Currently Reading: In Search of the Human Face by Luigi Giussani 📚

Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimension of my I, nothing so rich in surprises as the discovery of my own human face.

Absolutely excellent so far. In comparison, today I was reading this review of Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job and a few things stood out — the magic and grace of connective labor being increasingly “disenchanted and automated”; Wall Street and Silicon Valley being “epicenters of the toniest nihilism”; and there’s this lovely view from the top:

As one venture capitalist muses, people “are interchangeable and not very mysterious, with behavior reducible to sixty-five steps.” Indeed, one technologist envisions the brave new world of cyber-connection as one in which we fleshly plebeians will have to choose whether we want to be “pets or livestock.”

But the review ends with this:

The drive to automate even the most intimate of human connections reflects one of the more insidious currents of our day: the desire to enter a prosthetic sublime, shorn of all the ineptitude and mortality of our condition. If we continue to make the work of connection a matter of data and algorithms—from the arduous work of therapy to finding romance on dating apps—we would certainly make our lives more rational, streamlined, and efficient. But if Pugh and her connective workers are right, we would also forfeit moments of “magic,” communion, grace, and love—experiences that open us up to the boundless and the ineffable. Perhaps, as those terms suggest, we defend the human best when we recall what is divine about ourselves.

Giussani seems just such a defender of the human, and a powerful one. So much of the above is adressed (all of it, even?) just in this short excerpt from the introduction. I even think it would be worth downloading a sample from Kindle just read the ~7-page introduction. There was also an excellent review of the book in Comment.

Perhaps… defining the ends of life requires a hermeneutic inquiry, which must grope toward an adequate language in which these ends can be fully brought to light.

Finished reading: Cosmic Connections by Charles Taylor 📚

I doubt I’ll find the time or mental capacity to elaborate on this any time soon, but much of this book was, for me, a wonderful extension and significant deepening of something from the introduction to his A Secular Age, a quote that, for reasons I sort of mentioned here, I very often think about, probably more so than any other from Taylor:

We are deeply moved, but also puzzled and shaken. We struggle to articulate what we’ve been through. If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focused, articulated, and hence let fully be.

I’ve tried for the last several days to summarize a little more than this, but… too many rabbit roles, not enough time. So I’ll coin toss on a good excerpt.

It was probably just me, but I had a couple false starts with this book and it didn’t really come alive until a couple hundred pages in, beginning with the chapter on Rilke, I think. (On a practical note: The 600 pages are not nearly as daunting as those of A Secular Age. For one thing, the footnotes, which are never longwinded, are where God intended them to be, at the bottom of the page so you don’t have to flip endlessly to the back. There are also long sections where poems are given in their original German or French, followed by English translations. And best of all, the poems are always given plenty of room on the page to breath.)

I found all the chapters where he focused on one poet — Rilke, Beaudelaire, Mallarmé, Eliot, Milosz — very enjoyable.

In any case, Czeslaw Milosz wins the toss:

In ages past, we often thought that religiously inspired philosophers were best suited to define to define this latter element (for Catholics, the work of Aquinas). In the contemporary world, we look to political scientists or historians to discern the trends. The daring idea that Milosz puts forward is that a poet can do that; and a poet with the means of a poet: that is, not the study of learned documents, works of Plato and Aristotle, or the works of social science; but the poet’s way of articulating the deepest intuitions that come to him/her as a spiritual being contemplating our present condition.

Which may simply say — at least says — along with the likes of William Carlos Williams and Nadezhda Mandelstam: before science, before philosophy, look for the “groping-toward-an-adequate-language” that is good poetry; it will bring you a lot closer to genuine reality.

Finished reading: The Home Place by Wright Morris 📚

I put a roof nail in it here.

Finished reading: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond 📚

One city must build; another must destroy. If our cities and towns are rich in diversity—with unique textures and styles, gifts and problems—so too must be our solutions.

Whatever our way out of this mess, one thing is certain. This degree of inequality, this withdrawal of opportunity, this cold denial of basic needs, this endorsement of pointless suffering—by no American value is this situation justified. No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

📚 Happy New Book in the Mail Day! (I love it when a forgotten preorder shows up in the mailbox.)

Got pulled over Friday night for the first time in years. Nine years if memory serves, which is a pretty good stretch considering that in the years preceding that I estimate being pulled over between 30 and 50 times. (Don’t ever let people tell you you can’t change 🙂)

Last week’s warning (phew) could have been avoided if I had

• put my front license plate on (don’t like it because it makes the collision sensors wonky)

• consented to have the vehicle pass an inspection (disagreed with the service department about some very mild uneven tread wear and the necessity v. wastefulness of replacing tires which have plenty of good tread left on them)

• bothered to get the car reregistered … last October (oops)

I’m not a rebel, I’m just stubborn.

Which reminds me…

I’m currently reading: A Living Spirit of Revolt: The Infrapolitics of Anarchism by Žiga Vodovnik 📚

Some initial thoughts and sparks flew…

Currently Reading: On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald 📚

These essays are made up of a series of lectures Sebald gave in Zurich in the autumn of 1997. The letters of response to which, as Sebald mentions in the foreword, were telling.

