan Jacobs https://amzn.to/3pu4rJj Book: The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Beth Allison Barr https://amzn.to/3r6mYM1 Untangled Faith Podcast https://untangledfaithpodcast.com Shiny Happy People Docu-series https://amzn.to/44pRvmz JOIN Come be a part of the Grace Enough Gang http://eepurl.com/gidRnD Follow Grace Enough: Instagram | Facebook | YouTube Become a Grace Enough supporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Episode #74: A Conversation with Nancy on Talking with Our Children about Transgenderism (And other topics regarding to Catholic Social Teaching) Nancy Bandzuch from Catholic Sprouts joins us in discussing how to talk to our children about transgenderism and other social issues and Catholic Sprout's new book Catholic Social Teaching For Youth.  You can get your copy of the book here: https://shop.catholicsprouts.com/?ref=COFFEEANDCATHOLICS   Some of Nancy's Podcasts: https://catholicsprouts.com/catholic-sprouts-podcast/ https://catholicsprouts.com/the-just-one-small-thing-podcast/    For more discussion on this topic, listen to Episode #33: Transgender: A Catholic Social Justice Teaching Response.  https://coffeeandcatholics.podbean.com/e/episode-33-october-25-2021-transgender-a-catholic-social-justice-teaching-response/   Some other resources discussed:    Be Healed by Dr. Bob Schuchtes https://a.co/d/gadtCOX Be Transformed by Dr. Bob Schuchtes https://a.co/d/dRNDbeo  Be Restored by Dr. Bob Schuchtes https://a.co/d/g7a5n70  God's Design for Sex Series by Stan and Brenna Jones https://a.co/d/gzKbGeZ   Lauren's Library Recommendations: Male, Female, Other?: A Catholic Guide to Understanding Gender by Jason Evert https://a.co/d/4vzFVQM  Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs https://a.co/d/68i1vYH    Join us on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/groups/231017461535192 If you enjoy this podcast, please consider contributing to our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/coffeeandcatholics or you can email us at coffeeandcatholics@gmail.com for direct donations and prayer requests. We're a proud partner of the SmartCatholics Podcast Network. Find new shows to love, meet like-minded Catholics, and join the community at smartcatholics.com.   Love TAN Books? We do too! Consider using our affiliate account for your next purchase. https://tanbooks.com?rfsn=7123077.dfb511

Remember who you are when you're in that airport, or doing that last minute shopping trip. When you find yourself in line, find this Peace in that line. Find your smile in that line. Remember (t)His truth in that line, and It will relax your shoulders, It will relax your stomach, It will relax that belief that you're the one standing in that line. That line is happening in you. That store is happening in you,and then you are the Light of that store. Keep catching yourself, and letting yourself go. Catching yourself, and letting yourself go. Catching yourself believing in the world, catching yourself believing in others, catching yourself in fear, catching yourself in worry, catching yourself pretending to be what you're not.You are the Light of the world.  You are Amazing Grace.  How sweet, Your Sound. I love you, nik  Nikki@curlynikki.com ▶▶LOVE CHARGING STATION, Live, Daily, Group Practice-  6:30am ET (and Forum!)https://forum.curlynikki.com/▶▶Join our new forum, GoOD Friends and enter the Mala Giveaway!Support the show:▶▶https://www.patreon.com/goodmornings________________________________________Today's Quotes:"I have issued from a Great Powerand visit all who contemplate me;I have been discoveredby those who search diligently.Pay attention, those that meditateupon me, and listen well! All of you who are patiently waiting,take me to your Self.Don't dismiss me from your mindand don't let your inner voicesdespise me; don't forget me at anytime or place; be watchful..."-Alan Jacobs, 'Thunder' from The Gnostic Gospels"When we close our physical eyes we see darkness inside but as we cross this void of darkness following the meditation practice of the Saints, there is Light. Beyond the silence there is Sound."-James Bean via IG @santmat"Be within your body. Light the inner lamp that your within and without may sparkle with Radiance Divine. In Its brilliance let the shadow of your karmas fade.  The NAAM help you steer through this ocean of life and death."-Kabir"I Am the Light of the world," declared Jesus (John 8:12), but he also said, 'you are the Light of the world. (Matthew 5:I4). A paradox? Or, perhaps, insight into the essential unity between Christ and creation that forms the foundation of the mystical life?The light that shines in us is the light of Christ shining through us. This is not something we have to make happen; it is something we must allow to happen. Not something we achieve, something we receive.Yet to bask in that Christ-light within, we need to open ourselves to receive it.The sunflower turns over the course of the day so that its blossom always faces the sun. Likewise, mystics continually recalibrate their lives to embrace the Divine light. Illumination may come from within, but its source is heavenly."-Carl McColman, The Little Book of Christian MysticsSupport the show

If things in your life aren't going good right now... good. Things always get worse before they get better. Like any renovation or spring cleaning you've ever witnessed,dust gets stirred up, things get pulled out, stuff gets thrown away... sorted. Space is made. Be thankful for this Space.Even though It looks empty.He'll make It full again.It already is, but your eyes can't see. Trust. And bear witness.I Love you, Niknikki@curlynikki.comp.s. Love isn't a feeling, It's beyond. Feelings are distortions of Love.   ▶▶LOVE CHARGING STATION, Live, Daily, Group Practice-  6:30am ET (and Forum!)https://forum.curlynikki.com/▶▶Join our new forum, GoOD Friends and enter the Mala Giveaway!Support the show:▶▶https://www.patreon.com/goodmornings________________________________________Today's Quotes:  "The Name is unseen because it is the enigma of the unseen, which comes to ears that are full of Him.Our Father's name is unutterable, but known through His Son.The Name is Great.Who will be capable of uttering His holy Name?Only our Father, who owns the Name, and his sons, in whom the Name lives.Since our Father is unborn, He alone is the One who created for Himself the Name, before He created the Aeons, so that His Name as Father might rule as Lord.That is His Name in Truth, stable in control, through His flawless force."-The Gnostic Gospels, Alan Jacobs"Way MakerMiracle WorkerPromise KeeperLight in the Darkness"-@worshipblog via IG"God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain."-C. S. Lewis via @worshipblog IG"My feelings are not God. God is God.My feelings do not define truth.God's word defines truth.My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives.And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth.When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.- John Piper, Finally Alive via IG @worshipblob"What you hear clearly between your two ears. shout from the roof tops."-The Gnostic Gospels, Alan Jacobs"Note to self:Don't seek to be relevant, or liked, seek to be undeniable.Seek to be compassionate.Seek integrity.Seek humility. Seek Light."-@worshipblog via IG“I want that love that moved the mountains.I want that love that split the ocean.I want that love that made the winds tremble.I want that love that roared like thunder.I want that love that will raise the dead.I want that love that lifts us to ecstasy.I want that love that is the silence of eternity.”-Rumi "You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last..."-Jesus (John 15:16)  Support the show

