And the Quote o’ the Week award goes to… Nick Catoggio: “If the regime calls his bluff and he follows through, the likely result will be a humanitarian disaster and Iranian retaliation against oil output across the region. Militarily and economically, this clusterfark will become considerably more farked.”

Also: “We’ll probably know by Sunday, as it would be characteristic of this administration to want to launch a ground attack on a Muslim country on Easter.” — Regardless of what happens between now and Sunday, that’s a not-inaccurate note of character worth not overlooking.

R. David Nelson:

It is fair enough for theology to acknowledge that words—not least, God’s words—can and do behave extraordinarily, transcending their capacity as mere signifiers. But to erect an entire theology of theological language on the premise of the ecstatic, interruptive character of the word of God is to risk dislodging or alienating the word from ordinary human words and, indeed, from the world.

Stanley Hauerwas (sermon at Duke Divinity, March 28, 2008):

We are well-schooled Christians. We know we are not to identify with Judas. Yet we cannot help but think, thief though he was, Judas was right—the costly perfume should have been sold and the money given to the poor. If we are honest, we cannot resist the conclusion—Judas is appealing.

Moreover, if any conviction characterizes what it means to be a Christian in our day, it is surely the presumption that we ought to be on the side of the poor. No longer sure that we know what it means to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, we at least take comfort that to be a Christian requires that we care about those less well off. Of course what it means for us, that is, for the moderately well off, to care for the poor usually extends no farther than our attempt to make the poor like us, that is, moderately well off.

Moreover, given the world in which we find ourselves—a world that thinks that what Christians believe must make us doubtful allies in the struggle for justice—the Christian concern for the poor can win us some respect. The cultural despisers of the church at least have to acknowledge that Christians do some good in spite of our reactionary convictions. So it is good that we burn with a passion for justice. The only problem with such a passion is that it can put us on Judas’s side.

This means we are profoundly troubled, if not offended, by Jesus’ response to Judas: “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” Jesus, we wish Jesus had not said that. If you needed a text to confirm Marx’s contention that Christianity is the opiate of the masses, you need look no further than, “You always have the poor with you.”

Yet note: the one who said, “You always have the poor with you,” was poor. That Mary saw fit to bestow a lavish gift on a poor person, a poor person who was soon to die, is surely to be celebrated— particularly by the poor. One of their own receives a lavish gift. One of their own is celebrated. So, if you are poor, what Mary does is a good.

It is, of course, true that Christians have used this text to teach the poor to accept their status by suggesting that if they do so, they will ultimately receive a greater reward than those well off. The church has also glossed over Jesus’ response to Judas by not asking, “what if we did more than cared for the poor?”or, “what if we celebrated with the poor?”

That such questions are not asked reflects a church that has forgotten that Christianity is determinatively the faith of the poor. That is why we, the moderately well off, are puzzled by the undeniable reality that the church across time and space has been constituted by the poor. We, the moderately well off, are tempted to think, in response to Mary’s gift, “What a waste.” Surely a more utilitarian gift would have been more appropriate? But the poor know that this is Jesus, the one who shares their lot, so what could be more appropriate than this lavish gift, bestowed on this man to prepare his body for death?

It is crucial that we notice that this is a dinner where death is as present as those feasting. Lazarus, who had been raised from the dead, is present. Lazarus was raised from the dead, but that only delayed the inevitable. Lazarus, like you and me, will die. Moreover, Mary’s anointing presages Jesus’ death. Mary had bought the perfume for the day of his death, but it seems she could not wait. And so she anoints him in order to prepare him for death.

I think it is not accidental that death and poverty are connected at this dinner. Death, after all, creates an economy of scarcity. We only have a few years to live. We cannot do everything we would like to do before we die. That some of us have been given more than others is just the way things have worked out. We do not necessarily want to be selfish, but there is just so much that one can do in a world of limited resources.

Mary seems, however, to have caught a glimpse of a different world through her encounter with Jesus when he raised Lazarus from the dead. Mary’s gift—her outrageous gesture of love—indicates that she has been drawn into the abundance of God’s kingdom enacted by the life and death of the one who has said he is the resurrection and the life. She knows there is always “enough” because we cannot use Jesus up. […]

… Mary’s extravagant gesture turns out to be what God has done for us, that is, to lavish us with a love we cannot use up. But even more startling, we turn out to be the gift God would give the world through the work of the Holy Spirit.

