These two pieces complement each other quite nicely:
First, in FiveThirtyEight: “The Christian Right Is Helping Drive Liberals Away From Religion”
Second, in Politico: “‘Someone’s Gotta Tell the Freakin’ Truth’: Jerry Falwell’s Aides Break Their Silence” 🔗
Morning dinosaur-puzzle time. 📷
A day when one’s surroundings reflect one’s heart: dreary & a bit deflated.
If you use Apple Music and you like top jazz, give my ¡¡¡ Top Jazz !!! playlist a listen. (Shuffle mode recommended.)
With 690 tracks of great jazz music, there are few better ways to spend the next 72 hours. 🎶
Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri recounts the relationship that Hazzard and her husband, the Flaubert scholar and translator Francis Steegmuller, had with Graham Greene over two decades, from the late 60s to the late 80s. Their friendship started when, in a Capri cafe, Hazzard overhead Greene struggling to remember a line from a minor Robert Browning poem. Hazzard, who seems to have most of the English literary canon memorized, walked up to him, reminded him of the line, and walked away.
The Churchgoer I stayed up late to finish The Churchgoer, a new novel written by Patrick Coleman. It’s San Diego noir about mega-churches, faith and doubt, and about learning to accept love from others, despite unshakeable belief that you don’t want or deserve it. It’s so good. The voice is brilliant from start to finish. The narrator and central character is a former youth pastor turned atheist. His theological training gives him exegetical and etymological habits that won’t die, though his faith has; they’re a source of brilliant and fresh metaphor.
I made an Apple Music playlist of Hans Castorp’s favorite music in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of The Magic Mountain. (Full disclosure: there’s lots of opera.)
Amazing that it’s so easy to enjoy the same music that a fictional character listened to 110 years ago! 📚 🎶
This piece by Tara Isabella Button, In Brooklyn, ‘tradpunk’ Christianity meets millennial counterculture, speaks to some of what resonates with me in Anglicanism. Her literary lineage of Anglo-Catholics is a bit heavy on the twentieth century, though. I’d keep them all, but add Robert Browning, the Rosettis and William Morris, Hopkins, the Brontes, Bram Stoker, and Ruskin. Not all Anglicans, or Catholics, or even necessarily Christians, but all part of that same religious critique of modernity.
Today’s listening: on a recommendation from my father, Pat Methany’s Still Life (Talking), a Latin-jazz-fusion album. Like a lot of Methany’s music, it’s strange, beautiful, a bit surreal, heavily produced. 🎶
I’m excited about the new Schwarzman centre for the humanities at Oxford, which will provide a hub for the humanties departments and also a research center for the ethics of AI. It’s great to see major gifts earmarked especially for the humanities. Oxford has yet to identify architects to design the 23,000 square metre centre, which it intends to complete by 2024, but the university has earmarked land near the Blavatnik school of government and the Radcliffe observatory in the city centre.