The Season After Pentecost, Thursday, Proper 28, in the Church Calendar This week we are following the Daily Office lectionary with an episode Monday through Friday. Our general order and lectionary comes from the Book of Common Prayer Daily Office. We'll sing the song “Your Grace is Enough” by Matt Maher. We'll then offer a Prayer of Confession. We'll read Psalm 105:1-22 followed by the Gloria Patri. Our Scripture Lesson is Luke 17:20-37 . We'll say the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Collect of the Day. We'll then have a time of prompted prayer. If you have a prayer request please submit it here. Sign up here for the email list. Visit Patreon to give and support Morning Prayer monthly. Go to PayPal to give a one-time gift. Photo by Alan Jacobs. Collect of the Day Proper 28, Rite Two Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/prayerandworship/message

The Season After Pentecost, Thursday, Proper 28, in the Church Calendar This week we are following the Daily Office lectionary with an episode Monday through Friday. Our general order and lectionary comes from the Book of Common Prayer Daily Office. We'll sing the song “Your Grace is Enough” by Matt Maher. We'll then offer a Prayer of Confession. We'll read Psalm 105:1-22 followed by the Gloria Patri. Our Scripture Lesson is Luke 17:20-37 . We'll say the Apostles' Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Collect of the Day. We'll then have a time of prompted prayer. If you have a prayer request please submit it here. Sign up here for the email list. Visit Patreon to give and support Morning Prayer monthly. Go to PayPal to give a one-time gift. Photo by Alan Jacobs. Collect of the Day Proper 28, Rite Two Blessed Lord, who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

On this episode of Maxim and Marnie, We are joined by OSLC's council chair, Alan Jacobs. He's a pastor's kid and tells his story about growing up in the church. He also credits God to bringing him to this place with his family. Thanks for sharing your story Alan! 

Welcome back to The Literary Life this week and the continuation of our series on Hard Times by Charles Dickens. After some autumnal chit-chat, our hosts Angelina, Cindy, and Thomas dive into the plot of the end of Book 2. They open discussing Stephen's fate and Tom Gradgrind's destructive, devouring nature. They highlight Mrs. Sparsit and her similarities to a harpy and other imagery surrounding her denoting evil. Some other ideas discussed are good intentions with bad results, the concept of the fallen woman in Victorian times, Louisa's homecoming and confession, and the failure of a formula in imparting virtue. Head over to MorningTimeforMoms.com to get signed up for Dawn Duran's webinar on “A Reasoned Patriotism.” Commonplace Quotes: Beware of the superficial knowledge of cold facts. Beware of sinful ratiocination, for it kills the heart, and when heart and mind have died in a man, there art cannot dwell. Caspar David Friedrich I don't think they are noticeably worse at reading or writing than they were all those decades ago, though they're less likely to have a lot of experience with the standard academic essay (introduction, three major points, conclusion) — which I do not see as a major deficiency. That kind of essay was never more than a highly imperfect tool for teaching students how to read carefully and write about what they have read, and, frankly, I believe that over the years I have come up with some better ones. Alan Jacobs, from Snakes and Ladders The hours of unsponsored, uninspected, perhaps even forbidden, reading, the ramblings, and the “long, long thoughts” in which those of luckier generations first discovered literature and nature and themselves are a thing of the past. C. S. Lewis, from “Lilies that Fester” A Daughter of Eve by Christina Rossetti A fool I was to sleep at noon,  And wake when night is chilly  Beneath the comfortless cold moon;  A fool to pluck my rose too soon,  A fool to snap my lily.  My garden-plot I have not kept;  Faded and all-forsaken,  I weep as I have never wept:  Oh it was summer when I slept,  It's winter now I waken.  Talk what you please of future spring  And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—  Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,  No more to laugh, no more to sing,  I sit alone with sorrow.  Book List: The World's Last Night: and Other Essays by C. S. Lewis Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Esther Waters by George Moore Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell Pictures from Italy by Charles Dickens Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy's own Patreon page also! Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let's get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Alan Jacobs joins Cherie Harder to discuss his book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Readers Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. This podcast is an edited version of the Online Conversation, which you can find with video and transcript, here.We encourage you to put the ideas discussed in this episode into practice by starting your own reading group. The Trinity Forum Bookclub Box has everything you need to get started.

Reading & The Common Good is our new podcast series with Jessica Hooten Wilson, Karen Swallow Prior, Alan Jacobs, Dana Gioia, Anika Prather, and Matthew Lee Anderson. Few things in life are as enriching and humanizing as reading deeply and well. Yet the pace and technology of modern life make it hard for many of us to give books the time and attention they demand. Join us this season as we hear from guests who explain the value of reading in community, reading alone, reading old books, reading new books, and, above all, how reading serves as an antidote to the many problems of our time. If you're interested in leading your own reading group, we encourage you to visit our website. There you'll find information about our newly announced Bookclub Box. The Bookclub Box is designed to make it easy for you to host your own reading group. Each quarter will release a new box with a trio of curated, thematically linked Trinity Forum Readings. You'll also get a discussion guide to spur conversation on each of the Readings, as well as some other great Trinity Forum items, including a tote bag, notepad, pen and bookmark.

