First family hike of the new year, and our first with Bandit! McKinney Falls State Park - one of our favorite spots in the Austin area.
The second half of Nottingham Forest vs Man U was exhilarating: a Matt Turner give-away that led to an equalizer, a Matt Turner save that led to a successful counter attack, three bold one-touch strikes, and Nuno guiding Forest to their first victory over Man U in nearly three decades.
I have moved all of the content from Substack to Micro.blog for my forthcoming book on Virtues and the Church Calendar. The Substack funds were helpful, but I would rather have the content available to all, and rely on some folks opting to buy me a moment (or two) to write!
The Altar Rail
The altar rail is a microcosm
of a universe
held together by sacrament.
Imposed ashes speak
louder than the words.
The priest says
“Remember thou art dust."
But in their eyes, and his, it sounds more like
“This year, or perhaps next,
I will commend your ashes, not these."
“The body of Christ”
is heard in ten thousand ways,
most of them unspoken.
The altar rails is
the cosmos in micro.
Steps towards a more analog 2024
2024 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. To properly mark the occasion, and in a nod to Steve Jobs—who never wanted our devices to become part of who we are—I am taking some intentional steps towards analoging my life.
I will do this in two primary ways, one aesthetic, and one ascetic. For the former, I will work towards making analog things more intellectually and physically attractive, when reasonable. For the latter, I will intentionally dumb down a current tool as a form of fasting from digital bells and whistles.
Initial plans are below.
Aesthetic
- Pick up letter writing as a regular habit. (Aiming for one a month. A good friend has already kickstarted this for me by writing me a letter last month.)
- Carry my leather legal pad folder with me to classes and meetings.
- Continue my recent adoption of the Personal Punchcard method for work and life tasks.
- Pray the Daily Office by candlelight. (Saving the Podcast edition for emergencies. I’d still rather pray the Daily Office via Podcast than not at all.)
Ascetic
- Unless I am on a run or hiking, leave the Apple Watch behind. (I would have to purchase a new device in order to replace the Apple Watch as an exercise watch, so I am holding on to it for now.)
- Using my Mac in Grayscale.
- Using my iPhone in Grayscale.
- Remove all iPhone apps except for Ulysses, Maps, Messages, Calendar, Music, and Podcasts.
Merry Christmas from the newest member of our household! Happy to have a dog in the home again.
May He, who by His Incarnation gathered into one things earthly and heavenly, fill you with the fulness of inward peace and goodwill, and make you partakers of the Divine Nature; and the blessing of God almighty, + the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be upon you and remain with you always. Amen.
Pleased to have Malcolm Guite as our Inaugural Honored Speaker at Coram Deo Academy Dallas!
Fables doing what fables do: remind us of something we need to hear, in a way that allows us to actually hear it.
Smartphones and stoplights
Smartphone and social media addiction is a real plague affecting younger generations. To deny this in any way is to be woefully and intentionally ignorant of reality.
At the same time, part of the reason this is a problem in the first place is that the exact same is true of older generations. See Sherry Turkle’s excellent book Reclaiming Conversation for hard data on this front.
An illustration from my commute this morning: traffic was held up at a left-turn light because the lady in front of me put on her readers to check her phone.
Audere est facare, indeed!
Or, as Pep himself said about Ange: “He makes football a better place.”
Councils, Creeds, Confessions ... and the Beautiful Game
To put a bow on the past few weeks we have spent discussing Councils, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, my Senior Theology class has an exciting task ahead of us this week:
Use soccer as a running analogy for the Christian Church, and articulate where each of these things fit.
For example, perhaps:
- Councils function as governing bodies with varying levels of authority, whether official or unofficial. (FA, FIFA, YMCA, etc.)
- Creeds are the boundaries of the pitch, basic definitions, telos, and rules of the game. (It’s simply not soccer if it doesn’t include X, Y, Z.)
- Confessions/Statements of Faith are special contextualized rules, often claiming to be the best universal rules. (Akin to regional or league-mandated differences in application of basic rules.)
- Ministry Philosophies are specific strategies or formations, often claiming to be the best universal strategies or formations.
Excited to see how my students run with this question, and how this activity will reflect their renewed understanding of these things.
Putting up Christmas decorations is a lot more exciting when your eight-year-old loves climbing on the roof to help!
These are the people who are building the thing they don’t understand in hopes that it will outperform humanity in “anything and everything.”
Everything is fine.
The New Yorker cover for the week of November 20.
While it was 0-0 until the 83’, the fact that the USMNT vs T&T match ended in a 3-0 victory helped make the trip to Austin and back worth it on a weeknight!
Google search results return a “featured snippet” that was generated by AI, and the results are what (many of us) might expect.
Google search: “What is an African country beginning with K?”
Snippet answer: “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
William James on training the intellectual virtues.
I picked up digital—and hyperlinked—versions of the Syntopicon and the Great Books of the Western World to help students find great Classical through Enlightenment sources for their Capstone papers.
Both are gifts to the English-speaking world, but the Syntopicon is really something special.