Finished reading: Love’s Braided Dance by Norman Wirzba 📚

The introductory essay was excellent.

The way of hope is inspired by an acknowledgment of what can be called the miracle or grace of life itself, the realization that your own life and the lives of others are the never-again-to-be-repeated embodied expressions of life’s primordial, gifted goodness. Affirmation of the love-worthiness of this world is the spark that ignites a hopeful way of being because it calls people to give their love to the world in return. When love is given, the prospect, but not the guarantee, of a better future emerges.

The book mostly dropped off after that, at least for me. But Wirzba does bring it back toward the end of the book. If I get a chance, I may try to say some more about the final chapter. But don’t hold your breath. I’m easily distracted, and lately have the attention span of a

Currently Reading: Love’s Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis by Norman Wirzba 📚

A logic governs the way of hope. It is difficult to articulate because the way of hope is not linear, systematic, or smooth. It does not follow twelve neatly defined steps that, when taken in succession, lead a person into a hopeful manner of being. Instead, it is often meandering and circuitous as people attempt to live faithfully and mercifully with each other. False starts, improper motivations, and harmful choices, but also felicitous decisions, serendipitous encounters, and enduring commitments, often reveal themselves only along the way. This is why this book’s chapters take the form of essays that explore paths into what I take to be hopes animating logic. My aim is to narrate the experiences and journeys of various people so that the heart of a hopeful way of being can come into view.

These chapters, then, are complementary sketches that together draw a picture of what a hopeful life looks like, or, more exactly, they offer a series of improvisational movements that make a compelling theatrical performance in which hope appears. As people go through life, what do they encounter, what should they accept, how should they respond, and to what end? Hope registers as the desire to celebrate and further the loveliness and love-worthiness of this life. When we live a hopeful life, love animates what we do and why we do it.

An excellent book haul this week 📚

Currently waiting to dive into: The Uses of Idolatry by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

I’m waiting because a) I have a few projects around the house that require the attention I’d prefer to give to reading, and b) Cavanaugh’s gracious voice in his attitude toward politics and culture is one that I have a feeling I’m going to need a lot more of after November 5th.

But I couldn’t resist reading the intro a couple weeks ago.

I want, in a way, to present idolatry in a sympathetic light. As St. Paul tells the Athenians in Acts 17, their proclivity to worship is evidence that they are groping for God, and may still find God. Idolatry critique helps to overcome the binary of believers/nonbelievers by showing that we all believe in something; we are spontaneously worshiping creatures whose devotion alights on all sorts of things, in part because we are material creatures, and the material world is beautiful. Following an invisible God is hard for material creatures, so we fixate on things that are closer to hand. Idolatry critique applies equally to those who profess belief in God and those who don’t. We all worship, and we all worship badly, to greater and lesser degrees. Idolatry critique is therefore best understood first and foremost as self-critique, an exercise in cultivating the virtue of humility. I am not so much interested in “idolatry” as a stable and univocal master category by which we can critique others and get our own worship in order; the only remedy for idolatry is ultimately an unmanageable encounter with the living God, one that throws all of our lives into question.

Finished reading: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton 📚

A very enjoyable read. I don’t often delve into the world of quantum anything, but when I do it’s usually fun. (George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance and Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland are two that always come to mind.)

I love not only how diverse Egginton’s subject is, seen through the distinctive lives of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg (literature, philosophy, and science, respectively), but also how incredibly old it is: the book opens with, and never fundamentally moves on from, Plato’s Parmenides dialogues.

Robert Alter said of the 2500-year-old book of Ecclesiastes and its questionably pious epilogue, which arguably sought to “domesticate Qohelet’s doctrinal wildness,” “It is surely attributing far too much naiveté to the ancient readers to imagine that a few dozen words of piety at the end would deflect them from seeing the subversive skepticism emphatically reiterated throughout the text.”

He goes on:

What continues to engage the moral and philosophical imagination … is the writer who unblinkingly saw all human enterprise as herding the wind, who envisaged the same grim fate for rich and poor, for the righteous and the wicked, and who was led to question whether wisdom itself in the end had any advantage over foolishness.

Far from triumph, there is a leveling effect to be found in the heights of human knowledge. Here’s Egginton:

Standing on the precipice of this very instant, we stare into the abyss of the eternal. Desire for that abyss fuels powerful human impulses: romantic ecstasy; religious fervor; artistic creation; compassion for others; even the courage and conviction to transcend our inclinations and do the right thing, no matter the cost to ourselves. But to believe we can exposit that abyss, that we can package it into the language and logic of space and time—to think we can visualize the impossibly small, the infinitely whole, describe the world before its beginning or after its end, know the fate written in our stars—such pretension leads us astray.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like Qohelet.

