Today’s listening: gotta be the new Vampire Weekend album, Father of the Bride. 🎶
#MNUFC
It was a beautiful first match for me at Allianz Field, celebrating my birthday with my father, brother, and a couple old, old friends. I was also thrilled to be there for our first home win in the new stadium, participating in the first Wonderwall singalong at Allianz. It wasn’t a pretty win, but it was a win! #COYL
Publicly manifested prosperity might well hide a deeper sorrow than we at first could imagine.
~ Fr. James V. Schall, on the moral vision of Samuel Johnson’s essays 🔗 📚
Agnes Callard on losing philosophical fights
When you lose, you experience just how far your capacity to think takes you, which is to say, you experience it giving out. That’s when it washes over you: the feeling of not knowing what you are talking about, the empty nothingness of your own mind. ~ Agnes Callard, in her latest public philosophy column for The Point
Riding with the gauchos of Argentina
Riding with the gauchos of Argentina: A photo-essay (h/t Gray Areas I studied in Buenos Aires in the spring semester of 2005, and my brother & I had the good fortune to travel through Argentina’s northeastern provinces for a couple of weeks after the term ended. My kids are currently obsessed with a coffee-table book in my library, Estancias: The Great Houses and Ranches of Argentina. This photo-essay linked above is a remarkable complement, a testament to the dying gaucho way of life.
I’m re-reading a favorite novel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, preparing for a reading group this summer.
Looking for a good summer read? I’d highly recommend *MM*—you can’t go wrong with a long, philosophical novel about time, sickness, & death. (It’s funny, too!) 📚
The St. John Passion at the Lab Theater
I’m proud of my sister-in-law, Krista Costin for her role in the Oratory Bach Ensemble’s production of the St. John Passion at the Lab Theater this weekend. To quote from the Star Tribune’s review, Six female dancers provided a sensitively balletic counterpoint to mezzo-soprano Krista Costin’s probing account of “Von den Stricken meiner Sünden,” an aria in which the significance of Christ’s suffering is contemplated.
The Acropolis vs Mount Athos
Monasticism is not a theology; it is a way of life. Abbot Eliseus told me that there are two foundational monuments in Greece: the Acropolis and Athos. “But one is dead and the other is living,” he continued. “One is an idea, the other is a living experience.” From a remarkable travelogue by the secular philosopher Simon Critchley in the NYT.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Third Stream recently. So far, though, nothing I’ve found has come close to the depth & beauty of Sketches of Spain. 🎶 🇪🇸
Here’s a delightful symposium on personal libraries. The best entries, in my opinion, are those from Sarah Ruden & Peter Travers.
The symposium inspires me to write the story of my own personal library. I’d love to read others from the microblog community, as well. 📚