In this week's conversation between Dr. James Emery White and co-host Alexis Drye, they discuss the life of C.S. Lewis - one of the most influential Christian thinkers in modern history. From his talks to his writings, “Jack” (as his friends called him) was also undoubtedly one of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th century. He had an incredible gift for taking complicated topics and translating them in such a way that anyone could understand them. And Dr. White shares the influence that C.S. Lewis had on his life, in particular, as a spiritual mentor. Episode Links Any conversation about C.S. Lewis must include the books that he's written that continue to speak into the lives of each new generation. Anyone not familiar with C.S. Lewis should begin with Mere Christianity, a work that is a compilation of addresses that he gave on BBC radio to explain the Christian faith. For those interested in learning more about the life of C.S. Lewis we would encourage you to read two of his autobiographies - Surprised By Joy and A Grief Observed - as well as two biographies - The Narnian by Alan Jacobs and The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter. The Screwtape Letters and Men Without Chests are worth going back to read if you've been a Christ follower for some time. And finally, The Chronicles of Narnia as well as The Space Trilogy are both fun series to check out. He also referenced an essay written by Lewis called "Modern Man and His Categories of Thought," from Present Concerns (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1986). C.S. Lewis not only influenced Dr. White's spiritual journey, but also his writing. In his recent book, Christianity for People Who Aren't Christians, Dr. White explains in the introduction that C.S. Lewis will accompany the reader on the journey through the book. Special permission was received from the C.S. Lewis Foundation to share several excerpts from his writings. You can also read more about Dr. White's time in Oxford and C.S. Lewis' influence in his ebook A Traveler's Guide to the Kingdom. Dr. White has also written several blogs drawing from C.S. Lewis' life and writings. “C.S. Lewis and Covid” was written at the beginning of the global pandemic. “Rethinking Evangelism with C.S. Lewis” was a 2016 blog about the need to shift evangelism to both a process and event. And finally, you may enjoy reading “Celebrating the Birth of C.S. Lewis.” For those of you who are new to Church & Culture, we'd love to invite you to subscribe (for free of course) to the twice-weekly Church & Culture blog and check out the Daily Headline News - a collection of headlines from around the globe each weekday.

Last May, the day after the horrific school shooting took place in Uvalde, Texas, social media lit up with a back and forth that shows just how divided we are as a nation. I got to thinking about the best place to respond, as we must, to the tragedies that take place in our world. I truly believe that the evil in our world which rattles us to the core must be discussed and acted upon. The Gospel demands it. But it's wise to choose where we discuss how we should act and respond. The great temptation is always to jump online to social media and to engage in what's called virtue signaling and performative allyship. All too often, conversations that should be had one-on-one and face-to-face are taking place through sound bytes thrown around online. Alan Jacobs once wrote, The internet is a mugger that demands an immediate response. We need to show personal restraint while teaching our kids that the most constructive conversations in difficult times will take place off line.

