In this newsletter, the goal is to consider Jesus’ teaching: what makes it worth following now, 2,000 after Jesus lived? Can it speak to us today? Does it have anything to offer our world? This newsletter won’t be about institutional Christianity; it won’t be about “spirituality,” whatever that means. Rather, we’re simply trying to answer the question “How should I live?” The goal isn’t to convert you to anything—other than to a better life.
Realizing I should be maintaining issues of my newsletter here on my blog, not just on Substack, in case things fall apart, as they tend to do. So I’ll start re-posting 1-2 a week.
The newsletter is on the ethical teachings of Jesus. It doesn’t assume any religious belief or perspective.
Austin Klein won’t be hiring a virtual assistant anytime soon. 🔗
R.I.P. Ahmad Jamal, one of the greatest and perhaps my absolute favorite jazz pianist.
My dad used to play “Stolen Moments” at night while I was going to sleep. I’ve loved Jamal ever since. 🎶 🔗
The best AI app wouldn’t be an everything app. It would be a nothing app—so smart it helped me do nothing on my screens and more in the real world. 🔗
Everything Iain McGilchrist has to say is worth considering, but I can’t recommend his conversation with Dark Mountain Project co-founder Dougald Hine highly enough.
It’s about climate change, the place of science in modernity, AI, and much more. 🔗
On Brad East’s blog, Denise Levertov’s Good Friday poem “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”:
Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.
✝️📚🔗
[Early book collectors] supported the lively culture of book hunting that still goes on, diminished but not dead yet, in the auction houses and antiquarian bookshops of New York, Boston and other cities.
Can this gentle, humane culture survive the attritions of social media and the carceral state? In a way, it already has.
~Anthony Grafton, in an delightful LRB review-essay of Denise Gigante’s new book. 📚
Yeesh. For Minnesota United fans, things are not looking good on the Bebelo front.
Fortunately, we’ve been playing shockingly well without him. #MNUFC #COYL ⚽️
Currently reading: The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk
A gloriously strange book from 17th-century Scotland. 📚