“The conditions we now endure, I want to argue, are the fruit of a false and failed conservatism, as mistaken in its grasp of human nature as in its understanding of American history. A true conservatism, rooted in the tradition of John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, would be the first to embrace gun control as a condition of freedom.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to Eberhard Bethge, Tuesday, November 30, 1943:

In the past few months I have experienced as never before that everything I receive here in the way of relief and help is thanks to other people and not to myself. I have previously sensed on occasion that you suffer somewhat from the fact that you too owe many things in your life to other people. But that is precisely the wrong way around. The wish to have everything by one’s own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one’s own life, and the desire to calculate what one has “earned” on one’s own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.

Matthew Crawford, in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Today, we often use “technology” to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offer no apparent friction between the self and the world, no need to master the grubby details of their operation. It all takes place “somewhere else,” just as John and Sylvia wished. Yet this very invisibility has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech now orders everyday life more deeply than John and Sylvia could have imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, on a road trip to “get away from it all” one would likely depend on GPS, prompting digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral data and used to nudge us into profitable channels, likely without our even knowing it.

Crawford’s book, Why We Drive is an excellent contribution to this genre. If you have not read it, you should!

First light

Miri Rubin:

We can only understand anti-Judaism when we appreciate that it [is] not universal, and that it must be contextualized to be understood. . . . One looks around, guided by the single thing that anti-Judaism and similar social pathologies teach us loud and clear: that any attempt to categorize people, to place them in exclusive groups is a lie, and it requires an enormous effort of mendacity and persuasion to keep such lies believable. So much so that no claim can be coherent, that it cracks, and its cracks can become visible to us.

Goat on a mountain

Open 🙂

Bonhoeffer, joy, and “being for others”

“He wishes he were back in his country, praying in person with Haitians who have nothing to eat, instead of being stranded in Texas trying to persuade Americans that they have too much to eat.”

Andrew J. Newell:

At the heart of this moment, and of many such moments in Buechner’s writing, is a barely-spoken revelation of that which we take most for granted: the marvellous procession of all things out from their first cause. The seed, found situated in friendly earth; the hidden germination of its heart; the slow and steady downward reach of its roots towards deep treasuries of moisture and nutrients; the upward search of the sprout until, finally, it scents air above and unfurls its face to the residual heat and light of a myriad hydrogen protons smashing into one another at the core of a sun that burns at twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit ninety-three million miles away. Radiating through the empty vestibules of space and terminating on the outspread palms of the seedling’s leaves, the light meets favourably with air that is itself the collective sigh of all plants everywhere, and with water droplets borne from distant seas along the secret pathways of the wind. Thus, seedling becomes sapling, and the sapling — grown to maturity, its wooden arms outstretched and bearing fruit — is the product and continuation of a miracle. […]

Standing in a pulpit before the “cultured despisers” of his day, the upturned faces of staff and students alike, he returns time and again to this message — the ordinary, for Buechner, is extraordinary enough to exhaust the mind with holy wonder at the work and presence of God. […]

[Jesus] ate, he drank, he sat down and walked around, and the soft footfall of his feet of flesh upon the earth left imprints in the ordinary way. He was ‘the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us’, and he ate meals ‘like any other meal’, and this was enough to flood the world with light.