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture. This is what counts as a relatively short post around here, 1800 words or so, about a certain habit of mind that online spaces seem to foster. Almost one year ago, this exchange on Twitter caught my attention, enough so that I took a moment to capture it with a screen shot, thinking I’d go on to write about it at some point. Set aside for a moment whatever your particular thoughts might be on the public debate, if we can call it that, over vaccines, vaccine messaging, vaccine mandates, etc. Instead, consider the form of the claim, specifically the “anti-anti-” framing. I think I first noticed this peculiar way of talking about (or around) an issue circa 2016. In 2020, contemplating the same dynamics, I observed that “social media, perhaps Twitter especially, accelerates both the rate at which we consume information and the rate at which ensuing discussion detaches from the issue at hand, turning into meta-debates about how we respond to the responses of others, etc.” So by the time the Nyhan quote-tweeted Rosen last summer, the “anti-anti-” framing, to my mind, had already entered its mannerist phase. The use of “anti-anti-ad infinitum” is easy to spot, and I’m sure you’ve seen the phrasing deployed on numerous occasions. But the overt use of the “anti-anti-” formulation is just the most obvious manifestation of a more common style of thought, one that I’ve come to refer to as meta-positioning. In the meta-positioning frame of mind, thinking and judgment are displaced by a complex, ever-shifting, and often fraught triangulation based on who holds certain views and how one might be perceived for advocating or failing to advocate for certain views. In one sense, this is not a terribly complex or particularly novel dynamic. Our pursuit of understanding is often an uneasy admixture of the desire to know and the desire to be known as one who knows by those we admire. Unfortunately, social media probably tips the scale in favor of the desire for approval given its rapid fire feedback mechanisms. Earlier this month, Kevin Baker commented on this same tendency in a recent thread that opened with the following observation, “A lot of irritating, mostly vapid people and ideas were able to build huge followings in 2010s because the people criticizing them were even worse.” Baker goes on to call this “the decade of being anti-anti-” and explains that he felt like he spent “the better part of the decade being enrolled into political and discursive projects that I had serious reservations about because I disagreed [with] their critics more and because I found their behavior reprehensible.” In his view, this is a symptom of the unchecked expansion of the culture wars. Baker again: “This isn't censorship. There weren't really censors. It's more a structural consequence of what happens when an issue gets metabolized by the culture war. There are only two sides and you just have to pick the least bad one.” I’m sympathetic to this view, and would only add that perhaps it is more specifically a symptom of what happens when the digitized culture wars colonize ever greater swaths of our experience. I argued a couple of years ago that just as industrialization gave us industrial warfare, so digitization has given us digitized culture warfare. My argument was pretty straightforward: “Digital media has dramatically enhanced the speed, scale, and power of the tools by which the culture wars are waged and thus transformed their norms, tactics, strategies, psychology, and consequences.” Take a look at the piece if you missed it. I’d say, too, that the meta-positioning habit of mind might also be explained as a consequence of the digitally re-enchanted discursive field. I won’t bog down this post, which I’m hoping to keep relatively brief, with the details of that argument, but here’s the most relevant bit:For my purposes, I’m especially interested in the way that philosopher Charles Taylor incorporates disenchantment theory into his account of modern selfhood. The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a porous, and thus vulnerable self. The disenchanted world yielded an experience of a buffered self, which was sealed off, as the term implies, from beneficent and malignant forces beyond its ken. The porous self depended upon the liturgical and ritual health of the social body for protection against such forces. Heresy was not merely an intellectual problem, but a ritual problem that compromised what we might think of, in these times, as herd immunity to magical and spiritual forces by introducing a dangerous contagion into the social body. The answer to this was not simply reasoned debate but expulsion or perhaps a fiery purgation.Under digitally re-enchanted conditions, policing the bounds of the community appears to overshadow the value of ostensibly objective, civil discourse. In other words, meta-positioning, from this perspective, might just a matter of making sure you are always playing for the right team, or at least not perceived to be playing for the wrong one. It’s not so much that we have something to say but that we have a social space we want to be seen to occupy. But as I thought about the meta-positioning habit of mind recently, another related set of considerations came to mind, one that is also connected to the digital media ecosystem. As a point of departure, I’d invite you to consider a recent post from Venkatesh Rao about “crisis mindsets.” “As the world has gotten more crisis prone at all levels from personal to geopolitical in the last few years,” Rao explained, “the importance of consciously cultivating a more effective crisis mindset has been increasingly sinking in for me.” I commend the whole post to you, it offers a series of wise and humane observations about how we navigate crisis situations. Rao’s essay crossed my feed while I was drafting this post about meta-positioning, and these lines near the end of the essay caught my attention: “We seem to be entering a historical period where crisis circumstances are more common than normalcy. This means crisis mindsets will increasingly be the default, not flourishing mindsets.”I think this is right, but it also has a curious relationship to the digital media ecosystem. I can imagine someone arguing that genuine crisis circumstances are no more common now than they have ever been but that digital media feeds heighten our awareness of all that is broken in the world and also inaccurately create a sense of ambient crisis. This argument is not altogether wrong. In the digital media ecosystem, we are enveloped by an unprecedented field of near-constant information emanating from the world far and near, and the dynamics of the attention economy also encourage the generation of ambient crisis. But two things can both be true at the same time. It is true, I think, that we are living through a period during which crisis circumstances have become more frequent. This is, in part, because the structures, both social and technological, of the modern world do appear increasingly fragile if not wholly decrepit. It is also true that our media ecosystem heightens our awareness of these crisis circumstances (generating, in turn, a further crisis of the psyche) and that it also generates a field of faux crisis circumstances. Consequently, learning to distinguish between a genuine crisis and a faux crisis will certainly be an essential skill. I would add that it is also critical to distinguish among the array of genuine crisis circumstances that we encounter. Clearly, some will bear directly and unambiguously upon us—a health crisis, say, or a weather emergency. Others will bear on us less directly or acutely, and others still will not bear on us at all. Furthermore, there are those we will be able to address meaningfully through our actions and those we cannot. We should, therefore, learn to apportion our attention and our labors wisely and judiciously. But let’s come back to the habit of mind with which we began. If we are, in fact, inhabiting a media ecosystem that, through sheer scale and ubiquity, heightens our awareness of all that is wrong with the world and overwhelms pre-digital habits of sense-making and crisis-management, then meta-positioning might be more charitably framed as a survival mechanism. As Rao noted, “I have realized there is no such thing as being individually good or bad in a crisis. Humans either deal with crises in effective groups, or not at all.” Just as digital re-enchantment retrieves the communal instinct, so too, perhaps, does the perma-crisis mindset. Recalling, Baker’s analysis, we might even say that the digitized culture war layered over the crisis circumstances intensifies the stigma of breaking ranks. There’s one last perspective I’d like to offer on the meta-positioning habit of mind. It also seems to suggest something like a lack of grounding or a certain aimlessness. There is a picture that is informing my thinking here. It is the picture of being adrift in the middle of the ocean with no way to get our bearings. Under these circumstances the best we can ever do is navigate away from some imminent danger, but we can never purposefully aim at a destination. So we find ourselves adrift in the vast digital ocean, and we have no idea what we are doing there or what we should be doing. All we know is that we are caught up in wave after wave of the discourse and the best we can do is to make sure we steer clear of obvious perils and keep our seat on whatever raft we find ourselves in, which may be in shambles but, nonetheless, affords us the best chance of staying afloat. So, maybe the meta-positioning habit of mind is what happens when I have clearer sense of what I am against than what I am for. Or maybe it is better to say that meta-positioning is what happens when we lack meaningful degrees of agency and are instead offered the simulacra of action in digitally mediated spheres, which generally means saying things about things and about the things other people are saying about the things—the “internet of beefs,” as Rao memorably called it. The best we can do is survive the beefs by making sure we’re properly aligned. To give it yet another turn, perhaps the digital sea through which we navigate takes the form of a whirlpool sucking us into the present. The whirlpool is a temporal maelstrom, keeping us focused on immediate circumstances, unable to distinguish, without sufficient perspective, between the genuine and the faux crisis. Under such circumstances, we lack what Alan Jacobs, borrowing the phrase from novelist Thomas Pynchon, has called “temporal bandwidth.” In Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a character explains the concept: “temporal bandwidth is the width of your present, your now … The more you dwell in the past and future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of Now, the more tenuous you are.” Paradoxically, then, the more focused we are on the present, the less of a grip we’re able to get on it. As Jacobs notes, the same character went on to say, “It may get to where you’re having trouble remembering what you were doing five minutes ago.” Indeed, so. Jacobs recommends extending our temporal bandwidth through a deliberate engagement with the past through our reading as well as a deliberate effort to bring the more distant future into our reckoning. As the philosopher Hans Jonas, whom Jacobs cites, encouraged us to ask, “What force shall represent the future in the present?” The point is that we must make an effort to wrest our gaze away from the temporal maelstrom, and to do so not only in the moment but as a matter of sustained counter-practice. Perhaps then we’ll be better equipped to avoid the meta-positioning habit of mind, which undoubtedly constrains our ability to think clearly, and to find better ways of navigating the choppy, uncertain waters before us. Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Scott and Cole are joined by Andy Little to discuss the role of corporations, corporate responsibilities, and Christian ethics in the corporate world. Andy wants the world to know that "lawyers really don't go by doctor" ;-) Links: Peter Wehner, "The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart," The Atlantic, Oct. 24, 2021 (quoting Alan Jacobs). Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company, 1981 "J&J's Controversial Bankruptcy Strategy Upheld by Judge" by Stephen Church "J&J's ‘Texas Two-Step' Talc Bankruptcy Strategy Remains in Doubt" by James Nani "A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market" by Wilhelm Ropke "Judge Greenlights J&J Strategy to Resolve Talc Lawsuits in Bankruptcy Court" by Dietrich Knauth and Tom Hals Contact Us: Email: cpsquarepodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @cp_square Dr. Self's Website: jscottself.com Privacy Policy: Privacy Policy

