I don’t always judge books by the cover; I do judge them by the epigraphs (mostly just by whether or not they are there at all). Today: enthusiastically enthused.

^ The title of my next (unwritten) book 🙂

Stanley Hauerwas in the introduction to his 1998 Sanctify Them in the Truth:

So the invitation for me to do theology ‘straight up,’ so to speak, should be something I particularly welcome. Yet I am by no means sure those who wish me to do theology in a more straightforward manner will be happy with what they find in this book. To be given the permission to do theology is, at least for me, a frightening task. I am not sure I know how to do theology ‘straight,’ which means I may well disappoint those who think that if pushed, I will know how to ‘pay up’ theologically. It is not that I am just unsure how to do theology, but that even if I knew how, I am not sure I would want to do it. At least I am not sure I want to do theology the way many who bear the title ‘theologian’ do. I certainly have learned and continue to learn from those who do theology in a more systematic fashion than my work takes, but I continue to worry that such theology in our time cannot avoid giving the impression that Christianity is a set of ideas that need to be made consistent with one another.

Of course it is true that ‘all loci of theology are interconnected as nodes of an intricate web,’ which rightly requires theologians — in a manner not unlike that of spiders — to explore, repair, as well as, perhaps, discover new connections. Theology is always a matter of finding the interconnections in a manner that helps our lives not to be distorted by overemphasis on one aspect of the faith.…

That theology works like a web helps us understand why the work of theology is never done. Webs, after all, are fragile. They must constantly be redone. Theology can become a fascinating game in which the various loci are reconfigured by making one locus determinative for all the others. This kind of theology has been turned into an art form in Germany, in which every theologian is expected to produce something called ‘doctrine.’ Theology so produced can be quite impressive. It can give one a sense of ‘completeness,’ but such ‘completeness’ can be quite deceptive. Too often, I fear, this mode of theology provides answers to questions no one is asking. […]

… I hope that one of the ordinary reasons I do not ever seem to get around to doing ‘real’ theology is that I am a very simple believer. That way of putting the matter is not quite right. The truth is that I simply believe, or at least I believe I should want to believe, what the church believes. Believing thus means I never get over being surprised by what wonderful things The church affirms that at best I only dimly ‘understand.’ Therefore, I do not assume that my task as a theologian is to make what the church believes somehow more truthful than the truth inherent in the fact that this is what the church believes. One of the reasons, moreover, why I resist those who urge me to ‘pull it all together’ is that attempts to do so impose false unity on the wonderful anarchy of life called church.

(See also H. Frei and some previous “anarchist squinting.”)

Kimmy Sophia Brown:

Part coincidence and part inspiration following Jeremy Abel’s lead, I am also impressed by the cover art of a book.

La Saint-Jean by Jules Breton

I found that on the cover of Kimmy Sophia Brown’s collection of poems The Time Signature of Night. The title poem is written for that painting.

I often skim but don’t always read the acknowledgment section of a book. But man, Brown might have the best one I’ve ever seen:

I thank every person, every dog, cat, horse, cow, sheep, goat, pig, squirrel, chipmunk, vole, mole, dragonfly, mouse, whale, dolphin, jellyfish, roly-poly, bird, tree, flower, weed, vegetable, mineral, and stink bug l ever met or saw, and everything and everyone else too. I love you all.

I thank the most gracious and loving unseen helpers, the nature spirits and fairies, and the beautiful, sweet, divine Creator who thought of everything first.

That last post reminded me of something I read a week or two ago from Chris Smaje. About midway through the the book, he is retracing some of Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument in the opening pages of After Virtue.

At the start of the book, Macintyre invites his readers to imagine a world in which a series of environmental disasters are blamed by the public on science. Scientists are persecuted, books and instruments destroyed, and a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and represses scientific learning. Later, people try to reconstruct scientific knowledge from surviving fragments, but lacking the deeper structures of understanding that have been lost, science becomes little more than a set of apparently arbitrary and contradictory precepts!

For MacIntyre, this is an analogy for what he proposed, in 1981, was the condition of moral philosophy. Smaje knows this, but he does imagine scientific knowledge actually meeting this fate.

Now, if you’re like me, who so viscerally despises the cultish way that the Right took to RFK Jr. like a gaggle of goddamn parrots, you might be reading that and thinking, This is no longer an analogy. And you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But you would necessarily be missing something vital.

Keep reading; keep listening.

Smaje goes on:

Already, many educated liberals see themselves as engaged in a high-stakes battle for the truth against the first battalions of the Know-Nothings.

Much as I want to stand with them on the side of STEM truth, I’d suggest they should take a look at themselves to understand how we got here. In relation to agriculture, for example, there have been endless premature epitaphs for small-scale, low-input, local farming over the last century that vaunt romanticized views of ‘scientific’ agriculture as saviour technologies. The concept of science they invoke has less to do with any underlying science and works more as a kind of cultural metaphor for social progress.

Meanwhile, the remaining farmers who haven’t been parted from their land to swell the numbers of the precariously underemployed have increasingly become deskilled peons of top-down proprietary technologies — patented seeds, patented software, rising input prices and an ever-increasing thicket of often weakly validated regulation over which they have no control. If such people form part of a Know-Nothing revolt against science, it may be because they know something.

