Alfred Delp:

When I pace back and forth in my cell, three steps forward and three steps back, hands in irons, ahead of me an unknown destiny, I understand very differently than before those ancient promises of the coming Lord who will redeem us and set us free. And, along with these thoughts, comes the memory of the angel that a good person gave me for Advent two years ago. It held a banner: “Rejoice, for the Lord is near.” A bomb destroyed the angel. A bomb killed the good person, and I often sense that she continues to do angel-services for me.…

And it is… knowledge of the quiet angels of annunciation, who speak their message of blessing into the distress and scatter their seeds of the blessing that will begin to grow in the middle of the night. These are not yet the loud angels of public jubilation and fulfillment, these angels of Advent. Silently and unnoticed, they come into private rooms and appear before our hearts as they did long ago.…

Advent, despite all earnestness, is a time of refuge because it has received a message. Oh, if people know nothing about the message and the promises anymore, if they only experience the four walls and the prison windows of their gray days, and no longer perceive the quiet footsteps of the announcing angels, if the angels’ murmured word does not simultaneously shake us to the depths and lift up our souls – then it is over for us. Then we are living wasted time, and we are dead, long before they do anything to us.

Simone Weil:

‘Be ye perfect even as your Father who is in heaven ’ Love in the same way as the sun gives light. Love has to be brought back to ourselves in order that it may be shed on all things. God alone loves all things and he only loves himself.
To love in God is far more difficult than we think.
[…]

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.

John Ruskin:

And, for all of us, the question is not at all to ascertain how much or how little corruption there is in human nature; but to ascertain whether, out of all the mass of that nature, we are of the sheep or the goat breed; whether we are people of upright heart, being shot at, or people of crooked heart, shooting. And, of all the texts bearing on the subject, this, which is a quite simple and practical order, is the one you have chiefly to hold in mind. “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”

LUCILLA. And yet, how inconsistent the texts seem!

L. Nonsense, Lucilla! do you think the universe is bound to look consistent to a girl of fifteen? Look up at your own room window; —you can just see it from where you sit. I’m glad that it is left open, as it ought to be, in so fine a day. But do you see what a black spot it looks, in the sunlighted wall?

LUCILLA. Yes, it looks as black as ink.

L. Yet you know it is a very bright room when you are inside of it; quite as bright as there is any occasion for it to be, that its little lady may see to keep it tidy. Well, it is very probable, also, that if you could look into your heart from the sun’s point of view, it might appear a very black hole indeed: nay, the sun may sometimes think good to tell you that it looks so to Him; but He will come into it, and make it very cheerful for you, for all that, if you don’t put the shutters up. And the one question for YOU, remember, is not “dark or light?” but “tidy or untidy?” Look well to your sweeping and garnishing; and be sure it is only the banished spirit, or some of the seven wickeder ones at his back, who will still whisper to you that it is all black.

John Ruskin:

But the way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground. What fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off, and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that nothing else is.

Stanley Hauerwas:

Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own…

Valerie Pavilonis:

[Erik] Varden did not write only about Daniélou; that bit was part of a fuller meditation on chastity, in which he also wrote: “Only what I love will change me beautifully.” You cannot really love, I think, without being honest. Love requires a willing, enthusiastic force behind it, a fullness that cannot form if the germ of the feeling is cocooned in layers of irony. Perhaps that’s why a child’s sense of love of the small things of the world, of this teddy bear or this doll, is so heartwarming to us: They do not care if it is cool, or if anyone is watching. They are simply honest in their love. 

Freddie deBoer:

[S]omeone who scrawls an Italian antifascist slogan onto a bullet casing and also “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO,” as well as obscure video game references… this is exactly who I’m talking about. Clearly he had some sort of ideological urge, some sense that his violence should contain meaning, but his impulses and influences are incoherent; indeed, that urge has been inculcated in online communities that are defined by nothing so much as, well, nothing – the all-consuming lol lol lol of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred.

An assassin whose express motivation is a confused mishmash of ideological fragments and video game references is just one asshole with a gun. The 21st century violent tendency among angry, directionless people whose brains have bathed in online nihilism? That’s the perfect, tragic embodiment of the strange attractor, in the sense that I mean. The act of violence itself is not the product of a coherent belief system; it is the chaotic process by which the individual attempts to construct one. The “antifascist” label and the video game tropes are not the cause of the violence, they are the disorganized, post-hoc rationalizations for a pre-existing state of violent kinetic energy. They are the cognitive debris that has been pulled into the orbit of the strange attractor. This individual is not driven by conviction, but by a profound lack of it. They have been starved of clear, socially-sanctioned purpose and, in that vacuum, have latched onto whatever ambient signals – political noise, digital fantasies, the uniquely dehumanizing meme cultures that men have built online around their shared hobbies – they can find to justify a self-selected purpose: destruction.

The Kirk murder, in this context, is not an act of political terrorism; it is a desperate, violent assertion of personal meaning by a pathetic, immoral agent operating in a system experiencing a collapse of meaning. The assassin is the ultimate product of a society that has become a cacophony of contradictory signals. Unable to process a single, clear purpose, the individual becomes a tragic automaton, compelled by a violent impulse and forced to invent a narrative that can, however briefly, make sense of the carnage. The ideology is not the map to the violence; it is the bewildered commentary on a journey that has already begun.