I mentioned before that it reminded me of Jonathan Pageau’s “Most of the time the earth is flat.” Pageau ends that (first) piece with this:

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

So much wisdom in life simply has not changed in human history. And the real place for it is always right in front of us.

Here’s Egginton again:

We see evidence for the existence of this moral law everywhere, [Kant] said; in the least impressive of our fellows, in the most abominable of men, we can at times glimpse an act of righteousness, a spark of goodness. And when we do, Kant wrote, we can feel our spirit bow down in respect, even if we wish to resist that feeling and remain aloof.

There is a line from Elizabeth Bowen that Christian Wiman has quoted many times and that I think would have made for a fitting end/direction for Egginton’s epilogue:

To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

(I mentioned somewhere else that Sarah Hendren (@ablerism) has two posts on the book — here and here — that are not only excellent reflections but that probably give a better idea of the book’s contents than I have.)

Currently Reading: The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton 📚

Splendid, so far! I’m not sure how well this will follow Egginton’s narrative, but at several points I’ve been reminded of Jonathan Pageau’s 2014 post “Most of the Time the Earth Is Flat,” which was such a great source of conversation once upon a time.

It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them.

Finished reading: Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh 📚

So straight-forward and insightful. I figured before reading Cavanaugh’s new one I would read this little guy (100 pages), sitting on the shelf for who-knows-how-long. If I were a teacher and had students reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, I would have them follow it up with this one for two reasons:

1. While I thoroughly endorse Zuboff’s book, I was disappointed by the scarcity of light, which Cavanaugh does not lack and which he points more convincingly and specifically toward.

2. While Zuboff’s is something of a tour de force, the gist of her argument is old — we have known and been collectively inexcusable for way too much and for way too long. Cavanaugh’s contains, in far fewer pages and in much simpler terms, the essential diagnosis — and it was written a decade earlier.

As Zuboff is at pains to communicate, the “free market” — to say nothing about the surveilled, manipulated and manipulating one — relies on our ignorance. (And we should add, it relies on a large amount of acedia.) Cavanaugh is at pains to say that we are usually asking the wrong question, and by doing so we also avoid the correct answers. The question is not “Is the market free?” but when and to what end?

“The crucial question is: When is a market free? In other words, how can we judge when any particular transaction is free? I reject the idea that a transaction is free just because it is not subject to state intervention or any other form of external coercion. We must give a fuller, more positive, account of freedom.”

Ultimately, in the economy that we face every single day, we have a choice about how we will relate to the world, to the things and the people in it, both the ones we see and the ones that we do not see. “Things do not have personalities of there own,” Cavanaugh writes, “but they are embedded in relationships of production and distribution that bring us into contact, for better or worse, with other people’s lives.”

In a very important sense, then — and especially for those of us who believe that every single person is made in the image of God, that all bring not only to “the market” but to the table of life, the communio personarum, their own inviolable experience with God — it does not matter if that contact is made in person or made through the disguise of “the market.” Whether it is a cashier across the checkout counter or a mango lady in Haiti, in each case, we participate in a human communion that requires more of us than an empty, rationalizing slogan called “free.”

Finished reading: The Best of It by Kay Ryan 📚

I’ve been reading this without an ounce of haste for two years. Not once did I feel the need to hurry up and finish it.

Also finished reading: The Prophetic Imagination by Walter Brueggemann 📚

Some thoughts (and a poem from Kay Ryan) here.

Finished reading: Silence by Shusaku Endo 📚

Not a book that is easy to write about, which is why I’m looking forward to the Transcontinental Virtual Book Club chat with our friends in southern Oregon. It was timely, though, with reading Walter Brueggemann and trying (and mostly failing) to get into the Hulu show Shōgun. I think I’ll go rewatch Martin Scorsese’s adaptation now.

Here’s Scorsese in his foreword to the book:

It seems to me that Silence, [Shūsaku Endō’s] greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

…He understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful—the questioning faithful—to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture. Christianity is based on faith, but if you study its history you see that it’s had to adapt itself over and over again, always with great difficulty, in order that faith might flourish. That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it exists with faith—truth faith, abiding faith—it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage—from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion—that Endō understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.