That is why we must think of the wealth of the church as the wealth of the poor. The beauty of a cathedral is a beauty for the poor. The church’s liturgy, her music and hymns, is a beauty of and for the poor. The literature of the church, her theology and philosophy, are distorted if they do not contribute to a common life determined by the worship of a Savior who was poor. The church’s wealth, Mary’s precious ointment, can never be used up or wasted on the poor. Thus after Jesus is dead, Nicodemus will use almost a hundred times the amount of Mary’s gift to care for Jesus’s body.

No doubt such an account of the church’s wealth can be an invitation to self-deception as well as a justification for us, the moderately well off, not to hear the call of those in need. Yet “the poor you will always have with you” is not a description to legitimate a lack of concern for the poor. Rather, it is a description of a church that has learned that, “insofar as you do it to the least of these, you do it unto me” (Matt 25:40). Mary the sister of Lazarus has done for Jesus what the church must always be for the world, that is, a lavish gift poured out for the poor by the poor. […]

… To have the poor with us, to have Jesus with us, does not mean our task is to make the poor rich. Of course, rich and poor Christians alike are called to serve one another. Rich and poor alike are called to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked. But the church, if it is the church of the poor, must refuse the bargain with death that tempts us to live as if life is a zero-sum game of winners and losers. We are, after all, Mary’s people who have touched and have been touched by Jesus. We know, therefore, that we live in a world of abundance, because you cannot use up the one who has been raised from the dead.

I am quite aware that some may well find what I have said to be “idealistic.” Yet in a moment we will again eat and drink with the poor person who has invited us to share his body and blood. This is the gift we cannot use up. This is the gift that makes possible a people capable of sharing food with one another. This is the gift that makes possible a people who have time for one another. This is the gift that challenges presumptions of power, prestige, and status that we think necessary to be of service to the poor. This is the reality that makes it possible to resist the appeal of Judas. So come and receive this lavish gift, and by receiving may we become poor, so that the world might see what it means to be rich.

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HONOR

If you need it defined, you don’t have it.

— Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness

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Jay Sophalkalyan:

There remains a meaningful distinction between inviting thinkers who challenge prevailing orthodoxies and elevating personalities whose primary currency is provocation.

…the cultural reference points of the American right no longer lie in conservative intellectual traditions or political theory grounded in argument and debate. Instead, they stem from a loose constellation of streamers, influencers, and online commentators whose audiences are predominantly young men navigating an internet grievance culture organized around attention—earned through spectacle and the continual escalation of rhetorical transgression.

Furthermore, figures from these spaces are increasingly finding their way into positions of influence within youth political organizations themselves.

When I praised Mana Afsari’s The Point piece “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” in a newsletter last year, I mentioned my doubts about how far her generous ear-to-the-ground report on right-wing youth could actually go. Sophalkalyan’s piece for The Dispatch above helps explain those doubts.

Afsari’s closing description of young men who “don’t know who they are but know what they’re doing” — this was a tellingly contradictory way to end her piece. At best, she was able to see the good, or desire for good, in them. My fear, though — not an accusation, just concern — is that Afsari was merely participating in the prattle.

Here’s an excerpt from her essay:

These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century Romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the after-parties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives. They also impose strict rules, among them a complete prohibition against phones on the debate floor.

Outside their meetings, they’ll read whatever they think is honest, real and intellectually meaningful, no matter where it is published. […]

I don’t come for the debates themselves—which can be boring or ridiculous. But like these young men, I’ll go wherever people want to discuss ideas vigorously, however partisan or otherwise faulty. The casual conversations I have here are among the best I’ve had outside of academia. Here one needs no excuses or credentials to be part of grand discussions about history, philosophy and art.

To paraphrase and extend a point from Wendell Berry, Afsari and her boy-Natcons might just be reasonably model modern citizens: affluent sophisticates who want to discuss Freud and Montesquieu and complain about their “oppressed ambition” but who can’t grow a potato or act like responsible adults in the world beyond debate class. They want to discuss “big ideas,” full stop.

(There’s a version of this in the more explicitly Christian world, one that I still feel some shame for: They want to discuss the importance of big theological issues, “but they understand neither what they say nor the things they confidently assert.”)

The young, restless Right still requires, and deserves, a generous ear; what it should not get is a journalistic veneer to hide its widespread sophistry.

To quote Wendell Berry in that same passage: “I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.”

Phil Klay:

The justifications for the war have been stunningly incoherent. Maybe the war is about regime change, about Iran’s nuclear program, about the narrow military objectives of degrading their ballistic missile and drone capabilities, or perhaps it was because Israel was about to attack and we’d be at risk, or because the United States was under imminent threat from Iran, or to achieve peace in the Middle East, and so on.