He loses me — or my nod-along attention, at least — with much of the math and analogies that follow. But that’s not because he isn’t in some significant way on to something:

The grim certainty of a positive Lyapunov exponent means that the system is no longer governed by its grandest political narratives, but by its lowest-level noise. We are entering a state where the societal trajectory is not defined by policy or ideology, but by which random, unanchored individual next provides the minuscule perturbation that will send the entire manifold spiraling into a new, unknowable orbit. The signal is no longer at the top, but is rather buried in the entropic static of the digital substrate, waiting for a low-inertia vessel to broadcast it to the world and in doing so spread this empty, bloody gospel.

Needless to say, this is pretty hopeless and terrifying stuff. So rather than say, as Mr. deBoer goes on to conclude, “This is where the concept of self-organized criticality becomes paramount,” I’m happy to stick with the still messy but very good gospel as presented by Stanley Hauerwas:

Eschatology is a big word that says when Jesus was conceived in Mary’s belly, a new world was born. That’s the reason why I say that Christians are not called to live lives of nonviolence because we believe non-violence is a way to rid the world of war. But in a world of war, as faithful followers of Christ, we cannot imagine being anything other than non-violent, because it’s not like you have to make the world non-violent. Jesus did it. Jesus did it. Our problem is we don’t believe that. Now the question is, “How do you, as a church, embody that kind of truthfulness that is required for people to live non-violent with one another, because we’re willing to tell one another the truth?” I mean, the truth is hard to bear. God loves us, and we think that’s good for God. But how to turn that into trust is a very hard matter.

I’ll take that challenge, on those terms. Yins can keep yur “self-organized criticality.”

Mary Geddry:

Back in Georgia, MAGA populism has eaten its own tail. A congressional hopeful bragged about calling ICE on Hyundai’s $7 billion EV plant, and ICE dutifully detained over 300 South Korean engineers. Those workers are now home, recounting horror stories of duress forms, rancid food, and guards mocking their accents while they wore prisoner uniforms. The fallout? Hyundai has frozen construction, Seoul is fuming, and industry insiders warn the entire U.S. auto supply chain could be disrupted since Korean technicians set up and program the machinery for virtually every major car plant. Tens of thousands of American jobs didn’t just vanish with a bang, they’re evaporating in indefinite delays. The real winners? GEO Group, the private prison operator that profited from the detentions and once counted Pam Bondi as a lobbyist. This is a literal racket: arrest foreign technicians, enrich private prisons, and leave American workers holding pink slips. […]

Taken together, today’s headlines show a government more interested in suing reporters, punishing NGOs, retaliating against doctors, blowing up fishing boats, chasing away auto jobs, and groveling for TikTok than actually governing. Abroad, he’s greeted with Epstein banners; at home, farmers and workers are left to wonder how many more self-inflicted wounds they can withstand. Trump wanted to rule like a dictator, John Kelly warned. Turns out he’s ruling like a dictator and a clown: thin-skinned enough to sue the Times, reckless enough to terrorize allies, and vain enough to think the Apprentice ratings count as evidence in court.

This is America, September 2025: a nation where the president files a $15 billion tantrum, the vice president plots purges, insurers crush surgeons, fishermen flee the sea, and the UK greets us with billboards of Jeffrey Epstein. If it feels like the walls are closing in, that’s because they are…

Jason A. Staples:

Significantly, the clay is not portrayed as passive in these passages but rather as challenging its maker, serving as a satirical image for Israel’s rebellion and accusations against YHWH. In this context, as with Jeremiah, the potter/clay images in Isaiah do not suggest that YHWH works irresistibly—the very rebellion that has prompted these oracles demonstrates Israel’s capacity to resist. Instead, these passages rebuke the stubbornness of the people, who should submit to their creator rather than resisting him. In the same way, Paul’s (slightly amended) quotation of Isa 29:16 in Rom 9:20 is not an assertion of unilateral divine fiat but instead calls attention to the foolishness of humans imagining they could rightly impugn God’s justice, a point he further reinforces by appealing to God’s pathos in the next verses.[…]

These echoes and the potter/clay metaphor itself remind the reader not only that the divine potter has the right to make vessels of dishonor from disobedient Israel but that God has always reserved the right to respond to Israel’s disobedience in this manner. Indeed, God has previously made an unfaithful portion of Israel into a vessel for dishonorable use and cast that worthless vessel among the nations. Not coincidentally, God is now calling instruments of mercy from among the nations where Israel was sown (Zech 10:9; cf. Hos 2:23), redeeming the not-people from their useless state (9:24-26). The master potter has therefore used even the disobedience of his people to bring about mercy and redemption (cf. Rom 11:25-26), a purpose that has paradoxically been facilitated even by disobedient instruments of wrath. By implication, if God has made redemptive use even of Israel’s past disobedience, the same can be expected of any disobedience in the present. The incorporation of transformed gentiles therefore serves not as evidence of God’s unfaithfulness but rather as proof that God’s faithfulness to unfaithful Israel extends even further than previously imagined. God’s mercy ultimately supersedes his wrath, completing the circle of redemption (cf. Rom 11:28-36).