Happy Feast of the Epiphany!
Our Rosca de Reyes turned out exceptionally well 😋🏡
I think this year would be a good year to listen to Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers straight through chronologically.
There’s a zillion albums, so I might not make it. But I can start. Tonight: Live at the Cafe Bohemia, volume 1. 🎶
Exodus 90: readings ✝️
Try to read each week’s Scripture once each day.
Week 1: 8-14 Jan
- Reading: Exodus 1-4
Week 2: 15-21 Jan
- Reading: Exodus 5-8
Week 3: 22-28 Jan
- Reading: Exodus 9-12
Week 4: 29 Jan – 4 Feb
- Reading: Exodus 13-16
Week 5: 5-11 Feb
- Reading: Galatians
Week 6: 12-18 Feb
- Reading: Ephesians
Week 7: 19-25 Feb
- Reading: Philippians
Week 8: 26 Feb – 3 Mar
- Reading: Colossians
Week 9: 4-10 Mar
- Reading: Mark 1-4
Week 10: 11-17 Mar
- Reading: Mark 5-8
Week 11: 18-24 Mar
- Reading: Mark 9-12
Week 12: 25-30 Mar
- Reading: Mark 13-15
Week Easter Sunday
- Reading: Mark 16
Exodus 90: Mental prep ✝️
I have a very general, easy schedule of readings for the next 12 weeks. A few chapters each week—it won’t be a problem with all the new non-phone time you’ll have each day 🫠
Having done this twice before, I think the most helpful thing for you to prepare is to get a plan for areas where you expect to struggle:
- If it’s your phone/screen time: where can you put your phone at home & work so it’s out of sight, out of mind?
- If it’s regular exercise: where and when will you work out? What will you do for workouts?
- If it’s prayer: when can you consistently set aside half an hour of quiet in your day?
- If it’s eating healthy & not snacking: what can you do when you feel the urge to snack or drink? I try to replace it with getting up for lemon water. Reminding myself that this only lasts 3 months, not forever, also helps.
- If it’s the cold showers, just toughen up. Kidding! Do this by ending your showers with cold for gradually longer times: 10s, 30s, 1min, etc. This might sound like the worst part of the experience, but the guys I’ve done it with have stuck with this longer and more consistently after Ex90 than any of the other disciplines. It makes a huge difference in your mood & energy level.
Currently reading: If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino.
Christmas: the perfect time to reread old favorites. 📚
Currently reading: The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald 📚
Highland Advent vibes this morning. 🏡
Exodus 90: spiritual discipline between New Year's & Easter ✝️
Several times in the last five years, I’ve participated in Exodus 90, a 90-day program of spiritual disciplines and practices.
This year, Exodus 90 starts right on January 1, and goes through Holy Saturday (March 30). I’m especially excited to participate this year.
Although the Exodus 90 organization offers an app and a subscription service (who doesn’t, these days?), I’ve never paid for the service.
You can get the full benefit of the program by simply recruiting a group of friends and following these practices together, checking in regularly (at least weekly) to discussion how it’s going. I’ve grouped the disciplines into general categories, though of course there aren’t neat divisions between them:
Communal disciplines
- Attend the weekly group meeting
- Check in briefly but regularly with your group
Spiritual disciplines
- Read Scripture & offer up a holy hour of prayer daily (not necessarily a full hour—just a regular time of focused prayer)
- Make a nightly Examen (a prayerful review of the day)
Attentional disciplines
- Abstain from unnecessary mobile device use
- Abstain from unnecessary computer use
- Abstain from video games
- Abstain from TV and televised sports
- Listen only to music that lifts the soul to God
Physical disciplines
- Get a full night’s sleep (at least seven hours is recommended)
- Take short, cold showers
- Practice regular, intense exercise
- Fast on Wednesday and Friday (only eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal)
- Abstain from meat on Wednesday and Friday
Consumption disciplines
- Abstain from non-essential purchases
- Abstain from eating between meals
- Abstain from soda and sweet drinks
- Abstain from desserts and sweets
- Abstain from alcohol
Current listening: *The Incomparable Bola Sete 🎶
Sure, it’s just a live recording, but I’m here all day for this one. Heck, here all year. 🎶
Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚
Great day at the used book store 📚
I’ve been working on an essay on Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman for a couple weeks now. Today seemed like a good day to finish it.
Why are the traits they share—among others, naiveté, narcissism, love for humanity but only in the abstract, reducing complex realities to simple equations—so common?
I like the new Wikipedia app… but it doesn’t always get everything right:
Finished reading: *The New Leviathans* by John Gray
Finished reading: The New Leviathans by John Gray.
A book with no single overarching thesis beyond an examination of how liberal democracy is in crisis in the West, and how the alternatives at the moment, primarily Russia and China, are… unsavory.
Gray’s book, just 3 brisk chapters, helpfully resuscitates Hobbes as interested in the wide range of forms Leviathan can take to provide order, peace, and freedom to its citizens. Unfortunately, all of these are more or less totalitarian—which is why Gray finds in Hobbes a helpful thinker for our age, in which the world is converging on forms of surveillance capitalism:
The seeming triumph of liberalism and the free market was not an evolutionary trend but a political experiment, which has run its course. The result has been to empower regimes in which market forces are instruments of the state.
Instead of China becoming more like the West, the West has become more like China.
The middle chapter of the book is composed of a series of short vignettes of different disenchanted Soviet political thinkers, poets, & artists, such as Konstantin Leontiev, Vasily Rozanov, Dostoevsky, Alexander Boldyrev, Polina Barskova, Daniil Kharms, Jósef Czapski, and Teffi—most of whom have been forgotten by history; all of whose lives and writing, however abortive, provide a testament to the horrors of life under the Soviets.
In the book’s first and final chapters, Gray turns his attention to the ways in which our new Levianthans are different from Leviathan as Hobbes imagined it:
The goals of Hobbes’s Leviathan were strictly limited. Beyond securing its subjects against one another and external enemies, it had no remit. The purposes of the new Leviathans are more far-reaching. In a time when the future seems profoundly uncertain, they aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects. Like the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the new Leviathans are engineers of souls.
Even as our surveillance and industrial-agricultural technologies are become more and more powerful, though, natural is fighting back. Gray suggests that these new Leviathans may be tamed by nature herself, as climate change resists our efforts to feed billions. Future prospects are grim, however much “progress studies” rational optimists fill our feeds.
In the end, as a skeptical, humanistic Christian, I appreciate Gray’s skeptical, pessimistic, atheistic humanism. He doesn’t pretend the Christian roots of our current liberal order can be jettisoned without massive cost. Despite the bleakness of his outlook, he ends with not a call to arms, but a call to life:
If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.
Not quite stirring words, though one gets the sense they’re as rousing as Gray can muster.📚
Current listening: a new Arvo Pärt album, Tractus, featuring a new, chamber-choir arrangement of Pärt’s setting of words from a sermon of John Henry Newman. 🎶
Rest in peace, Terence Davies. 🎞️
The first film I saw of his was his relatively recent documentary about Liverpool, Of Time & the City—a film of great beauty, full of profound reflection on memory & how profoundly the world has changed since the 1960s.
Here’s a quotation that reflects his sensibility, from the NYT obituary linked above:
“The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with that in the modern world.”
No words strike fear into a Minnesota United fan’s heart quite like “must-win home game.” #COYL ⚽️
Currently reading: Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill 📚