Alexandra Petri’s satirical piece in The Atlantic reminded me of one those never-posteds, something from Nijay Gupta on the Slow Theology podcast.

Petri:

The terrorists are the ones without masks. They’re the ones yelling “No!” or “Stop!” or “Shame!” or blowing whistles. Sometimes they brandish cameras at federal agents. Sometimes they wantonly swallow whole canisters of pepper spray. These are just some of their diabolical tactics.

Gupta, on the 9th commandment:

It makes a lot of sense why this commandment meant so much to God to make it into the top 10. Because if God‘s people are intended to be the light of Yahweh in the ancient world, and they are not trustable — nothing matters. Nothing whatsoever matters if these are not people who can be trusted for their words. It is impossible to be a covenant of Yahweh, a community of Yahweh, and be a deceptive community, because this is a God who cares about reality.

I think this is essentially the same thing that Hannah Arendt was saying when she said, in defense of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, that much more meaningful than declaring “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let justice be done though the world may perish”) is to say “Fiat veritas pereat mundus” (“Let truth be done though the world may perish”).

“Is it not obvious,” she asks, “that [every virtue and every principle] become mere chimeras if the world, where alone they can be manifested, is in jeopardy?” She goes on:

[N]o human world destined to outlast the short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously—namely, λέγειν τα έόντα, to say what is. No permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to testify to what is and appears to them because it is.

Here’s how Arendt ends that famous essay “Truth and Politics”:

Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion. In short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were ruled by interest and power, that there would be no political realm at all if we were not bound to take care of life’s necessities.… From this perspective, we remain unaware of the actual content of political life—of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. However, what I meant to show here is that this whole [political] sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is limited—that it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world’s existence.  It is limited by those things which men cannot change at will.  And it is only by respecting its own borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact, preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

— Wendell Berry

That is the poem with which Paul Kingsnorth ends his October 2025 Wendell Berry lecture at The Berry Center.

A few things from/on the lecture:

• Mary Berry: “My father has told me all of my life that if you set an intention and make a commitment to something, the help you need will come. … Since starting The Berry Center in 2011, I’ve known this to be true. Tonight, I am happy to say that the right person has come to us, and he has written the right book.”
• Kingsnorth: “And the reason I don’t have a comforting and cohesive answer is that there isn’t one really. And why should there be? Because if we’re going to identify our enemy as a giant, soulless machine, and the alternative as a local, human-scale, creative act of rebellion and rootedness, then we’re not going to arrive at a nice five-point plan for the government to implement, or a new revolutionary theory by which we can abolish techno-feudalism.” What I will add to this is something I have said before and have been saying more often: Sometimes, even often, it is enough for humans to know what to say no to, because the imago-Dei-scaled soul remains. As Kingsnorth says a bit later, “I am optimistic about the fact that people wish to remain human, and I think that’s what’s going to save us. … Because the good thing about human-scale work is that it is human-scale.” But of course, we have to actually say no.
• For the Kurt Vonnegut “envelope story” Kingsnorth tells, here’s a short CBS transcript of the original where I believe it first appeared.
• There is, in the poem above, a hint at the cards I have not yet shown — that is, my own hesitancy or caution regarding Kingsnorth and the Machine and all that. The bulk of that caution is basically covered in an unpublished (unposted?) essay last year, but it had nothing to do with Kingsnorth and was written before his book crossed my radar or was even published.
• But… the boy wakes and there are thoughts left for another time.

Charles Carman:

And yet I don’t find Kingsnorth’s story overall to be specious. Something indeed is afoot, and it may indeed destroy us. And this is the terrible challenge of Kingsnorth’s book. I might wish for a more compelling account. Yet, being slowly destroyed is itself a state of ambiguity, the definiteness of which is found precisely when it is too late. Something is being unmade, and if we wait till we are certain of the details, the risk taken in delay is complete forfeiture. A human future, whatever may come, may depend on taking definite steps before one has complete confidence.

Finally a review I can get onboard with and that touches what is, to my reading, the heart of much of the hesitancy around Kingsnorth. Carman’s analogy with Poirot’s hesitation is spot-on. (And don’t miss the title of the piece.)

I still think that much of the disappointment is more or less par for the course. For example, given the differences between Kingsnorth and McGilchrist, just in the type of writers and thinkers they are, the contrasts between them that Carman points to are largely ones that I have a hard time imagining not being present.

I have offered two defenses of Kingsnorth, both prompted almost exclusively by what I take to be unfair, dismissive readings and comparisons. I have one more in me, one that very much preceded the other two. And it touches the same question Carmen asks: How much do we believe it? Will we take the train today?

And of course, how do you get more people on that train?

Hopefully I will coalesce its scattered notepad existence soon.

