Ephemera, Etcetera
Well, August has been a gift. I’ve mostly stayed away from online news and social media; my sense of what’s happening in the world has come from little bits of radio while driving and a Sunday print edition of the newspaper. I left my laptop for two different Michigan getaways and missed it not a bit.
I’m looking forward to picking the newsletter up again and reengaging some of our regular themes, but for today just a bit of ephemera from the past few weeks.
1) I read some articles and listened to a podcast episode or two about AI this month. More questions than answers at this point, though given some recent headlines I’m prone to agree with Andy Crouch that we’ll need a better demonology about AI in the months and years to come. All that said, I want to be on the record that the content of this little newsletter remains AI-free. The half-baked ideas and rantings delivered to your inbox are all mine!
(There’s obviously a lot more to say about AI, like the racial bias baked into a lot of it and how a theology of creativity and work shapes how Christians might or might not use AI, but that’s for another day.)
2) I read a bunch of books this month: Living the Sabbath, Norman Wirzba; Make Sense of Your Story, Adam Young; A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros; The Sabbath, Abraham Joshua Heschel; Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart; Abraham Joshua Heschel, Julian E. Zelizer; The Sabbath Way, Travis West; The Taste of Country Cooking, Edna Lewis; The Eyes & The Impossible, Dave Eggers; Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer; and Above Ground, Clint Smith.
Lot’s on the sabbath for personal reasons and because I continue to think that sabbath provides the logic which could rescue us from the insatiability of extractive capitalism. Each summer I read a book to my boys while we’re camping and The Eyes & The Impossible was the perfect, delightful story to enjoy around a campfire. About Gathering Moss my youngest son asked, “You’re reading a book about moss?!” with just the right balance of incredulity and loving acceptance in his voice.
3) I visited two churches this month, each pastored by good friends. In both cases corporate worship was refreshing and the sermons led me back to the gospel. Also, both congregations were super hospitable. Maybe our city is unique, but the number of faithful neighborhood churches doing quiet and humble ministry is so encouraging. If you’re looking for a church on the north side, be sure to visit Garden City and check out Glorious Light on the south side.
4) I picked up a collection of Mary Oliver’s essays from one of my favorite bookstores, the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, and the other night bumped into my favorite sentence of the summer: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
5) I will never get tired of the night sky at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Our visit to northern Michigan coincided with a moonless sky and the stars just kept going and going and going. We spent an evening around a campfire on the Glen Haven beach with my parents, roasting marshmallows and passing around the binoculars while craning our necks skyward.
6) A few nights ago I read George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Why I Write.” In it he writes, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties.” But he didn’t live in such and age.
The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
I’m sympathetic to Orwell’s logic. Our current president, enabled by his party, has made his authoritarian intentions clear. I hope to write more about what it means to do Christian ministry under these circumstances, but it’s Orwell’s clear-headedness which is attractive to me. I’m not particularly interested in convincing anyone that the presidential administration’s is purposefully dismantling our democratic institutions and norms. It seems to me that if you can’t see it, you probably don’t want to see it. I am interested in what Christian faithfulness looks like during these days and, with Orwell, I’m especially interested in how to account for our politics “without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
The View From Here
My wife and youngest son heading out for a twilight paddle during our stay on Lake Stevens, one of the many small, beautiful lakes in northern Michigan.