November 13, 2023

The Weekly, November 13, 2023

Hi all,

First things first, you have to watch this:

Absolutely insane athleticism and also I'm a Nebraskan and this newsletter needs more Nebraska sports content and we all know that ain't coming from the football team. Thankfully we have the most fun and great volleyball team ever.

Anyway: One of the highlights of attending the Touchstone conference last month in Chicago was being able to see what a mature band of writers and editors bound together by decades of friendship looks like. Touchstone started the year I was born, 1987, and many of the speakers and editors at the conference have been connected to the magazine for much of that time.

It brought to mind conversations I've had with the editors we have at the magazine over the years, particularly with Matt Anderson and Susannah Black Roberts. Susannah wrote of it beautifully in a piece for us published a number of years ago called Sealed in Blood.

This is about Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister who labored together in The White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance organization in Germany. For the Scholls and their friends, the work they were doing was the same sort of work we try to do with the magazine and that I think the editors at Touchstone have also attempted: It's the pursuit of truth. Here's Susannah's account of it:

The friends talked for hours, they talked late into the night. She and Hans shared an apartment, and sometimes after they’d turned the lights out they couldn’t stop talking; in a letter to Hartnagel, she describes a conversation in the dark after midnight where she was trying to convince Hans that Leibnitz’ theodicy made no sense, because the ability to do evil is not a power, but a privation.

They wrote letters to each other and to their parents and their friends, and sent each other books and treats; Sophie exchanged endless letters with Hartnagel, and Hans with his girlfriend, Rose Nagele; Hans started contributing to a magazine; they went on skiing holidays and swimming holidays, and Sophie decided to grow out her hair; they read– Novalis and Aristotle and Dostoyevsky and Aquinas and Augustine and Berdyaev and Junger and Nietzsche and Mann and Goethe; Leon Bloy, Paul Claudel, Bernanos, Etienne Gilson– and the group of friends met up for discussion groups about what they’d read, and about current politics; Hans and Probst and Alexander Schmorrell, under the direction of the journalist Carl Muth, debated Aquinas’ teaching on the right of resistance to tyranny; they went to concerts; Hans acquired a samovar and took up making elaborate Russian-style tea; Sophie bummed cigarettes from her friends; they had a birthday party for a professor, Kurt Huber.

They began, more and more, fumblingly, to pray.

Huber was the one who introduced the Scholls to John Henry Newman; Sophie, ever eager to pass along what she loved, sent a couple of volumes of his sermons to Hartnagel, in Russia. The late-night conversations of the Scholls and their friends began focusing, often, on Newman’s ideas about the development and authority of conscience.

And then, in the spring of 1942, on campus, Sophie came across an anti-Nazi pamphlet which had been distributed around the city and university. It was put out by an anonymous Christian student society called The White Rose. She recognized the writing and ideas as her brother’s. He’d been wanting to keep her out of his resistance work, to protect her. He did not want a repeat of 1937, his little sister once again in a Gestapo prison.

She had once written to Hartnagel that “establishing contact with someone new is a momentous occurrence, a simultaneous declaration of love and war.”

Of course, she insisted on joining.

The need of our moment, I think, is more bands of friends of this sort, bands concerned not with popularity or power or acclaim, but with the simple, earnest pursuit of what is true.

Reading

Books

I'm reading Mary Midgley's Poetry and Science now. Imagine Marilynne Robinson, but make her an Oxford trained philosopher with a deep interest in animals, ecology, and theories of being. That's more or less Midgley.

Speaking of Midgley, one of my favorite books this year has been The Women Are Up to Something, which tells the story of four Oxford trained mid-century women philosophers—Midgley as well as Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Elizabeth Anscombe.

Articles

Speaking of bands of friends pursuing the truth together, I loved Tessa Carman's essay on Christina Rossetti.

Something Matt Anderson said to me years ago that has stayed with me is that one of the greatest impacts of sin is lost time—the time you spend dealing with the issue that now can't go toward something more enjoyable. In a similar way, I thought of the financial costs of failed trust and public honor as I read this Vox piece on retail theft. Sin is a thief—of time, of trust, and, indeed, of money.

Leah Sargeant on Red Rose Rescues

This, from Robin Harris, is lovely:

I realized that Roman Catholicism is too small to be able to contain the fullness and breadth of our Christian tradition. And so is Protestantism, which is why many Davenant folk will call themselves “reformed catholic.” We want it all. Any friend–whether contemporary or historical, whether local or on the other side of the world–who can draw us closer to Wisdom Himself is a friend worth listening to.

Rowan Williams on the Russian intelligentsia

Matthew Rose on Robert Bellah

Brad Littlejohn on Instagram

Katelyn Shelton on contraception

Roge Karma on private equity

The Myth of the Friedman Doctrine by Kyle Edward Williams

Samuel Gregg on integralism

Paul Kingsnorth on AI

Andrew Van Dam on childless millennials

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on her conversion to Christianity

Elsewhere

The year end campaign began last Thursday. We're aiming to raise $100,000 which, just being honest, sounds crazy to me even though it's actually a fairly small amount for an organization of our reach and influence.

One of the big lessons I'm learning now is that we need to grow Mere Orthodoxy's operations and institutional structure to be more aligned with our editorial capabilities and reach. I regularly hear from people or talk to people who seem to think we have a "team" at Mere O and that we have a relatively large budget—and neither of those things are actually true. So we're needing to fix that because as long as we're basically a one-man operation, there is going to be a pretty hard ceiling on how much we can grow.

So that's what this campaign is intended to help us do. By increasing our financial resources, we can structure the org to be more sustainable long term and better run on a day to day basis so we can be more effective overall.

Anyway, please pray it goes well.

Under the Mercy,
~Jake