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The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.
Jives with my experience. I’ve only worked with one person in a decade for whom it was clear that he regularly read books about how to do his job well. We read the docs and search the web when the time-pressured task demands it, but we don’t read books. (And I’m as guilty in recent in recent years as anybody.)
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Starting the new year with a little script for making goals:
goals.txt. -
Finished reading: Spiritual Counsels IV: Family Life) by St. Paisios the Athonite 📚
I extracted a few quotes.
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wisdom
The following occurred on the island of Paros during the German occupation. After an act of sabotage by the Greeks against their conquerors, the German commander in retaliation apprehended and decided to execute one hundred and fifty young inhabitants of the island. His decision was final, and despite the supplications and mediations of mayors, bishops, and other prominent islanders, the German commander remained unyielding. Elder Philotheos Zervakos of blessed memory, the abbot of the sacred monastery of Logovarda at that time, invited the German commander along with his entourage to his monastery, intending to offer them hospitality. He gave them a warm reception and offered them a generous meal. He asked for the names of their family members and conducted a Supplicatory Canon to the Mother of God on their behalf. All this deeply touched the German commander. He was soothed, he was transformed, and at the completion of the service he asked Elder Philotheos to request any favor from him, except to revoke the execution of the misfortunate young hostages of the island. Father Philotheos said, “Before making any request, I first want you to give me your word of military honor that you will carry out what I ask.” “You have my word of military honor,” replied the German commander. Then, the ever-memorable Elder said, “I want you to include me with the one hundred and fifty hostages and execute me first.” This astonishing proposal “vanquished” the German commander, and, subsequently, he ordered that all the islanders who had been sentenced to death be released.
I am ever fascinated by the way that the lives of the saints and the virtuous can contribute to my approach to life. That is, I read a lot of things about how to perform well on a pragmatic level, and these assume a modern, analytical approach to life. Do this for that outcome. That’s why you’re here. a necessary and useful aproach, to be sure. Let’s not disparage the practical. But a story like this will not submit itself to that approach. Wisdom is what I need—take a break from the pragmatics, Brian.
(Credit: St. Nektarios Monastery, Roscoe, NY)
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evening
+John the Solitary:
When evening comes, collect your thoughts and ponder over the entire course of the day: observe God’s providential care for you; consider the grace He has wrought in you throughout the whole span of the day; consider the rising of the moon, the joy of daylight, all the hours and moments, the divisions of time, the sight of different colors, the beautiful adornment of creation, the course of the sun, the growth of your own stature, how your own person has been protected, consider the blowing of the winds, the ripe and varied fruits, how the elements minister to your comfort, how you have been preserved from accidents, and all the other activities of grace. When you have pondered on all this, wonder of God’s love toward you will well up within you, and gratitude for his acts of grace will bubble up inside you.”
– The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life
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There are pretty much always some elements of Christian teaching that you can get away with publicly affirming; but you can never get away with affirming them all. If American Christians sixty years ago felt always at home in their social world, that’s because they quietly set aside, or simply managed to avoid thinking about, all the biblical commandments that would render them no longer at ease in the American dispensation. Any Christians who have ever felt completely comfortable in their culture have already edited out of their lives the elements of Christianity that would generate social friction. And no culture that exists, or has ever existed, or ever will exist, is receptive to the whole Gospel.
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Superman ice cream, waffle cone with peanuts.
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birthday cake ice cream, chocolate dip waffle cone.
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Dreamcicle, in a rainbow sprinkle waffle cone, with extra rainbow sprinkles on top.
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Twitter
I recently deleted my Twitter accounts, finally. Watching the spiritual ill that social media creates, in me and others, contributed much to that decision. Alan Jacobs describes the hubris that is allows us to ignore this ill, or, more precisely, to ignore that this ill applies to ourselves.
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Why does the American church today “disapprove of Jesus”? There are many reasons, but I think the essential one, the one from which everything else flows, is this: Jesus tells us to worry about our own moral and spiritual condition rather than that of our neighbor. He tells me to attend to the log in my own eye before I worry about the speck in someone else’s. If my neighbor abuses me, I am to pray for him and bless him. Rather than thanking God that I am not like that [black person, homosexual, Trump supporter] over there, I am to pray “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.”