Maybe it’s not a war at all. Maybe it’s an “excursion that will keep us out of a war” or an incursion or maybe it’s only a “little excursion.” In President Trump’s America, there may be only two genders, but our military adventures can identify however they please.

[…]

Without a clear moral or political purpose, we’re left with what the military analyst Franz-Stefan Gady calls the “strike-as-strategy” paradox, in which we substitute tactical prowess for comprehensive strategic design. This tendency, he writes, “is reinforced by a political culture that demands televised displays of military prowess.”

Well, I am not entertained. And though my ideals have been bruised and battered, not least by the war I served in not long after Mr. Hegseth’s first deployment, I still retain a faith in the principles of the Constitution I swore an oath to 20 years ago. They are universal, not nationalistic, principles, and they should serve as a check on the hubristic American tendency to think we can dominate others by sheer force of military might.

As Washington knew well, war is a “plague to mankind,” even when it goes well and the only targets we strike are valid military targets. The average junior Iranian sailor on a ship off the coast of Sri Lanka could be a conscript. He might even dislike the regime that just murdered thousands of his fellow Iranians but which he feels helpless to overthrow. He is, like the average American, endowed by his Creator with inalienable rights.

The whole piece is worth reading.

I’m not a sports guy. Hockey has generally been a preference but without much real fandom, despite marrying into hockey people. Baseball is one I could see future me getting into, particularly with two baby boys in the house now.

I’m also not a National Review reader, so I’m stepping outside of my wheelhouse a bit to critique Christian Schneider’s piece on baseball as the ultimate modern sport. There’s some mixed messaging toward the end of the piece, and Schneider clearly praises the continued and even increasing popularity of baseball. But the way he wanders there strikes me as nothing short of erroneous.

The conventional wisdom says that baseball is a “pastoral sport” that is, for better or worse, out of step with modernity. Except that it isn’t, says Schneider.

Here’s the thing, though: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Not a little wrong. Substantially wrong. Baseball isn’t a dying sport desperately clinging to its past. It’s one of the most modern entertainment products in America — and it’s been hiding in plain sight.

Why is baseball the ultimate modern sport? you ask. Schneider tells us. Because it has… fastballs, and dive-catches, and home run hits. It’s also quite clippable for social media consumption. And then there’s (get this) lots of data and analytics.

If you sat down and tried to design a sport for the analytics era — for the kind of person who enjoys arguing at dinner about underlying metrics and model-based projections — you would invent baseball. The sport now tracks launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, barrel percentage, expected batting average, sprint speed, and, yes, actual swing mechanics in real time.

We can’t forget to add the fact that MLB has, according to Schneider, made concessions to modernity by altering some of its rules and practices, like pitch clocks and bases that are 18” wide instead of 15” wide. And lastly, because baseball is casual enough in its play and atmosphere for fans to talk to each other, that doesn’t actually mean that it’s casual enough in its play and atmosphere for fans to talk to each other; it means it’s a great “second screen” lifestyle sport perfectly tailored to modern screen-scrolling attention spans.

I hope I stumble upon some takedown response to Schneider from a writer with more knowledge and wit and love of the game than me, but I’ll happily plant a layman’s flag here and call foul. (I know, I know, but I couldn’t resist. And I rarely skip a chance to use the word bullshit.)

If you tried to design a sport for the analytics era, says Schneider, you’d invent baseball because — well, look at all the things we analyze! But Schneider could just as easily have said ping pong, or flying squirrels. The fact that a sport, or an event of any kind, can be grotesquely analyzed does not say one single meaningful thing about its design or value, especially for a game that goes back at least as far as the 1740’s.

In fact, follow that link and you’ll see that it’s precisely the point that baseball wasn’t designed for anything. The“conventional wisdom” for a long time had been that baseball was invented by Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York around 1840. But, uh, conventional wisdom was wrong, and it wasn’t just off by a hundred years:

[David] Block was offering a whole new way of approaching paternity. “Who is the father of baseball?” is the wrong question. As Thorn put it, “The game was not invented so much as it was accreted.”

That’s what Block is telling us. To put away the bedtime stories. To think of baseball as we would Homo sapiens, as something that crawled out of the primordial ooze at a hazy date in history and developed, slowly and mystifyingly, over the centuries. When you think like that, time spreads out before you like center field at the Polo Grounds. The first entry in Larry McCray’s Protoball chronology isn’t Doubleday. It’s “Overhand Throwing Evolves in Primates.”

[…]

This is the great irony of English baseball. Historians once assumed it went unrecorded because it didn’t exist. But it’s just as likely the sport wasn’t written about because it was mostly the stuff of commoners. Baseball was everywhere. The newspapers didn’t cover it because it was so mundane.