The inadequate and inhibited nature of the letters and other writings sent to me showed, in itself, that the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of [World War II] had never really found verbal expression, and that those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation. 

This is in some ways perfectly understandable, he adds, “given the force of the absolute uncertainty that emerged from our order-loving minds.”

In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization …

I am not German and I cannot confirm what Sebald says about German culture. But I can say that I recognize something of what he is talking about in my own culture. And I will certainly be reading this book, as I’m sure Sebald intended, with at least one eye on the fact that he acutely describes a more universal problem, and one that we are intensely suffering from in the U.S. right now.

“We are always looking and looking away at the same time,” he says, and so we are left with “a half-consciousness or false consciousness” that serves to consolidate moral resources in a culture that has been, or ought to have been, morally discredited. “The redefinition of their idea of themselves … was a more urgent business than depiction of the real conditions surrounding them.” 

Sebald notes that, in response to these lectures, he received “sharp reprimands from people unwilling to see that … a basic stance of opposition and a lively intelligence … could easily turn into more or less deliberate attempts to conform, and that later a man in the public eye … would therefore have to adjust his presentation of his career, through tactful omissions and other revisions.”

From my perspective, this is not only shockingly and obviously the case in American culture and politics, but it is in no way limited to the “man in the public eye.” To expand on Sebald’s terms: Every single citizen is preoccupied — at first naturally and then, apart from great effort, militantly — with an ongoing and retrospective improvement of the self-image that they wish to hand out and to hand down. The result is the inability of an entire generation, if not multiple generations, to describe what we see and to convey it to each other’s minds.

Finished reading: Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets by David G. Firth 📚

This managed to be both a quick read and an excellent depth of study — one, in fact, much more biblically scholarly than anything I have read in a while or that I expected to find here. I don’t recall how I came across this one, but the title attracted me for what should be obvious reasons.

Here’s Firth on why he focuses on the narrative materials of the Former Prophets rather than the legal texts:

There is value in a more focused study that considers the contribution of the Old Testament’s narrative materials. Walter Houston has pointed out that laws can change a society’s behaviour only when justice is taught and not only enforced, and one of the key ways in which this teaching happens in the Old Testament is through its narrative materials.

There are, however, more fundamental reasons for turning to Israel’s wider narrative traditions. One important point is that the law provides not an ethical maximum but rather a minimum. That is, law recognizes a problem that needs to be addressed, but what it provides is the least that should be done, not necessarily the ethical goal towards which a people should aspire. By contrast, [Gordon] Wenham has argued that the narrative texts of the Old Testament are didactic and so try ‘to instil both theological truths and ethical ideals into their readers’, and that therefore the narratives offer a form of paradigmatic ethics. […]

In the end, although there is no one method and there are some figures whose status is never entirely clear, many foreigners are mentioned in the Former Prophets, with many of these included among the people of God so that the boundaries of this people is constantly being challenged.*

While I wish Firth had said more in the closing pages, what he has done — what he draws out of the text and into proper attention — is remarkably important.

A few summary take-aways:

• Ethnicity itself is never a problem. (Hear ye, hear ye, fellow descendants of those belligerently god-awful — but sometimes fun — “New Atheism” debates: Ethnicity in the Bible is never a problem.)
• Often within the narratives, groups of people or even prominent characters themselves who we today might assume to be ethnically Israelite are not.
• Not only are “foreigners” generally viewed in a positive light, but they are often, and in some narratives usually, the ones who understand Yahweh and his purposes much better than “God’s people” do.
• The only Israel in the text that matters — and by extension, for Christians, the only church that matters — is neither ethnic nor geographical nor national. The only one that matters “is the the one that is continually reminded that their existence is for others, for foreigners.”

Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at age thirty will not know how to produce a potato.

—Wendell Berry

A long time ago, I had as a signature for personal emails a quote: “Reform is born aloft on the wings of song.”

That quote came from Mark Noll’s book God and Race in American History:

As many of the histories of the Civil Rights Movement have documented, reform was born aloft on the wings of song, preeminently black gospel and classical evangelical hymnody. When in 1965 King and his associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were discussing where in the North they should take the civil rights campaign, one midsized city was ruled out because it could not assemble an adequate choir.

That comes to mind because I just started reading Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance by Jeremy Eichler 📚

From the intro:

Typically history is written without much regard for music, and music is often heard as residing outside history. This book instead asks what might happen when we peer at each through the prism of the other—that is, when sounds are entwined with stories and we listen to the past through music’s ears. I have taken this approach not for the sake of “filling in some gaps” but in the hope of illuminating and activating the possibilities that open when we attempt to hear music as culture’s memory. And because these goals are fundamentally generative, because they relate to how we live today and how we experience art in the here and now, I do not consider this book primarily a work of elegy. Instead, among many other things, it becomes an experiment in the reciprocal enchantment of music and history. That experiment will have succeeded only if each one becomes fuller, and more luminous, in the presence of the other.