Joshua A. Klein:

I’m not sure I know many people who use hand tools for exclusively pragmatic reasons. The decision to shape wood with finely honed edge tools is almost always a decision to exercise agency, to purposefully involve our very selves in our work. The world outside smugly sneers at the nostalgia. “Making things should be easy,” they tell us. Why bother learning manual skills or sweating fine-grained joinery details when you can play with composites and 3D printing? In this new wave of “craft,” our designs can be untethered from the constraints of wood grain or traditional construction methods. We are no longer hindered by our lack of skills or underdeveloped sense of design. There’s an app for that, and if we want things to run smoothly, we’d best just get out of the way.

This is simply another way of illustrating the fact that outsourcing is the obsession of modernity. 

[…]

Craft is about dexterity, yes, but it is a dexterity that pays attention. This is to say that a true craftsman takes care. 

By contrast, technology is not an apparatus of care. Indeed, being nothing more than belts and gears, ones and zeroes, technologies cannot care. Only a person can care. Woodshop machinery, for instance, is unconcerned with grain direction or the most attractive orientation of the lumber – that is the purview of the artisan. But the logic of the development of technology is to ever more distance the artisan from the work.

[…]

Let us be clear on this point: Writing is a craft. And if writing is a craft, it follows that authentic wordcraft is something that could only come from a writer – someone who has something to say. When we instead have nothing to say, yet we believe that something should be said, we embezzle the words from a chatbot. We publish the drivel, and no matter how readable it might be, no warm-blooded soul could be moved by it. But it’s not because there is no logic to the string of words (there often is), nor because it’s clunky or awkward in its phrasing (it’s getting better all the time), but because we have conflated our desire for having something to say with actually having something to say.

But the prompt is not the craft.

So much more in that essay worth quoting. Thanks to Jeremy Abel for alerting me to it.

“Right now, our housing policies are structured so that the home is less of a place to live and more of a cash-flowing asset for Wall Street.”

I would only add that plenty of regular people treat homes as cash flow assets, too. The sickness is real.

Indranil Ghosh:

What is certain is that the AI race now runs through Abu Dhabi and Doha as much as Silicon Valley and Shenzhen. 

Bobby Ghosh:

Wars have always targeted the infrastructure of their age. Medieval armies burned granaries. Modern ones target communications and energy installations.

The Iranian regime has been true to historical form. Under attack by the U.S. and Israel, it has been striking back at the oil and gas infrastructure of its Gulf neighbors, and has closed the Strait of Hormuz — the choke point through which a fifth of the world’s oil supply normally flows. The energy markets understand this kind of damage; they have priced it in for decades.

But Iran has clearly read the new playbook.

When its drones struck three Amazon Web Services data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain on March 1 — the first confirmed military attack on a hyperscale cloud provider in history — Tehran was not lashing out blindly. It was making a calculated statement about the 21st century’s most valuable infrastructure.

The message was simple, and it landed: The cloud has an address, and that address can burn.

[…]

Iran’s drones didn’t just strike a set of server farms, they struck an assumption — the foundational premise on which the U.S. and Silicon Valley had constructed one of the most ambitious technology partnerships in history.

That assumption was stability. And Washington is the one that shattered it.

Along with McCullough’s The Body of This Death, I acquiesced to the seller’s suggestion that I purchase these conveniently discounted items. I cannot vouch for them yet, but I’m hoping they can live up to some Eugene Peterson-sown hopes.

Here’s Peterson in the introduction to Reversed Thunder:

Every Monday I leave the routines of my daily work and hike along the streams and through the forests of Maryland. The first hours of that walk are uneventful: I am tired, sluggish, inattentive. Then birdsong begins to penetrate my senses, and the play of light on oak leaves and asters catches my interest. In the forest of trees, one sycamore forces its solid rootedness on me, and then sends my eyes arcing across trajectories upwards and outwards. I have been walking these forest trails for years, but I am ever and again finding an insect that I have never seen before startling me with its combined aspects of ferocity and fragility. How many more are there to be found? A rock formation, absolutely new, thrusts millions of years of prehistory into my present. This creation is so complex, so intri­cate, so profuse with life and form and color and scent! And I walk through it deaf and dumb and blind, groping my way, stupidly absorbed in putting one foot in front of the other, seeing a mere fraction of what is there. The Monday walks wake me up, a little anyway, to what I miss in my sleepy routines. The wakefulness lasts, sometimes, through Thursday, occasionally all the way to Sunday. A friend calls these weekly rambles “Emmaus walks”: “And their eyes were opened and they recognized him” (Luke 24:31).