In our last episode, we discussed Jonathan Haidt's Atlantic piece in which he argues that social media has brought about "structural stupidity." But what if that's a bit dismissive and reductive? Alan Jacobs, another thinker we appreciate, makes the case that there may be something a bit more sinister at work behind the mechanisms that amplify our voices. Join Nathan and Cameron as they bring spiritual warfare to bear on the discussion of social media.

Our Reviews Editor, Lila Stiff, reads Cheryl Sadowski's piece, "On Temporal Tranquility," a review of the book Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs. Cheryl Sadowski writes creative nonfiction from Northern Virginia, where she works in nonprofit management. Her writing explores memory, time, natural and cultural landscapes. Cheryl's work has appeared in The Broadkill Review, EcoTheo Review, After the Art, and the 2020 Bay to Ocean Anthology. Follow Cheryl's words and pictures on Instagram and Twitter @cherylsadowski. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vita-poetica/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/vita-poetica/support

Jonathan and Ryan continue their discussion of Alan Jacobs's book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. This book stars C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, Jacques Maritain, and T.S. Eliot, and on this episode of New Humanists, your hosts continue to tease out the implications for our current transhumanist moment, hitting on technology, education, the family, and power. This is the second part of a two-part look into the Jacobs book.Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651Cicero's Pro Archia Poeta: https://amzn.to/3phQwS1Free in Latin: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Pro_A._Licinio_Archia_poetaFree in English: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DArch.The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in Latin: https://archive.org/details/MN5140ucmf_2/page/n71/mode/2upThe Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity in English: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0324.htmSimone Weil's The Iliad or the Poem of Force: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780820463612Free in French: https://teuwissen.ch/imlift/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Weil-L_Iliade_ou_le_poeme_de_la_force.pdfFree in English: http://www.holoka.com/pdf-files/weil.pdfLinks may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Until about a year or so ago, most of us felt understandably smug when measuring our modern selves next to our ancient ancestors. We are manifestly more advanced — scientifically, morally and, it can be said, rather literally, since we now know that the universe is expanding. We’ve clearly taken considerable steps along the misty path of improvement. Just look around!This rosy view of humanity as carried along by a steady current of progress is known among those in my profession as "whig history," after those who cast their lot with Britain's parliament, as opposed to its monarchy. And though it has long been ridiculed by historians, this whig view continues to inform a popular understanding of the passage of time.The past 18 months, however, have frustrated that reckoning. The pandemic, how little we knew about the virus and how poorly we managed its global spread, shook us out of our complacency. And the brutal murder of George Floyd made us question triumphalist narratives of American history that rely on giant leaps forward from our original sins. Painfully and conspicuously, we were reminded, history is not a linear jaunt toward enlightenment.In addition to the defiant dismissal of scientific consensus and the devaluing of Black lives, both with devastating consequences, there's another danger now lurking: We claim to have disavowed the vigilante justice of the posse and the lynch mob, only to embrace it on social media, in what many on the right decry as cancel culture. Never mind that the dreaded word — C-A-N-C-E-L-L-E-D — is wielded up and down the ideological spectrum with the thoughtfulness of a rubber stamp.What is most notable to me, as an historian, is the apparent tribalism that undergirds cancel culture and what it says about the fragility of our social fabric. We are living through an age of public denunciation in which people, objects, art and ideas are under knee-jerk attack. Calls to cancel — and the inevitable dog-piles that form as a result — are not based on careful consideration of evidence or context. They seem motivated by a desire to “perform” belonging, to zealously adopt the approved posture of a group and to be seen to be doing the “right” thing by others of your tribe. Resorting to a predetermined playbook is an indication of just how resistant we’ve become to the arduous, if ultimately rewarding, work of thinking. As the literary critic Alan Jacobs put it:[W]e suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?How, then, do we see our way past this scorched-earth policy to scrub out anything that conflicts with our own current orthodoxy? Or is it too late? Subscribe to Banished and join us as we attempt to answer these questions — with nuance, complexity and, yes, thinking.Please consider a paid subscription to Booksmart Studios! It’s only $7/month or $70/year and will get you extra podcast episodes, extended guest interviews and an opportunity to engage directly with our hosts. Plus, you’ll be supporting all of the work we do here at Booksmart.Banished is just one of at least three shows that we’ll launch during July and August. Others include:Bully Pulpit: A wry and pointed take on politics, media and society from longtime public radio personality Bob Garfield. His astute cultural criticism, infused with wit and humor, has been called “absolutely necessary” and “very brave.”Lexicon Valley: A close examination of language — its power to inform and misinform, to elucidate and obfuscate — from renowned Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. A true polymath, McWhorter will analyze the words and phrases that dominate our discourse and make the headlines.And finally: As we craft the first season of Banished, we want to hear from you. What topics do you want us to tackle? Which voices do you want to hear from? Simply comment below, or tweet to us at @BooksmartSocial. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit banished.substack.com/subscribe

