Notable uptick in people reading paper books on the train. My love for my fellow human creatures abounds.
I’m in a podcast rut and would love some suggestions. I like conversations on: intellectual history, philosophy and theology, the craft of fiction and creativity generally. And strong narrative-led documentary production on literally any subject except true crime. If it’s told well, sign me up.
lost causes
Great to hear Matt Dinan further expound on his last couple of years in the classroom on Know Your Enemy (after publishing this post). Dinan’s experience echoes so much of my own, and it feels amazing to be starting 2026 with confidence and clarity about what I’m doing in the classroom, even if it’s rare in my institutional setting. And Dinan’s aside that he is hopelessly devoted to a triad of lost causes — cooperativism, the Catholic church, liberal education — made my heart swell.
Looking forward to George Scialabba’s forthcoming collection.
Went to see Brazil at the Brattle tonight. Wow!
I wrote about 2025 in scenes: gift economies, pattern languages, one kid getting lost and found, keeping the chatbots at bay.
Best time of semester — a whole riot of finished models and also-ran models and early trashed prototypes and scraps in every direction. World building.
Our daughter just submitted her Christmas image for the church bulletin. Coming soon…
Unclear why it took me this long to read Thomas Cahill. That irreplaceable experience of seeing and hearing a lively intelligence on the page.
“Floating above the graphics are abstract sleeping babies, well swaddled and capped. A proprietary onesie and hat declare, “NYC loves me.” sarahendren.com/2025/12/0…
If, like me, you’re still enjoying homages to Alisdair MacIntyre and his long strange career, let me recommend this fine essay by Notre Dame’s Michael Baxter.
Christina Bieber Lake: “It is too facile to say that a reader learns a ‘moral’ by reading a story. What a reader learns is how to think about contingency when it appears in his or her own life…‘one learns it by guidance rather than by formula.'”
Culminating text with oral exams planned in my criticism class for architecture graduate students. We got liftoff as a group this term — a true seminar community. I’ll miss them.
An exchange with a student about being convinced.
I am finally teaching Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society today. Wow — so much to tackle. My students are all in pre-professional design programs, and few have had any exposure to philosophy. If you teach this book and have recommendations for structuring conversation, I’d be happy to hear them.
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.