Modernity’s gaze of data-fication and social-media-fication and analyze-to-death-ification can be fixed on anything. As Sheldon and Alan Hirsch have argued in their book, The Beauty of Short Hops, the sabermetricians treat baseball as a game “where the players are primarily vehicles for organizing data — names to attach to sets of statistics.” But that means only that baseball has been “hijacked by people with such a mindset.”

Baseball is a game — a peaceful game! — intimately evolved among down-to-earth Homo sapiens. And down-to-earth Homo sapiens still love it. Is it the ultimate game for modernity? Or an anti-modern pastime being hijacked in plain sight?

Sara Hendren:

Humans have stark and urgent material needs, and they’re right in front of us. Why should most people examine and scrub each situation down to its philosophical foundations, looking for consistent rules?

The ideas do matter. A strong design education should have philosophical and historical training at its non-negotiable core. But instead of a linear model where we assume that ideas always manifest themselves downstream in tangible design, we might take seriously that the causality runs both ways—that design with a demonstrated commitment to sacred humanness is itself a form of argument. Both neuroscience and environmental psychology show that our behavior is shaped in part by our designed surroundings. So we might set out to start with design—with a come-and-see invitation to the designed spaces and places where humans thrive. We might put forth a more sturdy anthropology by example, an irresistibly beautiful and consistent life ethic—an ethic that comes alive in the attentive structural details and material choices of our spaces and in the activities they envelop—rather than waiting around for a proper rationale to always lead the way. We might build the kinds of settings that signal the strong worth of the people inside them.

Leopold Staff:

Foundations

I built on the sand
And it tumbled down,
I built on the rock
And it tumbled down.
Now when I build, I shall begin
with smoke from the chimney.

Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

(Milosz said that this is a poem of “naked faith,” written in the immediate ashes of World War II. “What was left was to do what a child does, who when trying to draw a house often starts with the smoke from the chimney, then draws a chimney, and then the rest.”

Nate Sweitzer, “The Mozart of the Prairies” (source)

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Today, I am told, is the 10th anniversary of the death of Jim Harrison. The Substack The Poetic Outlaws has up a moving, and haunting, tribute to the man.

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Though I have not been a wide reader of Harrison, I claim deep admiration. Braided Creek with Ted Kooser was one of the most instantly and naturally loveable books of poetry I’ve ever held.

Inspired this morning, and isolated to an upper corner of the house nursing the end of some flu-like thing, I picked up his splendid collection Dead Man’s Float. This is the opening poem:

Where is Jim Harrison?

He fell off the cliff of a seven-inch zafu.
He couldn’t get up because of his surgery.
He believes in the Resurrection mostly
because he was never taught how not to.

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From a 1988 interview with Harrison (partially quoted in the Poetic Outlaws post above):

This idea of movement and the metaphor of the river, seem to be central to your work.

It’s the origin of the thinking behind The Theory and Practice of Rivers. In a life properly lived, you’re a river. You touch things lightly or deeply; you move along because life herself moves, and you can’t stop it; you can’t figure out a banal game plan applicable to all situations; you just have to go with the “beingness” of life, as Rilke would have it. In Sundog, Strang says a dam doesn’t stop a river, it just controls the flow. Technically speaking, you can’t stop one at all.

But you have to work at it, make a conscious effort so that your life flows like a river?

Antaeus magazine wanted me to write a piece for their issue about nature. I told them I couldn’t write about nature but that I’d write them a little piece about getting lost and all the profoundly good aspects of being lost—the immense fresh feeling of really being lost. I said there that my definition of magic in the human personality, in fiction and in poetry, is the ultimate level of attentiveness. Nearly everyone goes through life with the same potential perceptions and baggage, whether it’s marriage, children, education, or unhappy childhoods, whatever; and when I say attentiveness I don’t mean just to reality, but to what’s exponentially possible in reality. I don’t think, for instance, that Márquez is pushing it in One Hundred Years of Solitude—that was simply his sense of reality. The critics call this magic realism, but they don’t understand the Latin world at all. Just take a trip to Brazil. Go into the jungle and take a look around. This old Chippewa I know—he’s about seventy-five years old—said to me, “Did you know that there are people who don’t know that every tree is different from every other tree?” This amazed him. Or don’t know that a nation has a soul as well as a history, or that the ground has ghosts that stay in one area. All this is true, but why are people incapable of ascribing to the natural world the kind of mystery that they think they are somehow deserving of but have never reached? This attentiveness is your main tool in life, and in fiction, or else you’re going to be boring. As Rimbaud said, which I believed very much when I was nineteen and which now I’ve come back to, for our purposes as artists, everything we are taught is false—everything.