Ordinarily, I would succumb to the temptation to go down some path with Sven or something, but Peterson is going somewhere one would probably not expect. “What walking through Maryland forests does to my bodily senses,” he says, “reading the Revelation does to my faith perceptions.”

That’s right, reading the book of Revelation is like taking a soul-refreshing, eyes-open walk in the woods.

[F]or people who are fed up with [the] bland fare, the Revela­tion is a gift—a work of intense imagination that pulls its reader into a world of sky battles between angels and beasts, lurid punishments and glorious salvations, kaleidoscopic vision and cosmic song. It is a world in which children are instinctively at home and in which adults, by becoming as little children, recapture an elemental involvement in the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence, and then go on to discover again the soaring adoration and primal affirmations for which God made us.

[…]

I read the Revelation not get more information but to revive my imagination.…

Maryland forests and St. John’s Apocalypse show me over and over again that when I am bored it is no fault of creation or cove­nant. Familiarity dulls my perceptions. Hurry scatters my attention. Ambition fogs my intelligence. Selfishness restricts my range. Anxiety robs me of appetite. Envy distracts me from what is good and blessed right before me. And then Monday’s unhurried pace and St. John’s apocalyptic vision bring me to my senses, body and soul.

As a pastor reading St. John as a pastor, Peterson concludes that “this book does not primarily call for decipherment, as if it were written in code, but that it evokes wonder, releasing metaphors that resonate meanings and refract insights in the praying imagination” and that “an exercised imagination is essential to a full-bodied and full­-souled life in Christ.”

So, you can see why my expectations for the books above might be high. Here’s the note from the author of Past Watchful Dragons:

This is a collection of new fairy tales, inspired by the real biblical stories that we are all familiar with. I have chosen to tell these stories inside an imaginary and magical world called Erith. By doing so, I am giving very old truths new clothes to wear, so you might meet them again, as if for the first time.

I invite you to read these stories and experience the truth from a fresh perspective, remembering that fairy tales are not factual and are not meant to be. But they are always true.

Her epigraph and title come from C.S. Lewis, in a 1956 Times piece about writing The Chronicles of Narnia:

… I wrote fairy tales because the Fairy Tale seemed the ideal Form for the stuff I had to say. Then of course the Man in me began to have his turn. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

And just to wrap this up, here is George Herbert’s poem, from which Peterson takes his own title:

Prayer (I)

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world-transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, 
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood 
The land of spices; something understood.

Another Underline Adventure in Books Will Grabs Off the Shelf.

Toward the end of Stanley Hauerwas’s With the Grain of the Universe, he says, “By directing attention to the university as a site where Christians might rediscover the difference that being Christian makes for claims about the world, I do not mean to overvalue the importance of universities for Christians. Given the character of the modern university, we should not be surprised that the most significant intellectual work in our time may well take place outside the university.” And here there is a footnote:

In particular, I am thinking about Wendell Berry, who quite self-consciously stands apart from the university. He does so because the modern university is organized to divide the disciplines in a manner that insures that the university need pay little or no attention to the “local and earthly effects” of the work that is done in them. According to Berry, if the university sponsored authentic conversation between disciplines, the college of agriculture would have been brought under questioning by the college of arts and sciences or medicine. Berry confesses that he has no wisdom about how the disciplines might be organized but observes only that at one time, a time when the idea of vocation was still viable, the disciplines were thought of as being useful to one another. However, once the notion of vocation is lost, the university has no other purpose than to insure that the rich or powerful are even more successful. Berry wryly notes he does not believe that a person was ever “called” to be rich or powerful. The hallmark of the contemporary university is, of course, the professionalism whose religion is progress, and “this means that, in spite of its vocal bias in favor of practicality and realism, professionalism forsakes both past and present in favor of the future, which is never present or practical or real.” Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2000), 129-130. Berry’s criticism could fruitfully be compared to John Paul II’s understanding of the culture of death. For example, Berry observes that the story that dominates our age is the story of freedom from reverence, fidelity, neighborliness, and stewardship. Strikingly, he suggests that the “dominant story of our age, undoubtedly, is that of adultery and divorce. This is true both literally and figuratively: The dominant tendency of our age is the breaking of faith and the making of divisions among things that were once joined” (133).