Jonathan and Ryan dive into Alan Jacobs's book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. This book stars C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, Jacques Maritain, and T.S. Eliot, and on this episode of New Humanists, your hosts tease out the implications for our current transhumanist moment, hitting on technology, education, the family, and power. This is the first part of a two-part look into the Jacobs book.Alan Jacobs's The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780190864651Cicero's Pro Archia Poeta: https://amzn.to/3phQwS1Free in Latin: https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Pro_A._Licinio_Archia_poetaFree in English: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0019%3Atext%3DArch.W.H. Auden's “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times” recited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZE_bhSUgG8W.H. Auden's “Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times” text: https://archive.harpers.org/1947/06/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1947-06-0032956.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJUM7PFZHQ4PMJ4LA&Expires=1553827144&Signature=Dsmaq0Xss%2BBFcR24N4Kx%2FnpjYng%3DC.S. Lewis's “Learning in War-Time”: https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/Lewis.Learning%20in%20War-Time.pdfLinks may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, which supports local bookstores.Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

On Friday, July 10th we welcomed distinguished professor, author, and scholar Alan Jacobs to discuss his ever-timely book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. In his book, Jacobs describes how after the second World War, five Christian intellectuals presented strikingly similar visions for the moral and spiritual renewal of their countries.Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil all believed the renewal of their respective societies in the aftermath of World War II would come through education that was grounded in a Christian understanding of the power and limitations of human beings. Alan helped us consider the ways our world is changing due to our current crisis, and look back to these Christian intellectuals and their vision for cultivating a flourishing society and rebuilding a shared sense of the common good after world-wide disruption. We hope you enjoy this conversation!Watch the full Online Conversation and read the transcript here.Learn more about Alan Jacobs.Alan Jacobs' Books:Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a more Tranquil Mind, The Year of our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. Baylor University Great Texts ProgramAuthors and books mentioned in the conversation:Education at the Crossroads by Jacques MaritainThe Abolition of Man by C.S. LewisVocation and Society, a lecture given at Swarthmore College by W.H. AudenChristianity and Culture by T.S. ElliotBetween Past and Future, by Hannah ArendtRationalism in Politics, by Michael OakeshottRoberts Coles - Harvard Professor.Bleak House, by Charles DickensC.S. Lewis - “The Inner Ring,” “Membership,” Abolition of Man, That Hideous Strength.Leszek KolakowskiGeorge Eliot Søren KierkegaardRelated Trinity Forum Readings and Resources: Wrestling with God, by Simone Weil Origins of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell How Much Land Does A Man Need, by Leo Tolstoy A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens Poetry, Imagination, and Spiritual Formation, an Evening Conversation with Dana Gioia featuring the poetry of W.H. Auden. The Decadent Society, an Evening Conversation with Ross Douthat and Christine Emba.  Alan Jacobs is a scholar, English literature, a writer, a literary critic. He's a distinguished professor of the humanities and the honors college at Baylor university and previously taught for nearly 30 years at Wheaton college in Illinois, a prolific author and a wide ranging thinker. He's written for such publications as The Atlantic, Harper's, Comment, The New Yorker, the Weekly Standard and the Hedgehog Review and has published more than 15 different books on a wide range of topics from literature, technology theology and cognitive psychology, including How to Think, The Book of Common Prayer, the book we're discussing today, The Year of our Lord 1943, which was named by the Wall Street Journal is one of their best books on politics for the year of 2018 and many more, including the forthcoming book, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a more Tranquil Mind, which is available now.

Dean Still's guest will be Dr. Alan Jacobs, Baylor University Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program and Resident Fellow of the Institute for the Studies of Religion. A conversation about his recently published book Breaking Bread with the Dead as well as other books he has written.

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

Special thanks to Ned Bustard for the artwork and Andrew Peterson for the music!

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

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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

