Here’s a bit of Skylark Ensemble’s Rachmaninoff Vespers at my parish last spring. I’m in the third row, trying to keep it together in the presence of such overwhelming beauty. This clip doesn’t quite show the astonishing basso profundo guys at full blast, but you can get a taste anyway.
One of my (seven!) nieces had to dress up like an idiom for fourth grade today. She’s got on a fluffy white dress with a big cottony hem and a number 9 pasted on the front. Glorious.
I found out from a total stranger that Arthur Holmes’s entire History of Philosophy class at Wheaton is posted on YouTube. And I am…85% sure I am in that room! I recognize so many friends by the backs of their heads. What a gift to have this series at all, and what a set of memories it holds.
There are 80(!) people in my parish’s OCIA cohort, many of them students at the very fancy local university.
This girl is presiding over the Head of the Charles Regatta. An absolutely perfect day for it.
The best procedural addition to my classroom this semester has been having two students act as recap leaders at the beginning of class. I got this from Lang’s Small Teaching. They present a summary of what we discussed in the last session; we all have a moment to add or sharpen some feature of what was reported. Manifold goods: The room re-centers with a “where were we” reminder. I get to hear a week’s worth of metabolized information, which tells me a lot about what they heard and understood.
Boston folks: I’m hosting Duke psychiatrist & professor Warren Kinghorn this Wednesday night at Northeastern. Join us! Kinghorn will address the behemoth of mental health and wellbeing under the mechanizing forces of modernity, and he’ll offer wisdom from the ideas of St Thomas Aquinas.
This long review of Florence’s new Fra Angelico show is absolutely worth your time.
I enjoyed hearing Suzanne Vega look back on her long career in this podcast conversation. Pitching A&M records twice before a third time’s success; the hot/cold imagery that runs through her work; more background on the Luca hit.
I’m enjoying Task in part because I love Mark Ruffalo, but I also just love a complicated story with lots of children fully, inconveniently present — not just as background accessories.
Really pleased that Simple Machine continues its festival run (a dozen and counting!) with the Boston Globe’s documentary festival in late October. Online! So if you want to see it sooner rather than later, do please join us.
The always-lucid Yuval Levin is at the peak of his powers in this recent conversation — on order and disorder in the three federal branches, the real challenge of originalism, FDR and DJT, much more. Highly recommended.
The vertebrae texts of my architecture criticism are now Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic, a Wendell Berry collection called The World-Ending Fire, and Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. And lots and lots of short readings and other media in between. I’m pleased with this historical sweep and its gathering of material culture criticism (buildings, landscape and locality, technology) as social criticism, especially by three men who are politically uncategorizeable. My students are open, game, still pliable.
Currently reading, and in that blessed state of exactly-right-book-right-time: The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs 📚
Richard Hofstadter, via John Ganz: “The nation seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.”
Finished reading: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow 📚 Thoughts to come.
I’m teaching Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic this fall, in which he contrasts the alienated industrial city with the humanity & beauty of medieval architecture. I’m seeking the echoes to be found among YouTube minimalists — the kind of spiritual transcendence sought in purging stuff. Recs please!
Currently reading: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow 📚
Bethel McGrew: “If people are unbothered by the fact that embryos in general are discarded all the time, whence the squeamishness at the proposal to focus on some embryos in particular? He does have a point.”