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.
refrain
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.”
Have never found the internet less compelling than now.
My experience of dating, love, marriage, and sex is so profoundly outside what this story reports as normal that 1) it productively sharpens how I can talk with my teenagers about these subjects and 2) makes me more eager than ever to help them experience young adult communities where a countercultural vision at least gets a hearing: a salutary idea of life-with-limits, a sacred and sacramental relational ideal, and a hope for partnership that is sufficiently structured and settled so that it can turn freely outward, toward strong family and civic and political life.
July 22 = 30 years of marriage to this man. <3
Looking forward to Holly Lawford-Smith’s book taking the widest possible left-and-right survey of feminist history.
Our daughter had a great experience as part of CCPL’s Public Good Generation. Recommended for teenagers you know and love next year.
Aquinas by other means
Allow me to boldly suggest that theologians teaching Aquinas 101 consider Warren Kinghorn’s Wayfaring as a first text. It’s about the history and limitations of the regnant model of mental healthcare — with its mechanistic framings, its commodification, its internalist individualism — but then it provides Aquinas’s idea of the person-as-wayfarer in the most lucid and concise terms: substance and cause, telos and virtues, the good of “beatitudo” as not just happiness or flourishing, but “participation in blessing.
For my fellow longtime Mac users: a revealing and beautifully designed history of displays, settings, and the digital workplace between 1984-2004 in Marcin Wichary’s “Frame of Preference.”
My husband Brian’s latest project Syria After Assad is out now.