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

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

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

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 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was tasked by the Free French government with writing a report exploring how French society might be revitalized after its liberation from Nazi Germany. Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind. I was immediately struck by how Weil began her report. In the midst of a global cataclysm of unprecedented scope and scale, tasked with drawing up plans for the renewal of society, she begins by arguing for the primacy of human obligations rather than human rights. The very first sentence reads: “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.” Quite the claim coming from a French thinker, as she is well aware. As Weil sees it, rights are ineffective so long as no one recognizes a corresponding obligation, and obligations are always grounded in our common humanity. “Duty toward the human being as such—that alone is eternal,” she writes. Our obligations toward our fellow human beings, Weil goes on to argue, “correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.” Some of these needs are physical, of course—housing, clothing, security, etc.—but Weil identified another set of needs, which she described as having to do not with the “physical side” of life but with what she calls life's “moral side.” The non-physical needs “form … a necessary condition of our life on this earth.” In her view, if these needs are not satisfied, “we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death.” And while she acknowledges that these needs are “much more difficult to recognize and to enumerate than are the needs of the body,” she believes “every one recognizes they exist.”I'm inclined to believe that Weil is right about this. As she suggests, “everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man's life without injuring his body.” Weil goes on to call for an investigation into what these vital needs might be. They should be enumerated and defined, and she warns that “they must never be confused with desires, whims, fancies and vices.” Finally, she believes that “the lack of any such investigation forces governments, even when their intentions are honest, to act sporadically and at random.” Naturally, the rest of the work is an attempt to provide just such an enumeration and discussion of these vital needs with the express purpose of supplying a foundation for the rebuilding of French society. She deals briefly with a set of fourteen such needs before turning to a longer discussion of “rootedness” and “uprootedness,” a discussion which opens with this well-known claim: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” It is useful to pair this claim with Hannah Arendt's discussion of loneliness, alienation, and superfluousness, which, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she identifies as ideal conditions for the emergence of totalitarian regimes. “Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances,” Arendt wrote, “we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” Combining Weil and Arendt, then, we might say that to the degree that the need for rootedness—which is to say, a sense of belonging in relatively stable communities—goes unfulfilled, to that same degree human beings become vulnerable to destructive political regimes. My aim here, however, is not to discuss the merits of Weil's particular enumeration of these vital needs nor to elaborate on Arendt's argument. Rather, it is simply to recommend that we, too, undertake a similar radical analysis along the lines Weil proposed, recalling, of course, that our word radical comes to us from radix, the Latin word for roots. In other words, as we examine the multiple ills that beset our society, it may be that by returning to a fundamental consideration of human needs we may find the resources that lead to cultural renewal. Presently, we are focused on formal injustices that manifest themselves in key institutions. This work is always crucial, but its essentially critical nature may prove inadequate to the task of building a good society. To borrow a set of distinctions made by the philosopher Albert Borgmann, we may achieve a formally just society and still not have a good society. In other words, it may be possible in theory to eliminate political and economic inequalities without also providing for genuine human flourishing. Moreover, Borgmann argued that without a vision for a good society, even formal justice may prove unachievable. In his last essay for this newsletter, Dr. Horner wrote about the inadequacies of a posthumanist framing of our cultural disorders, one which accounts only for our differences without also recognizing our shared humanity or providing a vision for what a society ordered toward the common good might look like. He challenged his Christian readers, especially, to recover a distinctly Christian humanism as a foundation for our pursuit of justice. As Dr. Horner reminded us, the posthumanist framing of our experience emerged out of the distinctly modern understanding of the human being, one which ruled out any normative account of human nature or human purpose. And as Alasdair MacIntyre, among others, has pointed out, the loss of a model of human flourishing undermined all efforts to formulate a new moral theory to replace traditional models of the ethical life.Clearly this posthumanist framing poses a serious challenge to any effort to imagine a good society ordered toward virtue and human flourishing. But perhaps Weil's project offers us a way forward, a renewed humanism premised not merely upon human exceptionalism and self-sufficiency but rather upon human needs, interdependence, and mutual obligations. Indeed, it recalls MacIntyre's own efforts to reground an account of human nature not merely upon our capacity for reason, as was typical of the classical tradition, but also upon upon our fundamentally dependent status as human creatures. We are, as the title of a 1999 work puts it, “dependent rational animals.” The mere acknowledgement of our dependent status and a renewed attention to what constitutes genuine human needs, the satisfaction of which can serve as the foundation of a good society, will hardly heal all our rifts. And a determination of how exactly our dependence is manifested and what are, in fact, genuine needs will itself be a source of debate and contention. But it may prove a more productive starting point than those which currently frame our public discourse. Over the coming weeks, this newsletter will feature a series of reflections exploring both the nature and conditions of human flourishing as well as the forces that undermine such flourishing. We hope these reflections will prove helpful to those seeking a thoughtful and faithful way to address the myriad of problems that now confront us. Michael SacasasAssociate DirectorStudy Center ResourcesThis week, we especially want to draw your attention to our Zoom reading group on Tuesday, September 29th, at 8:00 p.m. We will be joined by Dr. Zena Hitz, the author of Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Dr. Hitz will discuss her work with Mike Sacasas during the first part of the evening and then field questions from participants. Please feel free to join in even if you have not read Lost In Thought. Use this link to join the Zoom session.The rest of our program enters its third full week with our Director's classes meeting via Zoom and in-person and our Dante group meeting 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— In “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, examines the challenges posed by GPT-3, a program that is capable of churning out meaningful text:The letters in GPT-3 stand for “generative pre-trained transformer.” It works by taking text input  and predicting what comes next. The model was trained on several massive data sets, including Wikipedia and Common Crawl (a nonprofit dedicated to “providing a copy of the internet to internet researchers”). In generating text, GPT-3 may return facts or drop the names of relevant public figures. It can produce computer code, poems, journalistic-sounding articles that reference the real world, tweets in the style of a particular account, or long theoretical essays on par with what a middling freshman philosophy student might write.— Alan Jacobs reflects on the value of plurality (as opposed to pluralism):In a recent conversation with Cherie Harder of the Trinity Forum, I recommended what I called — then half-jokingly, and now that I think about it more seriously — the Gandalf Option. I take that phrase from something Galdalf says to Denethor, the Steward of Gondor, who believes that Gandalf is plotting to rule that kingdom:“The rule of no realm is mine, neither of Gondor nor any other, great or small. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I also am a steward. Did you not know?” 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 this week's podcast, Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas highlight the study center's offerings after the first full week of fall programming. As Mike and Richard noted, there is still space available in all but Dr. Horner's in-person director's class. Please feel free to join in on any of our offerings. You can email Mike directly with any questions about the program: mike@christianstudycenter.org. Study Center ResourcesThe full fall program is now underway. This week, both Mike and Richard taught in-person and Zoom sections of their director's classes. As you've already noted, audio of those classes will be made available through this newsletter/podcast feed. The Dante reading group is seven cantos into Purgatorio. Participation is open to all, near and far. If you are interested in joining, please email Mike Sacasas at mike@christianstudycenter.org.We enjoyed our first discussion of Zena Hitz's Lost In Thought. In our next meeting on Tuesday, September 29th, Prof. Hitz will join us for an interview and Q/A. Please feel free to join in even if you have not read the book, although, of course, we do encourage you to read Hitz's powerful testimony to the value of the life of the mind. This newsletter will be a hub for our digital presence. Along with twice-monthly essays you can expect twice monthly conversations with Dr. Horner and Mike Sacasas, audio of the director's classes, and occasional interviews with scholars and writers of interest to our community.Dr. Esau McCaulley Book LaunchPlease note as well that the study center is co-sponsoring the book launch for Dr. Esau McCaulley's Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope hosted by the North Carolina Study Center on Wednesday September 23 at 8PM. Dr. McCaulley is assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America You can visit the event page for more details and you can register here. Recommended Reading— From “The Cassiodorus Necessity: Keeping the Faith Alive through Christian Education” by Richard Hughes Gibson:Yet in periods of crisis like our own, our intellectual supply lines become visible. We are reminded that they are fragile like us, and that their maintenance demands investment – of money certainly, but equally importantly of space and time, the space and time of learning. In The Year of Our Lord 1943, Alan Jacobs reminds us that in the midst of World War II a number of leading Christian intellectuals – Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil – dedicated themselves to the task of imagining education's future. They wondered: What kind of schooling will the citizens of postwar Western societies require? What role might the Christian tradition play in their education? They, too, were asking how “what has been received” might be passed on to the rising generation. The pandemic has made this question a pressing one once again, given its massive disruption of the business of education, Christian or otherwise. 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

