Thank goodness for Cameron Tonkinwise: “You just know the university managerial class making decisions to sign on with flailing organizations like Open AI will weasel a response like ‘the best way to learn what something is, is by using it.’ But I’ve been driving for 30 years and…
Our daughter drew images for our church bulletin, marking all seasons of the liturgical year. We made them into prints for grandparents’ Christmas gifts (Artifact Uprising).
Malcolm and I are nearing the end of Endurance, about the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. The ship sank, sled dogs have all been shot or eaten, gangrene surgeries done, a marooned party awaits rescue while Shackleton and co brave the Drake Passage in an ill-equipped small boat. Yikes, y’all!
Highly recommend this conversation on the early days of the Catholic Worker movement, with key passages from Maurin and Day, the philosophical ties to personalism and the (first) back to the land folks, Luddism, more: open.spotify.com/episode/1…
James K.A. Smith: That’s the answer I stake a life on. (Glad he also had to get to his 50’s to really hear it.)
Glad to see this probing look at Bishop Barron by the wonderful Molly Worthen.
Just got tickets for T-Bone Burnett in April!
More interesting craft and guild schools that are humanities-led.
Big resolution for the next year is more weeknight hosting of friends for dinner. You know what I realized will make it possible? Telling folks (in a funny diplomatic way) that we need to be done by 9. My husband wakes at 5; we tag team various tasks around 2 ft jobs/3 kids/1 dog, etc. Will report.
The best around-the-table Thanksgiving exercise we did the last couple of years is “who taught me,” courtesy of Austin Kleon.
Once more with feeling: Word is the worst software ever. Why, why, why do institutions keep migrating toward MS products?
Reliable runner’s high again today courtesy of that extended drum solo at the end of “Burning Down the House.”
I can’t believe it took me this long to read David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God.
“The ambient aunties (a great band title) were just there somehow, with their cars to collect me, their homes to go to, their abundant baked potatoes, their surprise trips to the cinema, their wooden jigsaw puzzles, and their benign curiosity about my life…https://sarahendren.com/2024/11/28/ambient/
I’ve been baffled by the success of cookie chains in recent years — their products are about on par with grocery store slice-and-bake processed crap — but then I realized they’re a knock-on enterprise arising from legalized weed.
Hitting a new low of discouragement about the widespread use of chatgpt among students, so if you’ve got links to frameworks, insight, even-more-creative assignment design, do please share.
This is my annual arrival-of-winter reminder that even if you don’t have ice cream in the house, there’s a good chance you have the makings of cinnamon toast for dessert.
My husband Brian edited and produced his latest Frontline production, airing tomorrow: China, the U.S., and the Rise of Xi Jinping. Eventually I hope Brian will teach a new generation of documentarians this craft: rigorously fact-checked, meticulously translated, deep-dive histories. Recommended.
Came to NYC for a fancy uptown symposium, but it was a much bigger thrill getting to see Maryhouse on a sunny cold Saturday. A bag of fresh bagels was hanging on the fence outside.
For beauty to be on the same footing as truth and goodness, it has to be constitutive of the real, not just downstream effects from the “really real” of truth and goodness: sarahendren.com/2024/11/2…
“As if I too could body forth His Heaven”: so much beauty-truth-goodness in this lecture by Malcolm Guite (via @mathewbattles)
Curious if fellow profs here have favorite books or articles about academic writing for new PhDs, generalizable across fields. Frameworks, exercises, generating what I call “fortified questions” etc?
I watched this terrific tribute conversation on Dorothy Day, and then I checked out what my hero Paul Elie is up to lately. A new book on art in the 80s! I hit pre-order so fast.
My daughter is an illustration editor for the school newspaper this year. Her latest.
“[Dorothy] Day’s ideas were never refuted, just misrepresented, overplayed, and then left for dead in media res, another half-built cathedral, surviving on a thread of memory and the steel of committed disciples and friends… sarahendren.com/2024/11/0…