Dan Alcantara:

The mourners are gathered around. Jesus is moved and troubled by Mary’s weeping. And so he says…

“Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. (John 11:34-35, ESV)

When Jesus says, “Come and see”, it is a call to believe and so have eternal life. When Jesus says, “Come and see”, it is the voice which brought all creation into existence calling his lost sheep home from the wilderness. When Jesus says, “Come and see”, he is pointing toward the cross upon which he hung.

But when the mourners say, “Come and see”, all they can show Jesus is the consequence of sin. The grave. Our legacy is one of death. Come and see what humanity has wrought in its rebellion. Come and see the fruit of free will and liberty. Come and see, and it is a grave.

It is no wonder that Jesus weeps. But, of course, the story does not end there.

For, with a word, Jesus calls Lazarus to life from death. From darkness to the light. He shows that even the worst outcome, death, is no match for the words of the one who has life in himself even as the Father has life in himself.

There is a richness to God’s word that you can only begin to experience after repeated readings and time meditating. The Bible isn’t an information book or a rule book. It isn’t a magic book or a talisman. But it is powerful.

Chris Smaje:

I begin, again, with a dark-age framing: the question is not how, in an ideal world, you’d prefer to fashion human relationships. It’s how, in the far from ideal, dark and challenging world that’s now upon us, you’re likely to fashion them as best you can in practice with the cultural institutions to hand.

Richard John Neuhaus, in the 1998 foreword to Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World, originally published in German in 1950:

With respect to the human prospect, Guardini may be viewed as a pessimist, but I think that is to miss the point. Optimism and pessimism are the wrong categories altogether. Optimism is finally just a matter of optics, of seeing what we want to see and not seeing what we don’t want to see; and pessimism is its twin. Guardini’s view of the future is admittedly bleak at times, and little that has happened in the years since he wrote these pages would likely change that. But his is a disposition toward a hope that is unblinking in the face of all the reasons for despair. His hero—the kind of man he intended to be and invites his reader to be—is not unlike Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith.” The question is not whether the glass is half full or half empty, but what do you do when you know it’s empty.

I love the way this describes the work of Jonathan Lasch: “Against this barrage of abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale.”

This goes perfectly to the heart of Kingsnorth and basically all of my follow-up, f***-the-machine reading this year.

To insist on the fact of human scale.

Put it on my tombstone. Put it on yours.

Jeffrey Foucault in his latest newsletter (quoted in full):

I’ve been having trouble writing this thing. I mean, if we pulled on our boots and wrapped up in heavy jackets, drove down to the falls below town to walk the access road to the No. 2 dam, I’d have my opinions. After a while. After a decent interval. But I’d want to hear what you’ve got going first. I’d want to hear about your folks, and your work. Your kids. Probably I’d hesitate to get into the heavy stuff. A stray barb and a dark chuckle might be all. 

I wake at three, humming like a tuning fork, vibrating with the collective churn of a few million other souls, everyone wondering where the ship of fools is headed. I get up and dress, start the water for coffee, go out to make kindling in the moonless dark. Empty the pan from the stove into the fire scar out by the barn, and watch as the sparse coals from the night prior blaze up as they fall. I kick the snow from my boots in the front hall, twist last years newsprint into the stove, and absently note outrages I barely remember now, splashed across the front pages in heavy type.

I read Takahashi, and Larry Levis. Set them down to fight through a chapter of science, until, distracted by an unfamiliar word, I find my notebook, and begin a poem. Or maybe it’s a song, or a grocery list, or nothing. Eventually I’ll locate my phone and check messages, look at the news of the world. The stove ticks and the light comes up, inexorable as an artesian spring.

My heart is sore, like yours. There was a story that most of us believed about this country, regardless of party, about who we were, what we did, why did it, and what it meant. That story was our culture, and it wasn’t always true, but now we don’t even tell the story. Not to ourselves, not to each other, and not to the rest of the world.

******

Still, there are things we all agree on. In our country, no one is meant to be above the law, and because officers of the state have the law on their side, they don’t wear masks, they wear uniforms. Masks are for outlaws. We don’t threaten our allies with wars of territorial aggression, or depose the leaders of other countries in order to expropriate their sovereign resources. 

Those of you familiar with our history will know that we have, in fact, done these things. In the second half of the last century alone we interfered with the governments of forty-plus nations and deposed democratically elected leaders everywhere from Iran to Chile to Congo, when they didn’t fall in line with our cold war policies. We lost fifty-eight thousand Americans – and killed two million Vietnamese – in a war prosecuted on the basis of lies. But when those and other things came to light – usually through heroic journalism or civil disobedience – we held hearings, fired people, and passed laws. It was messy, and too late, but it’s what we have. It’s how we preserve the story, and the story is everything. We have to tell it over and over.

