Putting a roof nail in some quotes from NYT’s excellent interview with David Bentley Hart, which I’d like to come back to:

The New Testament speaks of creation as something broken and distorted and destroyed by spiritual freedoms gone astray, and the whole structure of reality that we know is in some sense alien to true creation. […]

But that means we don’t justify this evil or that evil as part of some grand plan, but rather see the world as a place in need of rescue from a catastrophe that has occurred in some frame of reality we don’t know and don’t understand.

My fear of theodicy is that it becomes not just a justification of God but a justification of evil. It’s not just that I’m trying to justify God in the face of a child dying from diphtheria or a death camp; I’m actually justifying the death of that child and that death camp. At that point, the whole moral grammar of the New Testament seems to collapse in on itself.

the ancient premise was that we could read like persons in whom the act of reading was an inspired grappling with a difficult text. … the Bible is not a revealed text, it is a text that allows for revelation.”

the more you know about the history of doctrine and the more you understand how minimalist it actually is, when you look at the formulations of doctrine in Christian history, you realize the degree to which they’re trying to end the controversy by coming up with a bare grammar that can be agreed on, but whose contents are endlessly contestable.

The institution of the church, to my mind, has been a 50-50 phenomenon, as evil as good, as Christian as non-Christian. In itself, it is not Christianity. In fact, what we call Christianity in itself is not Christianity. That’s just a blanket term we use for anyone who makes even an ostensible claim to loyalty to Christ.

But this man and these teachings — and this consuming moral attention that is required of us and the messianic light in which that’s cast, by which I mean a light that’s both historical and eternal at once — so that what we do in time already has an eternal meaning and then eternity is already something spilling into time.

“Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

And especially at this moment politically and culturally in which the name Christianity in this country and in other parts of the world has been conscripted yet again, but with even more brazenness, into a justification for cruelty, bigotry, violence, murder even, the waging of war, the persecution of those seeking refuge. The New Testament is pretty clear on strangers in our midst. You’re going to be judged by how well you treat the strangers in our midst. For me, that’s maybe 80 percent of my faith now, just this burning sense of obligation to those whom this man loved. And in calling him God or calling him the revelation of God, I realized that that love is absolutely incumbent on me.

Noah Millman:

But there are two other possible lessons to draw from the Hungarian election that should be more sobering for opponents of the right-wing populist turn in politics, here in America and elsewhere in the world.

The first is that winning an election is only the beginning. Now Péter Magyar will have to reckon with what you might call the Fidesz deep state, the partisan loyalists that Orbán’s party placed throughout the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media and elsewhere to entrench Fidesz’s hold on power. As Yascha Mounk points out in a valuable post-election piece, dealing with this reality presents a Hobson’s choice. If the incoming government doesn’t aggressively purge these individuals, then they can be expected to act as an entrenched opposition force thwarting, disrupting and undermining that government’s effectiveness. But if they do conduct a wholesale purge, then they’ve established a precedent that this is the normal thing for new governments to do—a precedent that will no doubt be followed by future governments, whether led by Fidesz or by some other party. In other words, either way one casualty of Fidesz’s rule might be the idea that certain parts of the government and civil society should be professional, and therefore formally non-partisan and independent. […]

The other possible lesson from Hungary, and it should be sobering indeed, is that trouncing right-wing populism, as opposed to squeaking out a narrow and evanescent victory against it, may require moving considerably further to the right than center-left parties imagine.

Before founding Tirsza, Magyar was a loyal member of the Orbán regime. He broke with Fidesz over an outrageous incident of corruption, and he ran on the government’s disastrous economic record. But with the important exceptions of relations with Europe and with Russia—Magyar promises to restore Hungary to Brussels’s good graces and to end the Hungarian veto of European loans to Ukraine—in policy terms Tirsza has promised a great deal of continuity. Magyar is an immigration restrictionist, a social conservative on issues of sex, gender and sexuality, favors expanding incentives for childbearing—all mainstays of Fidesz’s ideological positioning. The new government promises more competence, an end to corruption, a focus on domestic problem-solving, and restored relations with the rest of Europe. It does not promise a revolution in values. That proposition is what won a landslide.