I said something in a post a few weeks ago about “whatever the first word I read from Wendell Berry was.” And it occurred to me the other day while reading that marked up footnote that this could very well be the first thing I ever read about Berry. Possibly, at least. I don’t know exactly what year I read Hauerwas or when it was that I finally picked up Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace, but it was late for me, not early. It really cannot be overstated how much of a non-reader I was before the early to mid 2010s.

Also, that reference to John Paul II’s “culture of death” might not be what you think. Here’s Hauerwas a few pages earlier:

For John Paul II, the church is the alternative to violence just to the extent that the church is the agent of truth. […]

In Redemptor Hominis John Paul II not only holds Christ up as the source of hope, but also provides on the basis of that hope his extraordinary analysis of the pathology of modernity. He notes that fear characterizes modern life. As modern people, we are afraid of what we produce, particularly that part of our making that is the result of our genius and initiative. We fear that our creations will turn against us and become the means for our unimaginable self-destruction. In later encyclicals, he describes our condition as a “culture of death” that is nowhere more evident than in our unwillingness to receive into this world our own children, exactly because we fear our calling to be God’s good creatures.

Redemptor Hominis was issued in 1979.

I love discovering valuable things written before my time. I don’t mean, in this case, the C.S. Lewis “clean sea breeze of the centuries,” “two heads are better than one,” thou shouldst read old books sense. I mean things that were written and said well within earshot of my time and my bubble but which I and (usually) those around me were simply oblivious to. Those early 2010s were spent exactly zero inches outside of the David Platt, Francis Chan, John Piper orbit. But footnotes — praise be upon them, those exponential breadcrumbs of discovery — they took me places I’m still finding thanks for.

Karl Barth:

The actual end of the 20th century as the “good old days” came for theology as for everything else with the fateful year of 1914. Accidentally or not, a significant event took place during that very year. Ernst Troeltsch, the well-known professor of systematic theology and the leader of the then most modern school, gave up his chair in theology for one in philosophy. One day in early August 1914 stands out in my personal memory as a black day. Ninety-three German intellectuals impressed public opinion by their proclamation in support of the war policy of Wilhelm II and his counselors. Among these intellectuals I discovered to my horror almost all of my theological teachers whom I had greatly venerated. In despair over what this indicated about the signs of the time I suddenly realized that I could not any longer follow either their ethics and dogmatics or their understanding of the Bible and of history. For me at least, 20th-century theology no longer held any future. For many, if not for most people, this theology did not become again what it had been, once the waters of the flood descending upon us at that time had somewhat receded. Everything has its time. Evangelical theology in the true spirit and style of the 19th century continued to exist and some vestiges still remain. But in its former wholeness it is a cause which today is significantly represented by only a few. This is not to say that we do not owe it our most serious attention for our own sake and for the sake of the future. But it remains true that the history of this theology had its beginnings, its various peaks, and then also its end.

Molly White:

Prediction markets have not covered themselves in glory as the US and its allies kick off a war in Iran. Kalshi has had to reimburse trading fees to customers who hoped their bets on “Ali Khamenei out as Supreme Leader” would pay out in the event of his death, which would have unequivocally made the wager an assassination market. While Kalshi does state in their fine print that markets like this have carveouts for death to avoid being classed as assassination markets, the lack of clarity on the main betting page and Kalshi’s enthusiastic social media promotion of this specific event contract left many customers angry.²⁴Over on Polymarket, the offshore prediction market that the CFTC is in the process of welcoming back to the country, there were no such barriers to traders’ fun. One trader named “Magamyman” made half a million bucks on the bet and other markets related to US and Israeli military strikes on the country, and placed his $87,000 in wagers over an hour before news of military action became public.

… Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) vowed to introduce legislation to restrict prediction markets, issuing a statement that he believed it was “very likely — probable even” that people close to Trump who had advance notice of the strikes profited from placing bets. Expressing fears that such markets would increase corruption risk and result in “people inside the Situation Room who are making decisions not based on what’s good for national security, not on whether or not we should send our young men and women overseas to die, but based on whether or not they make money off of war.”

Separately, California’s Democratic Representative Mike Levin and Senator Adam Schiff have introduced the “Death Bets Act”, the name of which alone sums up the absolute dystopia we’re living in at the current moment. […]

But hey, fear not: the death-and-destruction betting platform Polymarket has teamed up with the panopticon-for-hire Palantir in a cursed partnership they promise will ensure fairness in the sports prediction markets Polymarket is bringing to the US. So that’s a relief.

