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.
Simple Machine will be in the Indy Shorts festival next month — Deadline write up here!
“Often the Dying Ask for a Map": Upon opening the new issue of Comment, that B.H. Fairchild poem stopped me in my tracks.
Passed much of a long solo road trip this weekend listening to Middlemarch. I forgot how funny it is! So many hilarious snarky asides.
I’m glad to see this decently fair coverage of the Abigail Adams Institute, which I have found to offer high-quality free humanities education and community, for students and beyond. The Great Conversation, in its online offering, was a great salve to me in deep pandemic days.
Howard Jones sings God Only Knows in memory of Brian Wilson.
Today I talked with a priest, longtime educator, former university president, now back in the regular classroom teaching ethics. He confirmed what I have been suspecting in midlife: that the invisible thread of teaching, the I and Thou encounter, is the most likely to survive us when we’re done.
Finished reading: North Woods by Daniel Mason 📚 A book about architecture that’s not about architecture: one house and its many lives over centuries. Adventurous. Much to admire.
Thrilled to see this piece in Wallpaper, including one of my projects, about the just-opened show at the V&A on disability and design.
Glad to see this e-flux review of Looking After Each Other, now on view in Seoul.
Just talked with a friend about the Am Dash, and he speculated about whether the future of life-with-bots might have this quality of cat-mouse tactics. Introduce human-only elements; the bots lag behind, can only chase and imitate downstream; rinse and repeat?
RIP Alisdair MacIntyre.