Ivan Illich, via L. M. Sacasas’s amulets:
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.
Learned and leisurely hospitality v. The stance of deadly cleverness…
The most high-end account, the most highly mathematical and theoretical account of the cosmos, still reaches, at least in metaphor, for music and harmony.
Malcolm Guite is possibly the most enchanted creature on the planet. You can have your enlightenment by reason if you like. I’ll take “enchantment by baptized imagination,” thank you very much.
Kathryn Gin Lum, on whether she sees her book Heathen as being consistent with or in tension with her Christian faith:
It’s both… Some think that the book is very anti-Christian because of the sharpness of the critique. So they think that I must have abandoned the faith. Others see it as very Christian – maybe too Christian – and they see it as coming from a place of Christian lament. And I’m glad people can’t tell, because I would say that’s an accurate description of where I’m at. It’s messy.
Currently Reading: The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy by Martha C. Nussbaum 📚
We must never forget that tragedies were vehicles of political deliberation and reflection at a sacred civic festival — in a city that held its empire as a “tyranny” and killed countless innocent people. For that audience, tragedy did not bring the good news of resignationism; it brought the bad news of self-examination and change.
In short, instead of conceding the part of ethical space within which tragedies occur to implacable necessity or fate, tragedies, I claim, challenge their audience to inhabit it actively, as a contested place of moral struggle, a place in which virtue might possibly in some cases prevail over the caprices of amoral power, and in which, even if it does not prevail, virtue may still shine through for its own sake.
(Extended quote here.)
I find myself remembering early 2016, when in my neighborhood — which is somewhat mixed: there are doctors and lawyers, but there are also plumbers and electricians and office workers of various kinds — was filled with political signs. About half of them were for Trump, and about half for Bernie. There were none, and I mean none at all, for Hillary Clinton. When she was crowned as the Democratic nominee, the Bernie signs disappeared, leaving only Trump signs. Looking back, it seems like a moment freighted with symbolism, for those who can interpret it.
Finished reading: At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine 📚
The resonance overflows. I will be revisiting this one, and hopefully posting more about it. One thing that kept coming to mind thoughout the book was an essay I wrote for a global health class in 2020: What kind of expertise shall we look to? For me, it’s never been Hans Rosling. It’s Paul Farmer!
Don’t let the rhetoric hide the reality:
Hine again:
Some of this was little more than the playacting of the privileged: long before Covid, the urban middle classes had acquired a taste for simulations of a simpler and more wholesome existence, as embodied in the handmade aesthetic of a Whole Foods store, its fixtures and fittings carefully disguising the concrete box into which it is built.
😆 Of course, it’s not even the tiniest coincidence that Whole Foods Market, Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon. Sometimes I think we should be more grateful when they say the quiet part out loud.
Dougald Hine:
Two possibilities arise from this newfound sense of vulnerability. It can be a humbling moment in which, brought down to earth, we are able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the licence for the grandest version of that project yet: an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and our more-than-human kith, into an object of global management and control, and all in the name of ‘saving the world’.
I’m only half way through, but Hine’s At Work in the Ruins has a solid place in my “this should be mandatory high school or undergrad reading” list.