This is anything but a straight forward story, but that’s the point. Pointing directly at the insanity on the Right, I could repeat to you forty times, You don’t have to excuse it… You don’t have to excuse it… Because, well, we should not excuse it. But you absolutely should have a political, civic space in your dome for this: “They” may know, have known, something you don’t.

I’ll try to return to this with Wendell Berry’s 2010 “Paragraphs from a Notebook,” and something from The New Atlantis if memory serves.

I have meant for a long time to reread Jeffrey C. Pugh’s Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times. But the book always rewards a random grab off the shelf.

[Bonhoeffer] wondered how the Christian faith can move away from the temptations of religion to be tied to national or ethnic identity, or psychological need. During this time, he is also trying to make sense of the ways in which Jesus becomes true concrete reality within the community of faith. In the midst of the manifold failures of the church, it was hard for him to discern the ways in which Christianity exhibits faithfulness to anything other than itself.

These failures were made particularly acute with the church’s failure to respond to the political situation it found itself in with the rise of the National Socialists. When Hitler came to power in January of 1933 he moved quickly to consolidate power through the passing of laws and the seduction of the church. His handling of both Catholic and Protestant churches led to the utter collapse of those communities as effective centres of real resistance to the evil within Germany. The church in Germany was co-opted because Hitler would only offer support to the extent that they supported him. The true shame is that whenever this type of support is offered to the church in return for its silence the church, for the most part, has taken the deal.

I don’t really like doing this sort of thing but I was really tempted to swap out a few words in that second paragraph. You could, I think, void any straight comparison to Nazis whatsoever and still find that as a description it works perfectly.

I can’t help myself:

These failures were made particularly acute with the church’s failure to respond to the political situation it found itself in with the rise of the (Christian) Nationalists. When Trump came back into power in January of 2025 he moved quickly to consolidate power through the passing of laws and the seduction of the church. His handling of both Catholic and Protestant churches led to the utter collapse of those communities as effective centres of real resistance to the evil within the United States. The church in America was co-opted because Trump would only offer support to the extent that they supported him. The true shame is that whenever this type of support is offered to the church in return for its silence the church, for the most part, has taken the deal.

Again, you don’t have to call anyone a Nazi to see that that’s a wildly accurate description of current events. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll do straight comparisons. But they do have to be done carefully if at all — if you want to do more than psychological soapboxing, that is. Most people are happy enough only to differentiate themselves, well before the real work begins. Bonhoeffer stayed with the real work; that, more than anything else, is why Bonhoeffer is so Bonhoeffer.

Pugh goes on:

Bonhoeffer saw that the choice was going to be a stark one for the German people:

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we’re going to get is a long, popular, national church whose nature cannot any longer be reconciled with Christianity and that we must be prepared to enter upon entirely new paths which we will have to thread. The question really is: Germanism or Christianity?

If I had the time to turn the previous post into a proper Poem, Prose and Praise (I never did like the word ‘praise’ there, but I never found a better one; the praise that I have in mind is much more subtle, even awkward, then the word ‘praise’ typically evokes), it would probably include the lyrics to Burl Ives’ “Mockingbird Hill,” which Lucille sings. And also some etymology tracing of “economy” — oikonomia and its use in the New Testament, particularly the epistles, as a stewardship which seems always closely tied to a kind of freedom and/of love within the mystery of the ages. But leaving it slant is just fine, too — and probably more economical…

Louise Bogan (read and hear the poem read here):

The cold remote islands
And the blue estuaries
Where what breathes, breathes
The restless wind of the inlets,
And what drinks, drinks
The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed
Wait upon the salt wash of the sea,
And the clear nights of stars
Swing their lights westward
To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks
Renews itself forever;
Where, again on cloudless nights,
The water reflects
The firmament’s partial setting;

—O remember
In your narrowing dark hours
That more things move
Than blood in the heart.

---

From Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping:

It was so dark that creatures came down to the water within a few feet of us. We could not see what they were. Lucille began to throw stones at them. “They’re supposed to be able to smell us,” she grumbled. For a while she sang “Mockingbird Hill,” and then she sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun.

Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable. Say that my mother was as tall as a man, and that she sometimes set me on her shoulders, so that I could splash my hands in the cold leaves above our heads. Say that my grandmother sang in her throat while she sat on her bed and we laced up her big black shoes. Such details are merely accidental. Who could know but us? And since their thoughts were bent upon other ghosts than ours, other darknesses than we had seen, why must we be left, the survivors picking among flotsam, among the small, unnoticed, unvalued clutter that was all that remained when they vanished, that only catastrophe made notable? Darkness is the only solvent. While it was dark, despite Lucille’s pacing and whistling, and despite what must have been dreams (since even Sylvie came to haunt me), it seemed to me that there need not be relic, remnant, margin, residue, memento, bequest, memory, thought, track, or trace, if only the darkness could be perfect and permanent.

(I have sometimes wanted to write about why this novel is called Housekeeping, and I think this passage comes pretty close to telling it slant. Maybe very slant; I’m not sure at the moment.)

I’ve been singing it wrong. Walking and talking…, singing and praying…, with my mind stayed on freedom. Not set on freedom; stayed on freedom. That’s a much better word.