My guest today is Alan Jacobs, the author of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. Jacobs is a scholar of English literature, writer, and literary critic. He is a distinguished professor of the humanities at Baylor University.In his book, Jacobs offers an insightful and playfully guide on how to make reading pleasurable and enjoyable. You'll learn why you probably don't want to read only Great books, the benefits of writing in your books, the truth about speed reading, and many more wonderful reading tips.TIMESTAMPS:[00:39] About Prof. Alan Jacobs & growing up a reader [02:56] Thoughts on How To Read A Book by Mortimer Alder[06:26] The truth about giving book recommendations  [09:53] The difference between liking to read & liking to have read[11:26] Why you probably don't want to read only Great books[14:35] Great books require a lot of your time, attention, and reflection  [17:24] Niccolo Machiavelli's relationship with books   [21:26] The benefits of writing in your books[24:51] Pros and cons of reading on a Kindle[32:24] The truth about speed reading & why you may be reading too fast already  [36:06] The benefits of rereading books[42:40] Two books that changed Alan's lifeLearn more about the author:Website: ayjay.org***If you enjoy this podcast, please subscribe & leave a positive review.Connect with Alex & Books:Twitter: @alexandbooks_Instagram: @alexandbooks_YouTube: Alex and Books

Poem, "God" from Poetry for the Spirit: An Original Anthology of Insightful Poems, Alan Jacobs, ed.Let me guide you into your Spirit Spot, even if just for a few minutes of your day.Follow me at facebook.com/VitruvianWellnessSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-spirit-spot/donations

Poem, "Amergin" from Poetry for the Spirit: An Original Anthology of Insightful Poems, Alan Jacobs, ed.Let me guide you into your Spirit Spot, even if just for a few minutes of your day.Follow me at facebook.com/VitruvianWellnessSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-spirit-spot/donations

https://canonpress.com/products/the-bondage-of-the-will This week pastor Wilson chats Foreign Intelligence agencies, unpacks the word aspondos, and review Alan Jacobs' book The Year of Our Lord 1943. 

Happy New Year! 

REFLECTION QUOTES “Humility leads to gratitude which sees with wonder, prompting the contemplation that leads to the dilation of the mind.” ~Joseph Pearce, English-born writer in “Distracting Ourselves to Death” “Our ‘ecosystem of interruption technologies' affects our spiritual and moral lives in every aspect. By our immersion in that ecosystem we are radically impeded from achieving a ‘right understanding of ourselves' and of God's disposition toward us. We will not understand ourselves as sinners, or as people made in God's image, or as people spiritually endangered by wandering far from God, or as people made to live in communion with God, or as people whom God has come to a far country in order to seek and to save, if we cannot cease for a few moments from an endless procession of stimuli that shock us out of thought.” ~Alan Jacobs, scholar of English literature “Both seen and unseen powers join To drive my soul astray, But with God's Word a sword of mine, I'll overcome some day. I'll overcome some day, I'll overcome some day; But with God's Word a sword of mine, I'll overcome some day.” ~Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933), American Methodist minister and gospel music composer. “God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions in such a way that human responsibility is minimized or mitigated.” ~D. A. Carson, Canadian-born theologian and Biblical scholar “Pride in the religious sense is a refusal to let God be God.” ~Lewis Smedes (1921-2002), author, ethicist and theologian “To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.” ~Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher and political activist SERMON PASSAGE Titus 1:1-16 (NASB) 1 Paul, a bond-servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the faith of those chosen of God and the knowledge of the truth which is according to godliness, 2 in the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, 3 but at the proper time manifested, even His word, in the proclamation with which I was entrusted according to the commandment of God our Savior, 4 To Titus, my true child in a common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. 5 For this reason I left you in Crete, that you would set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you, 6 namely, if any man is above reproach, the husband of one wife, having children who believe, not accused of dissipation or rebellion. 7 For the overseer must be above reproach as God's steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, 8 but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, 9 holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict. 10 For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision, 11 who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain. 12 One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, “Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” 13 This testimony is true. For this reason reprove them severely so that they may be sound in the faith, 14 not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth. 15 To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. 16 They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed.

After a delicious Christmas dinner and dessert, Aimee, Carl, and Todd relax around the fireplace and answer some Christmas ‘letters' from listeners. For example: Are nativity scenes with baby Jesus in the manger a second commandment violation? Some attribute the origin of Christmas to a pagan tradition, and the Christmas church service as an infringement of the regulative principle of worship. The crew give their views on those, as well as some thoughts on the Reformed position of Advent, and “making room for Jesus in your heart” during this time of the year.Todd's cultural insensitivity is remarkable, but he redeems himself by offering the sole criteria for a children's Christmas pageant. Wanna know who's the most personable of the three, and Carl's alias on Twitter? Don't miss this episode!We are pleased to give away few copies of Love Came Down at Christmas by Sinclair Ferguson. If you'd like the opportunity to win one, register here. The copies are a complimentary gift from our friends at The Good Book Company.Congratulations to the winners of How to Think by Alan Jacobs from our past episode Dear Comrade,.Zachary B. - West Lafayette, INPhilip R. - Northport, ALCynthia C. - Jonesborough, TN

It seems that reading comprehension difficulties are on the rise. That might be due partly to the great technological advancement of social media, and the ability one has these days to communicate, and discuss profound ideas pertaining to life and death, in just 280 characters.Mortification of Spin understands the issue, and steps up to the plate to help those with difficulty comprehending Carl's article, “Is Tim Keller a Marxist?” In this episode, Carl--once again--affirms his distaste for the city, and for Transformationalism...all, while defending a man (who happens to like both) from unfair accusations. Confused? You won't be, after this episode of “The Spin!”Truly yours,The CrewShow NotesIs Tim Keller a Marxist?How to Think by Alan JacobsWe have 3 copies of Alan Jacobs' book to give away! To win a copy of How to Think, register here.