This brief overview of The Occasional Human Sacrifice reminded me of this excellent piece from Taylor Dotson:
Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world.
“No want, no effort, no merit, no judgment.”
Glad I didn’t miss this piece Matthew J. Milliner.
On the bottom left of the icon is Joseph, who, traditional Christian orthodoxy and the Church of the East insist had nothing to do with Mary’s pregnancy. Which is to say, his merit is not involved in salvation. Nor is anyone else’s. Because of this he sits to the side, but in this quiet contemplation, the food of the earth springs up nonetheless—that being precisely the image employed in the Jesus Sutras to illustrate the dictum of “no merit.”
The Nativity, Andrei Rublev, 1410, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
A line that stood out today: The necessity of a genuine exchange (not just fatuous “dialogue”) is as important as ever.
Sunset crossing Cod Cove
Bumper sticker on an early 2000s VW Bug and my new response to so… many… things.
“Um, excuse me but your weblog thing seems to be missing something lately…”
I love a good goosebumped coincidence. I was just saying this morning, stirred by this photo from the gifted Clifford Beshers, how one of those lines from movies growing up that pop in my head regularly is from The Big Cat (1949). Several times in the film, when Preston Foster’s character is astonished at something, good or bad, he just says, “Cloud on a mountain.” I can guess well enough, but I’ve never known exactly why he says it.
Later this morning, while Will was splashing around in a bowl of cereal and strawberries, I opened the book of poetry I’ve been slowly going through this summer and this was the very next one (italicized commentary is from Czeslaw Milosz):
Personalized price gouging based on anything from ethnicity to battery life… welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. (Nothing to see here, folks. Just keep buying.)