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Here’s another from Dead Man’s Float:

The River

Yes, we’ll gather by the river,
the beautiful, the beautiful river.
They say it runs by the throne of God.
This is where God invented fish.
Wherever, but then God’s throne is as wide
as the universe. If you’re attentive you’ll
see the throne’s borders in the stars. We’re on this side
and when you get to the other side we don’t know
what will happen if anything. If nothing happens
we won’t know it, I said once. Is that cynical?
No, nothing is nothing, not upsetting just
nothing. Then again maybe we’ll be cast
at the speed of light through the universe
to God’s throne. His hair is bounteous.
All the 5,000 birds on earth were created there.
The firstborn cranes, herons, hawks, at the back
so as not to frighten the little ones.
Even now they remember this divine habitat.
Shall we gather at the river, this beautiful river?
We’ll sing with the warblers perched on his eyelashes.

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If you don’t already love the man, take four minutes to watch this PBS recap of a 2009 interview with him. He was, or is in my imagination, like a more feral Malcolm Guite.

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From Harrison’s poem “Bridge”:

Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
though the sea was too wide.
I’m proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air.…

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above
the abyss. Tonight the moon will be in my lap.
This is my job, to study the universe
from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea, the
faint green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.

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I didn’t know who Jim Harrison was when he died — back then, I didn’t know that he was or that he had died. He even sat on my own shelves for years, unknown to me, unknowingly collected and collecting dust.

Today I am happy — lucky and grateful — that he was and is here.

Mandy Brown:

We are, once again and inexplicably, seeing a conversation unfold about reforming the military force in our streets, with body cameras and training standing in for a moral reckoning about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world that is livable for more than the wealthy few. We know what such “reforms” accomplish, because we’ve seen this many times before: an armed, unaccountable force with body cameras is no less deadly or immoral than an armed, unaccountable force without. A trained secret police is still the secret police.

[…]

Body cameras promise increased surveillance with no attendant increase in accountability, while training maintains the distribution of money and resources away from care and towards cops and prisons; both reforms represent business as usual, not a remade world.

I take the heart of her point as a very good point, even if she takes it to an untenable place. In fact, that isn’t strong enough: This is very important, even if the “defund the police” direction she seems to favor in that post is the wrong one. (She does seem to me to be saying significantly more that just “abolish ICE.”)

Reform is not enough, or entirely wrongheaded, she suggests. Instead, Brown highlights André Gorz’s “non-reformist reforms.”

For Gorz, a reform is non-reformist if it both exercises the power and agency of workers acting together and foreshadows the future world in the present. That is, a non-reformist reform requires both concrete, bottoms-up action and the reflection of a different world within that action, the way a small fractal prefigures the large.

Far be it from me to knock some fun wordplay like “non-reformist reforms,” but I am skeptical that that could be a term to hang a hat on. (I could be further convinced.) And I don’t know anything about Gorz. And I am still skeptical of the extent to which Brown would take what she is calling “abolitionist demands.”

That description of non-reformist reforms, however, has potential.

Here’s Miroslav Volf, who I couldn’t help thinking of reading Brown’s post, in the closing of a 2012 piece which is included in the second edition of his book The End of Memory:

All the conditions for non-remembrance of wrongs suffered and committed will be realized only in the coming world of love, a world that, in turn, is hard to imagine as a reality with truthful and living memory of the horrors of history. And yet, this eschatological hope can shape our practice today. When the miracle of such non-remembrance happens in families, among friends, or in small communities—on those occasions, not so rare as one may think, a ray of light from the dawning world of love has illumined our lives.

Here’s Volf earlier in the book:

[I]n Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities — a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, however devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it — they will, in [David] Kelsey’s words, enter a world “marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.”

Call it what you want, but that sounds like real reform to me. That I don’t find anything this rich in the Brown or Gorz program will likely always be a problem for me. In fact, somewhere in this post is an urge, but not the time, to go down that “Why I’m still a Christian” road. Instead, I’ll settle for some overlapping Venns.

So I trust this in the hands of Volf far more than Brown, but Brown’s longing for changes that foreshadow a world “where care overcomes criminalization” is exactly right. And, my own alarms bells about some secularized postmillennialism notwithstanding, I love the way she puts it:

To put this another way: a reform maintains the old world, often under cover. While a non-reformist reform demands that we build a new world, one in which all humans and the more-than-human world can thrive.

We must take small steps towards the future we want; there is no other way. But each step must point the way toward that future, a drop of water that heralds the wave.