Mary Huntington:

Perhaps, then, one central issue that can’t be reached by tax changes or different housing policy that the enabling paradigm of modernity itself – of technology, of “progress” – is radically hostile to the mindset required to welcome children. This possibility then also provides a window into a great deal else, which has been marginalised by the ideology of Progress. For by extension, the technological mindset is at odds with any kind of interdependent relationship – because it is at odds with resonance, which is to say encountering the world and other beings in relationship rather than as resources.…

That might mean, for example, raising meat animals in accordance with their nature rather than in accordance with the industrial search for maximum yield. And meeting someone or something where it is means accepting limits on what we can demand. In the context of human connections, as for example a baby’s needs, we don’t call this “limits” but simply “relationship”. To accept relationships that fall outside transactional logic is to accept being bound by and to something we can’t always control, and can’t always opt out of. Belonging to others means accepting that those relationships place constraints on us. As a wife and mother, for example, I couldn’t just move overseas for three months at no notice. This is not oppression; it’s an enabling condition for the freedom I have to live the life I have well.

David Walker, a free black man born in 1796, in what James Davison Hunter calls “one of the most important polemics of the early nineteenth century… a statement as radical as any of the Revolutionary period”:

Are we MEN!!—I ask you, O my brethren! are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we? Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone? Is he not their Master as well as ours?—What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we cannot precisely tell—but I declare, we judge men by their works.

The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. …

… In fact, take them as a body, they are ten times more cruel, avaricious and unmerciful than ever [pre-Christian Europeans] were; for while they were heathens, they were bad enough it is true, but it is positively a fact that they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, and through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kind of ways. While they were heathens, they were too ignorant for such barbarity. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelties. Now suppose God were to give them more sense, what would they do? If it were possible, would they not dethrone Jehovah and seat themselves upon his throne?

“Can anything,” Walker goes on to ask, “be a greater mockery of religion than the way in which it is conducted by the Americans?”

… He…who…has…ears — shutter.

David Frum:

Most of Haley’s supporters voted for her as a way to stop Donald Trump. Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him; it will only lower their opinion of her. When she says, as she said again today, that she wishes Trump would “reach out” to her voters, she’s speaking words that may sound like English, but make no sense. The only way Trump could reach out to Trump-skeptical Republicans is by pleading guilty to the many criminal charges against him and vowing to devote the rest of his life to restitution for the victims of his many civil frauds.

[…]

From the point of view of Trump-skeptical Republicans, this election is no more about Joe Biden than a fire in a children’s hospital is about the fire extinguisher. They don’t think, Gee, I wish this extinguisher were newer, so I’ll let the children burn to death. They think, I hope there’s still an ounce or two of flame-retardant foam left in this old thing—and if there is, I’ll be damn grateful for it.

Steve Hayes:

If don’t have convictions that Trump shouldn’t be president after January 6, you probably don’t have convictions.

Nick Catoggio:

As a Never Trumper, it’s my duty today to be furious at Nikki Haley. Yet I feel nothing…

How angry can one be about this, realistically?

It’s traumatic to watch a “principled conservative” roll over for a proto-fascist out of rote partisanship, but we’ve all gotten used to that particular trauma by now. The anger is spent. Numbness and fatalism are what’s left.

[…]

Watching Haley back Trump on Wednesday, I had dark visions of what might be in store for her. In 2028: “J.D. Vance has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Gretchen Whitmer would be a catastrophe.” Then 2032: “Tucker Carlson has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Josh Shapiro would be a catastrophe.” Or 2036: “Nick Fuentes has not been perfect. I have made that clear many, many times. But Wes Moore would be a catastrophe.”

It’s 2016 forever. The future is delayed, but rest assured that it’s coming.

Zadie Smith:

The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

An added note for clarity: I have my differing feelings about much of the protest-leaning middle ground in Smith’s piece, most of which, in spite of the “words,” does little to really address the Jew-hatred that thrives on these campuses. But the above point is sharp. And it’s a point I will not stop making.

Ivo Andrić:

There had been and there would be again starlight nights on the kapia and rich constellations and moonlight, but there had never been, and God alone knows whether there would be again, such young men who in such conversations and with such feelings and ideas would keep vigil on the kapia. That was a generation of rebel angels, in that short moment while they still had all the power and all the rights of angels and also the flaming pride of rebels. These sons of peasants, traders or artisans from a remote Bosnian township had obtained from fate, without any special effort of their own, a free entry into the world and the great illusion of freedom. With their inborn small-town characteristics, they went out into the world, chose more or less for themselves and according to their own inclinations, momentary moods or the whims of chance, the subject of their studies, the nature of their entertainments and the circle of their friends and acquaintances. For the most part they were unable, or did not know how, to seize and make use of what they succeeded in seeing, but there was not one of them who did not have the feeling that he could take what he wished and that all that he took was his. Life (that word came up very often in their conversations, as it did in the literature and politics of the time, when it was always written with a capital letter), Life stood before them as an object, as a field of action for their liberated senses, for their intellectual curiosity and their sentimental exploits, which knew no limits. All roads were open to them, onward to infinity; on most of those roads they would never even set foot, but none the less the intoxicating lust for life lay in the fact that they could (in theory at least) be free to choose which they would and dare to cross from one to the other. All that other men, other races, in other times and lands, had achieved and attained in the course of generations, through centuries of effort, at the cost of lives, of renunciations and of sacrifices greater and dearer than life, now lay before them as a chance inheritance and a dangerous gift of fate. It seemed fantastic and improbable but was none the less true; they could do with their youth what they liked, and give their judgments freely and without restriction; they dared to say what they liked and for many of them those words were the same as deeds, satisfying their atavistic need for heroism and glory, violence and destruction, yet they did not entail any obligation to act nor any visible responsibility for what had been said. The most gifted amongst them despised all that they should have learnt and underestimated all that they were able to do, but they boasted of what they did not know and waxed enthusiastic at what was beyond their powers to achieve. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous manner of entering into life or a surer way towards exceptional deeds or total disaster. Only the best and strongest amongst them threw themselves into action with the fanaticism of fakirs and were there burnt up like flies, to be immediately hailed by their fellows as martyrs and saints (for there is no generation without its saints) and placed on pedestals as inaccessible examples.