The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their “nature” is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.

— Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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NASA astronaut and Artemis II Pilot Victor Glover pictured here in the Orion spacecraft during the Artemis II lunar flyby. Glover and his fellow crewmates spent approximately seven hours taking turns at the Orion windows capturing science data to share with their team back on Earth. At closest approach, they came within 4,067 miles of the Moon’s surface.

The Artemis II crew captures a faint view of a crescent Earth above the horizon on the Moon’s far side. (Source)

Ruth Graham:

Humans have always looked up to the skies to contemplate big questions, but we’re doing it less and less these days.

Arnold Lobel:

THE CROCODILE IN THE BEDROOM

____________

A Crocodile became increasingly fond of the wallpaper in his bedroom. He stared at it for hours and hours.

“Just look at all those neat and tidy rows of flowers and leaves,”
said the Crocodile. “They are like soldiers. There is not a single one that is out of place.

“My dear,” said the Crocodile’s wife, “you are spending too much time in bed. Come out into my garden where the air is fresh and the sun is bright and warm.”

“Well, if you insist, for just a few minutes,” said the Crocodile. He put on a pair of dark glasses to protect his eyes from the glare and went
outside.

Mrs. Crocodile was proud of her garden. “Look at the hollyhocks and the marigolds,” she said. “Smell the roses and the lilies of the valley.”

“Great heavens!” cried the Crocodile. “The flowers and leaves in this garden are growing in a terrible tangle! They are all scattered! They
are messy and entwined!”

The Crocodile rushed back to his bedroom in a state of great distress.
He was at once comforted by the sight of his wallpaper.

“Ah,” said the Crocodile. “Here is a garden that is ever so much
better. How happy and secure these flowers make me feel!”

After that the Crocodile seldom left his bed. He lay there, smiling at
the walls. He turned a very pale and sickly shade of green.

____________

Without a doubt, there is such a thing as too much order.

Smelling flowers in the garden last summer:

There’s a famous story about New Hampshire and the “Live Free or Die” motto. When the state decided to slap it on all their license plates, George Maynard, a Jehovah’s Witness, decided the motto was not an accurate representation of his way of life and covered up the motto on the license plates of his vehicles.

After receiving several citations and a 15-day stint in jail for failing to comply or pay his fines, Maynard sought relief from the District Court, where “a three-judge court enjoined the State from arresting and prosecuting appellees in the future for covering the motto on their license plates.”

The state, (ahem) “seeking to communicate to others an official view as to proper appreciation of history, state pride, and individualism,” appealed the decision, eventually landing in the Supreme Court case of Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705 (1977), which ruled in favor of Maynard.

The case could just as easily have been called Irony v. Irony, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t sympathize with Maynard. Representing himself in court for the early citations, he defended himself thusly:

[B]y religious training and belief, I believe my ‘government’ — Jehovah’s Kingdom — offers everlasting life. It would be contrary to that belief to give up my life for the state, even if it meant living in bondage. Although I obey all laws of the State not in conflict with my conscience, this slogan is directly at odds with my deeply held religious convictions.

. . . I also disagree with the motto on political grounds. I believe that life is more precious than freedom.

Here’s the thing that brings all this to mind now: I’m a fan of Something Called Democracy and will continue being so. But I think that most of us use the term believing ourselves to be on the side of Mr. Maynard, while history will show “democracy” and its advocates to be a lot more like the state of New Hampshire.

Alan Jacobs, on reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things:

What an infuriating endeavor. … I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader and now want to throw these volumes as far from me as possible. 

It’s funny because I began as an exceptionally sympathetic reader of Jacobs, but lately…

This is a reminder that I need to sit down and finish that last defense of Kingsnorth. It’s mostly written; I just haven’t felt like finishing it. But Jacobs is one of the reasons why I haven’t. And of course, the fact that I have a one-month-old and a two-year-old at home.

