A joke, from Alexei Novalny’s prison diaries.

Someday I hope to finally get around to writing an account of the events — and the life — that spun me around so forcefully, so completely, in 2017. I noted around that time a quote from Charles Taylor about the feeling we get when we succeed in articulating something we’ve been through, something that reflects our deepest orienting beliefs about life.

…If we succeed in formulating it, however partially, we feel a release, as though the power of the experience was increased by having been focussed, articulated, and hence let fully be..

It would not be an overstatement to say that much of my reading life is spent chasing that articulation. Occasionally, I am gifted a taste of it. The latest example is from Cavanaugh:

The best remedy for idolatry is an uncontrollable encounter with the incarnate God in the chaos and vulnerability of those who are marginalized by the idolatrous systems that eat people alive.

It has only ever been to the credit of these chaotic and vulnerable encounters, to the lives that provided them, that I have ever seriously changed.

But there is a flipside to these encounters and articulations, a “negative slope” as Taylor puts it. If the positive slope is something like Marilynne Robinson’s wild strawberries, the negative slope is “an exile, a seemingly irremediable incapacity ever to reach this place.”

If I have a desire to write about or share anything, it is this.

This lovely post reminded me again of Richard Wilbur’s “Elsewhere”:

This weekend I got to attend a local Braver Angels event, as part of the Building Bridges Maine project. I’ve been wanting to get involved with these groups for some time. We’ll see where it goes.

David Frum: “I’m not voting with enthusiasm, but I am voting with conviction.”

Is there an environmental argument for, if not getting off the internet, curtailing photo uploads and avoiding unnecessary uses of search engines, especially if they use AI?

This morning’s Dispatch newsletter on “Preparing for an AI Energy Boom” reminded me of something I read back in July, from Arthur Holland Michel:

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off. This points to an uncomfortable, and eminently modern, question. “Everyone says it’s really bad to fly,” Tom Jackson, a professor at Loughborough University, in England, who studies the environmental impact of data, told me. “But also we’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”

[M]aybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

I have not picked this book up, but the title gives me a smile every time I see it at the bookstore.

They probably average 1.3 articles/week that catch my eye. But 4 is a treat.

Though of course, I mainly read it for cartoons 🤓

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.

Liz Cheney:

Or will we be so blinded by political partisanship that we throw away the miracle of America? Do we hate our political adversaries more than we love our country and revere our Constitution? I pray that that is not the case. I pray that we all remember [that] our children are watching. As we carry out this solemn and sacred duty entrusted to us, our children will know who stood for truth. And they will inherit the nation we hand to them: a Republic — if we can keep it.

That is something worth thinking about in the next couple weeks.

And this whole thing is something worth revisiting and sharing, even for just the first 30-40 minutes.