Every human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilization; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view. This generation which was now discussing philosophy, social and political questions on the kapia under the stars, above the waters, was richer only in illusions; in every other way it was similar to any other. It had the feeling both of lighting the first fires of one new civilization and extinguishing the last flickers of another which was burning out. What could especially be said of them was that there had not been for a long time past a generation which with greater boldness had dreamed and spoken about life, enjoyment and freedom and which had received less of life, suffered worse, laboured more hardly and died more often than had this one. But in those summer days of 1913 all was still undetermined, unsure. Everything appeared as an exciting new game on that ancient bridge, which shone in the moonlight of those July nights, clean, young and unalterable, strong and lovely in its perfection, stronger than all that time might bring and men imagine or do.

Re: Why I keep a web-log

From Cory Doctorow:

The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.

The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. I am much better at kidding myself my ability to interpret my notes at a later date than I am at convincing myself that anyone else will be able to make heads or tails of them.

Writing for an audience keeps me honest.

[…]

These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.

Paul Sellers:

The coming and going of handwork is the rhythmic pulse that comes no other way by any other method of working wood. In some ways, it’s an unintentional exclusivity we enjoy, an acceptance of organic noise types and the exclusion of mechanical others. The human engine has multidimensionality relying on great and minute manipulations and shifts in direction second by second––the complete opposite of machine-like, inline omnidirectionality with mere pushes along a straight corner where table meets fence. This rhythm, the pulse of all handwork, is the same with most if not all handcrafts. By repetition, the day comes and goes in unmeasured chunks of time as do the patterns by which we carry them out. It brings true order in the art of our working. We think ahead by tasks stacked in order by anticipating every effort ahead of the need. This prefacing is our making ready our sphere of forward planning but dimensionally there is no flat one dimension screen with the illusion of 3D, we’re working in 3D every minute. 

I meant to post this a while back, but like most things I intend to post, it never left the intention phase.

I’ve been reading (very slowly) through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (LPP), and one of the greatest pulls to read even the most benign and prosaic details is the depth of joy that is so ubiquitous throughout his letters.

On November 26, 1943, his friend Bethge visited him in prison and delivered a cigar as a gift from Karl Barth.

This image—to have had the four people who are closest to me in my life around me for a moment—will accompany me now for a long time. When I came back up here to my cell, I simply walked back and forth for an hour, my food sat there getting cold, and finally I had to laugh at myself when I caught myself saying to myself from time to time, quite clichéd, “That was really wonderful!” I always have intellectual reservations when I use the word “indescribable” for something, for if one takes the trouble and insists on the necessary clarity, then to my mind there is very little that is truly “indescribable”; but at the moment this morning seems to me to belong in that category. Now Karl’s cigar is here before me, a truly improbable reality—so, was he nice? and understanding?

Most of my highlights in the book are of this simple, joyful quality.

He goes on to talk about the

misconception that being imprisoned is perceived as uninterrupted torment. That’s not how it is, and precisely such visits ease one’s life quite perceptibly for days afterward, even if they also naturally stir up some things that fortunately had been asleep for a while. But that too does no harm. One realizes again how rich one was, becomes thankful for it, and musters new hope and will to live. I thank you one and all very much.

Not enough can be said about this — about the things that today are not enough for us but that by tomorrow we might realize were more than enough. Imagine if we all spoke to and about our neighbors, or even voted and practiced our politics, from this second, revised perspective.

(Of course, I mean “neighbors” in the Christian sense, not simply the geographical one. As Bonhoeffer put it, “The transcendent is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbor within reach in any given situation.”)

More than a hypothetical, this is the “how” that Bonhoeffer stressed was more important than any other thing:

I now often think of the beautiful song by Hugo Wolf, which we sang several times lately: “Over night, over night, joy and sorrow come, and sooner than you thought, they both leave you, and go to tell the Lord how you have borne them.” Indeed, everything depends on this “how”; it is more important than any external circumstances.

One of the most edge-of-your-seat books for me, one that spoke perhaps more than any other to the religious bone in my body, was Peter Hooton’s Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in Its Christological Context.

Speaking of Bonhoeffer’s use of the phrase “being for others,” Hooton writes,

The idea of “being for others” is not a new way of being human. It is, rather, the only way of being truly human and is as such characteristic of Christ’s inclusiveness; of life lived, theologically speaking, in the Christuswirklichkeit [“Christ reality”] shared by God and human beings, whence springs the sense of human wholeness, and confidence in God’s unfailing goodness and compassion. We may, of course, repudiate this, and cling instead to that illusory notion of the isolated individual which religion, as Bonhoeffer conceives it, shares with some expressions of secularity, but, for Bonhoeffer, the reality is that our “being for others” is synonymous with the life with God which is our life, and thus with our humanity.

For Christians, it’s epieikés or nothing. And I don’t think there can be any doubt that the joy visible in the letters from prison and the Christuswirklichkeit known through/as “human being for others” are a part of the same grace-infused feedback loop.

Much more could be said, but I want to avoid over-analyzing and lengthening this post.

…

Of course, several days later … I over-analyzed it and got caught up rereading highlights from Hooton’s book. I may put some quotes up, which is something I never got around to a couple years ago because I intended to write more about it.