Note: as is often the case, this short note started with a quick thought I recorded in a parking lot. Below is the first attempt to put down in words some of what I am trying to say. If you are curious and okay listening to unpolished thoughts, here is the original voice memo.
Here is the slightly more polished attempt:
Opening Premise
Humans are better off when they spend more time talking with family, friends, and neighbors than they do listening to strangers.
My recent desire on walks to recognize—by sight and sound—the birds of our neighborhood has nothing to do with turning forty. Right? Just a renewed desire to know and appreciate the world around me. Right?
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.
Before you can intentionally form a human child, you have to understand what a human child is, and what a human child is for. Unfortunately, most of the modern educational movements of the past century have, as their foundation, a woefully inadequate anthropology.
If you can survive the first hour of stress, the final five minutes of almost pure garbage, and a sneaking suspicion that the most powerful moment of the film was meant to serve as an emotional appeal for the merits of physician assisted suicide, 28 Years Later has some otherwise powerful life-affirming and monastic imagery stuck in the middle.
After a 90 minute lightning delay, it has turned out to be a beautiful evening for the beautiful game.
Every day of the school year, all adults and students on our campus stop what they are doing to gather together for Noonday Prayer. Starting in January 2026, we will gather in the Sanctuary of our new campus for this daily office. I cannot wait.
“Beauty is goodness made manifest to the senses.”
“If we live for ourselves, we are necessarily unhappy.”
Fr. Joseph-Michel of Solemes Abbey
My contribution to an essay series commemorating the Council of Nicaea was published today.
In it I offer a thought experiment I have used to teach the Councils and Creeds over the years.
From MIT’s recently published study Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task:
“Participants who were in the Brain-only group reported higher satisfaction and demonstrated higher brain connectivity, compared to other groups.”
That “higher satisfaction” and “higher brain connectivity” were associated with those who had no access to LLMs confirms the hunch that many of us have had all along:
A window pops up, blocking content, to encourage me to download the app for a better reading experience. In the app, a window pops up, blocking content, to encourage me to rate the app. All the while, I have unread paper books next to my bed.
“We are reduced to the role of the weak link in a system we have freely created.”
Dom David (monk) summarizing The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders
“If you don’t take risk, you also take risk.”
Thomas Frank is at least speaking the language of Audere est facare; here is hoping it plays out this season. Happy to know he gets the ethos—this has not always been the case!
This is a new recording of an essay originally published in June 2022: livingchurch.org/covenant/…
Social media is a form of the unexamined life Socrates warned us about.
But does it have to be so? Are the current popular iterations of social media, which I will refer to as Big Social, our only option for consuming information, connecting with friends and strangers, and developing bonds across borders and oceans?
Transcript
We are increasingly convinced that newer is always better in every arena of life. But what if there are older, better ways to think about what it means to be human?
While this certainly resonates, Lewis rightly goes on to argue that the root issue lies in us holding the utterly unrealistic expectation that there will be no “unexpected demands” in the first place.
“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
What started as intuitive and experimental practices in applying the Daily Office to a K-12 school context years ago is now being formalized so that the best of what we have offered can continue even after the people who cared to do these things well are gone.
The ultimate questions which man asks about himself are partly answered by the very fact of their being asked.
