My favorite editions of this newsletter have been unreasonably long personal essays. But that format isn't sustainable, if only because I keep writing unreasonably long and personal drafts for this mailing list and just never sending them. Thus, in an effort to make this newsletter more manageable to write and read on a weekly or biweekly basis, I will attempt to loosely ape the general format of other newsletters that show up in my inbox — that is, briefly reviewing whatever media and food I've been consuming of late.
 

Some weeks ago, Twitter briefly lit up with thoughts on TikTok witches attempting to hex the moon, which I understand was controversial even within the "WitchTok" community. This reminded me vaguely of an unfinished project my infamously Catholic friends Sean and James were working on circa 2017, to catalog and describe the demonic gods unknowingly worshipped in America, such as "Mammon" and "Libertas." Someone could write a good story, I recently said to Sean and James, revolving around the concept of previously powerful gods/goddesses like Artemis trying to regain power against the gods of modern American society, but having at their disposal only these goofy young wannabe witches trying to hex the moon.

Turns out Neil Gaiman beat us to these ideas by about two decades.

I'm about half-way through the novel, and I wish I could characterize it better in terms of these big ideas, but Gaiman is a storyteller above all else. The book is not really about gods and big ideas communicated didactically. It's a story above all else, hung on the scaffolding of big ideas, but not existing to communicate them.
 

This is an interesting, academically-published book from 2000 — so, to clarify, it's about the senior Falwell, not the current clown — that I snagged for a dollar at Goodwill. I haven't moved past chapter 4 for several months now (because I'm a bad reader, not because Harding's writing isn't engaging), but one stand-alone chapter has stuck with me since I read it: a transcript and analysis of a Southern Baptist pastor witnessing to the author by way of sharing his personal testimony. Harding posits that anthropologists are often hindered in their analysis of religion by failing to accept it on its own terms, but also approaches evangelism from a (somewhat?) linguistic perspective.

To Harding, conversion (specifically, conversion to fundamentalist Christianity) is a three-step process of learning to speak a different language and situate oneself in the Christian story. One hears the story from the Evangelist — a story that "implicates" the witnessed-to as a mirror of the Evangelist's former, Lost self — and then lets the story and language of the Evangelist colonize their thinking, seeing the world through Christian eyes; and then finally "becomes saved": the witnessed-to person situates him- or herself within the story, fully adopting spiritual language and telling their own testimony. Witnessing, essentially, becomes a fundamentalist sacrament.
 

Yet another book I've not made much progress in — but I have a good excuse! Which is that I am reading this with my housemates in The Shalom Project and the plan is to spread out the readings generously. I'm tickled by the fact that it was recommended to Shalom Project director Nathan by the ubiquitous Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds Bookstore. I worry it's in a line of Christian books following in the footsteps of James K.A. Smith's Cultural Liturgies trilogy (a line of books that probably started with Smith's own You Are What You Love, a more accessible reworking/summary of Cultural Liturgies) that all sound vaguely the same, using (what seems to me to be) a new evangelical lingo of liturgy with phrases like "rhythms of life" and "get into [my/their/your] bones". Maybe this lingo isn't new and I'm just new to it. All the same — it sounds as if I feel negatively towards this book, when the truth is that it's tremendously well-designed and seemingly helpful; and I have real hope that it'll be a key part of my personal path towards growth over the next year.
 

Five.

No.

Two couples where I'm friends with both people, and then one less-close friend who got married to a guy I'm barely acquaintances with. Just to be clear on that point.
 

It turns out that basic cake mixes are really easy to prepare, especially if you just use a large fork to mix them and don't mind them turning out lumpy? And — it took me years to realize this — I actually like cakes less when they have frosting. So I've just been churning out ugly cake after ugly cake.

I was supposed to help prepare dinner at the house of my quasi-commune last night (we had bagels and eggs), but that was all mostly taken care of by the time I got back from 10-20 minutes of attempting to parallel park, which I narrowly pulled off only with the help of some locals who were outside at the time and coached me through it, much to my embarrassment. I did quite well on the parallel parking part of my drivers' test a year and a half ago, but somehow orange cones and cars seem to be a whole different ballgame.
 

I hope you all are well, staying healthy, and using appropriate precautions against the virus. As always, feel free to reply directly to this letter: I may not get back to you, but I promise I'll appreciate it.

Till next week, or the week after! (Because I am committing to writing this regularly!)

Warmly,
Benjamin