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.”
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.
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?
Opening in ten days: the Victoria & Albert’s new Storehouse, a behind-the-scenes look at collections, curatorial and conservation processes, and more. Especially cool: you can Order an Object!
My boy in the first seat, right side, River Charles. We read The Boys in the Boat together, and then watched the movie. Let’s just say that was an instructive case of “adaptation.”
The first of my two lectures on the virtues of dependence is up at For Your Consideration. This invitation got me to finally make some early sense of changing my mind in big ways starting ~4 years ago. Expansionist design, Alisdair MacIntyre, selective abortion, animality, faith, hope, Love.