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Currently reading: Personalism by Emmanuel Mounier 📚
A thousand photographs put together will not amount to a man who walks, thinks and wills (xvii)
There are not, then, stones, trees, animals—and persons, the last being like mobile trees or a more astute kind of animals. The person is not the most marvelous object in the world, nor anything else that we can know from the outside. It is the one reality that we know, and that we were at the same time fashioning from within. Present everywhere, it is given nowhere. (xvii)
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Currently reading: On Human Being: Spiritual Anthropology by Olivier Clément 📚
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Jeanne Lenzer suggests that perhaps nobody has the whole truth on COVID science:
The debates over COVID-19 and the arguments of the past, in which different sides have failed to perceive the possibility that they might not have the whole story, may hold vitally important lessons for President-elect Biden’s COVID-19 task force. Hardened positions, which leave little room for uncertainty and nuance, undermine public trust as various assertions prove wrong.
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concerning the recent report from the Catholic Church
Luke 10:
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side.
“A priest … passed by on the other side.”
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Both New Polity (Marc Barnes, Jacob Imam) and Liz Breunig agree: Laity are (a big part of) the necessary reform in the Catholic Church. Like Iain Provan likes to say, the Reformation is working.
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“Roman Catholicism does not readily distinguish between public and private moral obligations”, and yet Roman Catholic institutions have worked to be exempt from this integration of the Chuch and State spheres. The institutions aim for “the exemption solution”: Catholic hospitals argue their First Ammendment rights free them from, e.g., performing or discussing abortions, and so on. Liz B sees two simultaneous outcomes:
There are those who worry that the exemption solution won’t work forever, and those who worry that it will work too well, shrinking the role of religion in public life and reducing the ranks of the faithful. There are also those, like me (I should note that I, too, am Catholic), who suspect that both may happen at once: that religions whose ethics conflict with the broader culture will shift toward forming small, dense enclaves, where they are unlikely to encounter legal challenges to their preferred practices.
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Liz Bruenig: “It’s just that the Catholic right is no longer recognizably Catholic. Its politics are more or less identical to those of the other members of the right-wing Christian coalition.”
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a wide, barren, featureless liberty
Which is to say that [Biden] is an ordinary Democrat — more or less his explicit pitch. Perhaps Catholics have earned the right to no distinction, the privilege of blending seamlessly into the social and political landscape of the United States, the freedom of having no special moral obligations. And what a wide, barren, featureless liberty it is.
An “American Catholic” or a “Catholic who lives in America”?
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group identities: the essential task
The question, for me, is whether this increasingly widespread abandonment of individualism in favor of group identities can be leveraged to argue on behalf of the kinds of group identities that individualism discarded, especially the ties of family and membership in religious communities. I have my doubts, but I can’t think of anything more essential for those of a conservative disposition or of Christian faith to think about.
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checking email apps only every 36 hours!
The workflow with Hey, my newly-acquired email app from the folks at Basecamp, has me in an excellent workflow. I’m actually considering that I don’t need to open my email applications but every 36 hours or so. Surreal.
Here’s how:
- The app has allowed me to configure several “notify now” contacts: when these folks email, I get a notification on my phone or desktop
- Everything and everybody else can always wait a day and a half or so, right?
Sure, I could have set up a workflow like this myself—I have tried several workflows in this direction—but I didn’t. I didn’t conceive of it in quite the terms that Hey does. My configurations, because they didn’t nail #1 above, never left me confident that I wasn’t leaving somebody or something important hanging by not checking frequently. (I did however dream of writing an app that would filter notifications by contact to my watch.) I’m feeling confident that the right people and the right information can get through to me when it needs to.
And, maybe—just maybe—I may even start referring to the contents of my conversation, rather than the medium. Oh drag, I need to go do some emailing is not a great way to think about it, but we all do it, right? Better to think about the content: Nice, let me see what my close friends and family need from me or want to inform me about. Perhaps we’ll have a fruitful and joyous interaction. Too often, email kills that sense. But who cares by what medium my family or friends deliver content to me—I’m standing ready to help, listen, respond!
Finally (and tangentially!—I couldn’t restst sharing this awesomeness), Hey does this:
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hey
I just became a very happy customer of 37Signal’s email app, “Hey”. You should check it out. They’ve redesigned the entire email experience.
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[Wokeness] is basically a secularized Counter-Reformation.
It has:
- magisterial teaching that one must hold de fide in order to belong
- the pronouncing of anathemas upon those who dissent from that magisterial teaching
- a distributed Inquisition devoted to unearthing and prosecuting heresy
- an ever-growing Index of Prohibited Books
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