Righteousness is dangerous, and I don’t want your approval. I don’t confuse anything that happens on the internet, where nearly every available platform is a corporate tool for data surveillance, with my moral stature. I could get on the socials and ask the thirty thousand people who already apparently approve of me to approve of me again, over this, and some people would applaud, while others would quit me, or send irate letters (I have a folder of these). In either case, I’m not famous enough to give a shit. I just feel conscience-bound to tell whoever I can tell: what’s happening right now in our country is wrong. If you live in a state with Republican legislators, they need to hear it from you directly. 

I don’t write what people like to call protest songs. The last thing in the world I want is to have a lot of people who think they agree with me show up to agree with me in person, in order to feel the thrill of having a correct opinion, without the work of having done anything. Music is a mystery, as strange as dreams, or laughter, and at its best it enlarges the space for our common humanity, our sense of the soul and of aesthetic possibility, in a world full of blindness and pain, and joy. By that definition, every song is a protest song.

Madeleine L’Engle (extended quote):

There is no more beautiful witness to the mystery of the word made flesh than a baby’s naked body. I remember with sensory clarity sitting with one of my babies on my lap and running my hand over the incredibly pure smoothness of the bare back and thinking that any mother, holding her child thus, must have at least an echo of what it is like to be Mary; that in touching the particular created matter, flesh, of our child, we are touching the Incarnation.…

Once, when I was in the hospital, the smooth and beautiful white back of the woman in the bed next to mine, a young woman dying of cancer, was a stabbing and bitter reminder of the ultimate end of all matter.

But not just our human bodies: all matter: the stars in their courses: everything: the end of time.

Meanwhile we are in time, and the flesh is to be honored. At all ages. For me, this summer, this has been made clear in a threefold way: I have fed, bathed, played pat-a-cake with my grandbabies. In the night when I wake up, as I usually do, I always reach out with a foot, a hand, to touch my husband’s body; I go back to sleep with my hand on his warm flesh. And my mother is almost ninety and preparing to move into a different country. I do not understand the mysteries of the flesh, but I know that we must not be afraid to reach out to each other, to hold hands, to touch.

In our bedroom there is a large old rocking chair which was in the attic of Crosswicks when we bought it. It seems to have been made especially for mothers and babies. I have sat in it and nursed my babe in the middle of the night. I have sung innumerable lullabies from it. When Hugh was in Medea, which was sent overseas in 1951 by the State Department, I sat in the rocking chair, carrying his child within me and holding our first-born in my arms, singing all the old lullabies, but especially Sweet and Low because of “over the Western sea,” and “Bring him again to me.”

This summer I sit in the rocking chair and rock and sing with one or other of my granddaughters. I sing the same songs I sang all those years ago. It feels utterly right. Natural. The same.

But it isn’t the same. I may be holding a baby just as I used to hold a baby, but chronology has done many things in the intervening years, to the world, to our country, to my children, to me. I may feel, rocking a small, loving body, no older than I felt rocking that body’s mother. But I am older bodily; my energy span is not as long as it used to be; at night my limbs ache with fatigue; my eyes are even older than the rest of me. It is going to seem very early—it is going to be very early—when the babies wake up: Alan, Josephine, Cynthia, and I take turns getting up and going downstairs with them, giving them breakfast, making the coffee. Is it my turn again so quickly?

Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.

I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.

The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.

Romano Guardini:

The old passion for a universe, limited in structure, the old desire for a world in which life was directed and channeled, disappeared. Man began to feel that expansion itself was a liberation. […]

The single historical event lost its unique significance under the immense weight of historical facts and under the impact of the new conviction that time was unlimited. The multiplicity of historic phenomena allowed a unique importance to no one event; rather all events were viewed as having an indifferent significance and value. As the old sense of limitation was sundered man lost that value given those unique historical “moments” wherein the medieval belief in order had reposed. Gone was the beginning and the end, the limit and the center. The concept of hierarchy faded; with it disappeared not only all related convictions about the nature of culture but also its many symbolic accretions. The new world seemed a fabric woven of innumerable parts, a fabric which expanded in all directions. Even as this new world view affirmed a freedom of space it denied to human existence its own proper place. While gaining infinite scope for movement man lost his own position in the realm of being.

Madeleine L’Engle:

Chronology: the word about the measurable passage of time, although its duration varies: how long is a toothache? how long is standing in line at the supermarket? how long is a tramp through the fields with the dogs? or dinner with friends, or a sunset, or the birth of a baby?

Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever.

Thank God there is kairos, too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos.

Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionato, are in kairos. The saint at prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby, are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the very particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake. We too often let it fall asleep, not as the baby in my arms droops into sleepiness, but dully, bluntingly.

I sit in the rocking chair with a baby in my arms, and I am in both kairos and chronos. In chronos I may be nothing more than some cybernetic salad on the bottom left-hand corner of a check; or my social-security number; or my passport number. In kairos I am known by name: Madeleine.

The baby doesn’t know about chronos yet.