Ross McCullough:

My dear Barlow,

I am having the same aches and pains. We are the same age, after all. But it is a mistake to think that God merely sympathizes with us, God who “passed through every stage of life, restoring to all communion with God.” It is true that Christ died long before our old age, that he never faced senescence. And yet… was he not arthritic in some way on the cross? Those hands on the Isenheim altarpiece… And even the plague sores there, which after all he never actually suffered on his body—except that in one sense he did.

Perhaps we are no older than him; perhaps he aged the first part of a human lifespan in thirty years, the middle part in three years, and the last part in three days or even three hours. His features can be found in the faces of the five- and the twenty-five-year-old, surely, but also of the seventy-five-year-old; also of St. Adam in his 930th year, meditating on his deathbed upon the fruit of his youth.

Susan J. Wolfson:

“No young man believes that he shall ever die,” wrote Hazlitt in 1827, a little more than six years after Keats was no more. “Death, old age, are words without a meaning, that pass by us like the idle air which we regard not.” How otherwise it was for Keats, who had seen and endured plenty of death when he petitioned in Sleep and Poetry, the capstone of his debut volume, “Oh, for ten years, that I may overwhelm / Myself in poesy” (pp. 96-97). This was written in late 1816, published the next spring. Not granted even half this span, he still achieved a remarkably full poetic life, seeming in brief years to “write old” — so Elizabeth Barrett Browning measures the amazing intensity:

By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped
In gradual progress like another man,
But, turning grandly on his central self,
Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years
And died, not young, – (the life of a long life
Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear
Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn
For ever;) by that strong excepted soul,
I count it strange, and hard to understand,
That nearly all young poets should write old.

Long life distilled into a burning drop is a perfect conceptual biography, beautifully figured by the embrace of parentheses.

Rebecca West:

But the Serbo-Byzantine frescoes are unquestionably more naturalistic and far more literary. In looking at some of these at Neresi there came back to me the phrase of Bourget, “la végétation touffue de King Lear,” they are so packed with ideas. One presents in another form the theme treated by the painter of the fresco in the little monastery in the gorge; it shows the terribly explicit death of Christ’s body, Joseph of Arimathea is climbing a ladder to take Christ down from the Cross, and his feet as they grip the rungs are the feet of a living man, while Christ’s fect are utterly dead. Another shows an elderly woman lifting a beautiful astonished face at the spectacle of the raising of Lazarus: it pays homage to the ungrudging heart, it declares that a miracle consists of more than a wonderful act, it requires people who are willing to admit that something wonderful has been done. Another Shows an Apostle hastening to the Eucharist, with the speed of a wish.

But there is another which is extraordinary beyond belief because not only does it look like a painting by Blake, it actually illustrates a poem by Blake. It shows the infant Christ being washed by a woman who is a fury. Of that same child, of that same woman, Blake wrote:

And if the Babe is born a boy
He’s given to a Woman Old
Who nails him down upon a rock,
Catches his shrieks in cups of gold.

She binds iron thorns around his head,
She pierces both his hands and feet,
She cuts his heart out at his side,
To make it feel both cold and heat.

Her fingers number every nerve,
Just as a miser counts his gold;
She lives upon his shrieks and cries,
And she grows young as he grows old.

It is all in the fresco at Neresi. The fingers number every nerve of the infant Christ, just as a miser counts his gold; that is spoken of by the tense, tough muscles of her arms, the compulsive fingers, terrible, seen through the waters of the bath as marine tentacles. She is catching his shrieks in cups of gold; that is to say, she is looking down with awe on what she is so freely handling. She is binding iron around his head, she is piercing both his hands and feet, she is cutting his heart out at his side, because she is naming him in her mind the Christ, to whom these things are to happen. It is not possible that that verse and this fresco should not have been the work of the same mind. Yet the verse was written one hundred and fifty years ago by a home-keeping Cockney and the fresco was painted eight hundred years ago by an unknown Slav. Two things which should be together, which illumine cach other, had strayed far apart, only to be joined for a minute or two at rare intervals in the attention of casual visitors. It was to counter this rangy quality in the universe that the little monk had desired to maintain contact between his devotions and their objects. His shining eyes showed a faith that, bidden, would have happily accepted more exacting tasks.