Peco and Ruth Gaskovski:

If it is our aim to remain fully human with our feet firmly planted in reality, then we will need to actually translate our ideas into tangible actions. From our individual actions we do not need to expect sweeping societal change, but we have to start somewhere. Fasting from the virtual while feasting on simple, anachronisitc actions is a tangible beginning. We also believe that there is a fundamental power of face-to-face conversation around a kitchen table. One of the most earth-shattering changes in history did not come to pass through political action, institutional change, or mass demonstrations; it was preceded by a meal around a dinner table, sharing bread and wine.

The Gaskovskis have written before about what they call practicing acts of anachronism, which I have kept meaning to come back around to. I love the phrase, partly because when I read the original post I mistakenly read the entire thing as “small acts of anarchism,” which is just as good a phrase as far as I’m concerned.

“It was one of the small anachronisms that resisted the unbearably fast pace of life,” Ruth writes of simply walking to the grocery store with their small children and loading up a hiking backpack with groceries instead of driving, “and prompted many a driver who zoomed past to take note and wonder: Why would anyone choose to do something so slow and effortful?”

Why? Because “in an age where technology has wholly reformed our imagination, visible models of anachronism serve an essential role in reminding us that slowness and effort make us more human.”

That’s about as straightforward and essential as you can put it.

(It reminds me of a surgeon I used to work with who was in a pick-up basketball league where, of course, everyone tried to make their team names as creative as possible. His team went with “We May Be Small But We’re Slow.”)

Via Jeremy Abel

Stanley Hauerwas:

Christians believe that the true history of the world, that history that determines our destiny, is not carried by the nation-state. In spite of its powerful moral appeal, this history is a history of godlessness. Only the church has the stance, therefore, to describe war for what it is, for the world is too broken to know the reality of war. For what is war but the desire to be rid of God, to claim for ourselves the power to determine our meaning and destiny? Our desire to protect ourselves from our enemies, to eliminate our enemies in the name of protecting the common history we share with our friends, is but the manifestation of our hatred of God.

Matthew Giambrone:

“Well, son, what do you think? Is the volume of the universe infinite, or is it finite but expanding faster than the speed of light, or is it static and somehow bounded?” (I suppose I’m kind of a jerk, but at least I left out the part about quantum fluctuations.) He promptly replied: “What?”

I tried again. “What do you think, son: is the universe infinitely large?” Again, “What?”

I made a third go at it: “How big is the universe?” He was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “Big to us and small to God.”

Simultaneously humbled and proud, I no longer felt like the smart one in the car. “That’s a wonderful answer, the best possible answer.” No other words were spoken on the matter, and really no other words need to be. At least not by me.

God, though, did speak something else on it, lest this be to us not only a big universe but a big, hopeless universe. He spoke before all other words, before even his own words that called this physical realm into existence (13.8 billion years ago, I’m told). Before and beyond all that, there was another Word, which is always being spoken. And thus it was that God found a way to fit inside this place, this little universe that is much too small to hold him. The most miraculous thing about the Incarnation is that the universe did not immediately burst.

And while he was in it, he spoke a few more words. He said that when it comes time for us to leave the universe, we ought to go out through the narrow gate. Then he did leave it, briefly, and then he came back a few days later, and afterward, that gate was not quite so narrow as it had been. In fact, it was stretched immeasurably wide because he himself had passed through it. So we, too, can now pass through, as was his purpose. But it also remains narrow. Like the universe it adjoins, it is both big and small: it could accommodate the entire human race, yet you might easily walk right by it without even noticing. Many people do.

But on that day when he returned, when he gloriously arose from his three days away, I imagine that for a moment the universe was indeed filled with infinite light and everything was infinitely bright. And enough of that light remains for us to find the gate — to find our way from this place into the other one, the one that is truly infinite.