Brad East attempts to answer the question of why so many high-profile intellectuals seem to be converting to high church traditions like Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy or Anglicanism.
All this applies, mutatis mutandis, to public intellectuals. Put another way, suppose you are an atheist or agnostic exposed, over time, to the desert fathers, or to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, or to Saint Maximus Confessor or Saint John of Damascus, or to Benedictine monks, or to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, or to Julian of Norwich, or to Saint Francis or Saint Bernard or Saint Anselm. It would simply never occur to you that what you find in these authors is what you’d find in the Methodist congregation on the corner, or the Baptist church around the block, or the non-denom start-up across town. Not only do the devotional and liturgical, spiritual and theological worlds conjured by these writers and texts not exist in such spaces. The traditions themselves do not claim the figures in question. You go, therefore, to the people and the places who are bold enough to say, “Those names are our names; those saints are our saints; those books are our books. We nurture and preserve and pass them on. Come learn them from us; indeed, come learn from us what they learned themselves, in their own time.”
I would say that Protestants do have their own deep thinkers to claim, but they have nowhere near the rich history of thought that stretches back two thousand years. Nor do they incorporate those figures into the faith in the way that the older traditions do for the saints.
As I’ve been chasing lossless digital audio, it’s ironic to read that there is a company making a guitar pedal called “Lossy” that makes your guitar sound like an old MP3.
No thanks. I’m all for lo-fi in analog, but digital lo-fi is just lifeless.
“Wherever you find yourself, do not go forth from that place too quickly. Try to be patient and learn to stay in one place."
~ St. Antony of Egypt
My former pastor was the one to introduce me to this saying from the venerated desert father.1 He used it in the context of my decision to leave the Presbyterian Church to attend an Orthodox Church. It did not convince me to stay, but did stick in my head. I’ve thought about it often in all sorts of contexts.
Great Wave Friday. Best Buy has a LEGO set of “The Great Wave” by Hokusai.
To complete the look, download the iA Writer wallpaper version of the famous woodblock print, complete with text from Moby Dick in the iA Writer Duospace font.
I love reinterpretations of the classics.
This is an extremely well-done YouTube video about the death of physical media. It mostly focuses on visual media such as movies and TV shows. However, there are some mentions of audio media and comparisons of digital to analog, as the case is made for the popularity of vinyl and what makes the medium unique today. I have to agree with the point that vinyl offers something that digital forms of physical media can’t, thus making it more competitive against streaming options.
As someone who in college majored in psychology and family and child counseling, I’m a proponent of therapy as an intervention in the case emotional difficulties. However, I am starting to question the potential overuse of therapy. Olga Khazan writes for The Atlantic about a study in which Australian teens with no history of mental health challenges were given therapy and actually saw negative outcomes as a result.
I’ve found this collection of letters in response to the question of “how citizens of faraway countries should handle differences (with regards to the Middle East) about the best way forward so as not to tear their own societies apart” to be very helpful.
Just updated my now page (tiny mountain view edition).
Alex Cranz has a piece in The Verge about where Marvel movies went wrong and why audiences can no longer trust the quality of those productions.
I don’t want to put on rose-colored glasses and say every early Marvel film was better than what’s coming out today. I sat through all of Iron Man 2 in the theaters. I remember Avengers: Age of Ultron, too. But as the MCU has become more and more successful, it’s become a victim of its own hubris. It started to imitate the comic industry that inspired it: shoddily putting together solo projects that always feed into some big crossover event and that usually require you to catch up with a bunch of other solo projects regardless of whether you want to, all while being pretty devoid of well-thought-out or consistent characterizations.
What I find most fascinating is the assertion that the movies are now following the path of the comics from which the properties came. It makes sense, though, that success is affecting movies in the same way it affected comic books. I haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a while, and have been at least partially deterred by hearing that you now have to be familiar with the rest of the franchise to enjoy any given entry in it.
“Nothing is lost with peace, everything can be lost with war.”
~ Pope Pius XII