I did see that. Good to see that yet another lifestyle designation has been coined. This will keep some academics busy for the forseeable future, even if it has no other use.
I thought the really useful thing about that article would be showing it to your teenage kids... see, Taylor Swift is only trying to capture the image that Dad has perfected!
I don't know that I can say I have fully committed enough to be a convert but I have been attending a non-denominational church for about 18 months now. I have recently thought about trying a different church as Is feel as though there may be something missing... I would like to visit an Orthodox or Catholic church - but I live in rural Wales, UK, and my options are limited here! Whereabouts are you based?
I do love baseball. I would argue its has remained the closest of the American sports to its respective founding in terms of rules, etiquette, etc. That said, like all American sports it is now infected with what infects us all. The American way is to take something "poetic" and grounding about human competition/athletics and make it stupidly complicated and corrupted for (and because of?) ultimate modern aims that miss the boat entirely about what compels us to it in the first place. In general, we are part of the problem though as viewers/participants. I'll admit "power", glamorous baseball has an allure but we lose and are losing so much with it.
Again, I think baseball has preserved its way better than say the NFL or NBA but it's still depressing to see what it has become compared to ages of old. (Robot assisted umps coming soon is my guess). Just another reflection of us and our world. Give me a low scoring, homerunless game any day with more finesse displayed...this does not "sell" any more. My Eeyore is whiny so I'll end by saying I love the Francis poem Jack and enjoy your respite Paul to its full.
Chris- I can only concur with your assessment. It is sad. I came of age as a baseball fan probably when the shift began in the 1970s. But at least to my young eyes the poetry was still there. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to games with my Dad. It was pure magic. I haven't been to a live game in a while but even 10-15 years ago it was hardly the same. Constant advertising and noisy musical interruptions. Not nearly as joyful.
My hope is that the poetry still survives for some kid going to a game with his Dad like I did. -Jack
Same. Vin Scully calling Dodger games was the soundtrack of my childhood, and I can still remember being in the stands at Dodger Stadium with the bases loaded at the bottom of the seventh, trying to tie it up. I can hear Vin’s tinny radio voice playing out the kitchen windows of every house on my streets if I try.
I found AAA games were still fun in the way the Bigs were when I was a kid, the last time I went to one. (Also, if you want to recapture some of the faded magic, “Facing Nolan” and “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” are both documentaries worth watching.)
My problem with professional sports is that they have all become extremely and explicitly money-centric. Listen to sports talk radio and when they're not talking about salaries and contracts and caps they're talking about gambling. Can't stand it.
My husband and I were exposed to a lot of cricket on TV in our hotel room in Barbados in 1996, I think because we simply turned on the box during our afternoon escape from the heat and watched whatever turned up, which was cricket. We could not figure out this game at all and said so to a local bartender, who tried to explain it to us and even drew a diagram on a napkin. In the end, we decided just to drift off into the afternoon nap content to be clueless about this strange British activity, but I will always remember that they took a break in the middle of the match to have tea. Cricket is the most civilized sport on the planet.
Like many things perhaps the answer is to grow up in a cricket-mad family in the era when the test match would be on in the background as if summer music. My dad would explain it all to mini-me who grasped it in a way I’m not sure I’d be able to as maxi-me. It all made complete sense without being complicated…and of course we all learned how to measure out a chain at 22yds, stick three sticks in the grass, balance two twigs on top and off we went. .
Test cricket is less like actual war and more like a very long game of chess, played in the outdoors. Literally everything affects the outcome: the bowler's technique, the batter's style, the psychological state of the middle order, whether it is sunny or cloudy, how old the ball is, where the fielders are placed. You name it. add to that the strategic calculations involved in deciding the batting order, whether or not to declare and a thousand other things ... it's like psychological warfare waged by great artists. And it doesn't matter how many unpronounceable words DBH uses to try and prove otherwise.
"You can talk about anything you like, other than Johnny Bairstow’s disappointing form with both bat and gloves."
I came across a video explaining Cricket to baseball fans and I meant to watch it but haven't. My guess is that there are superficial similarities that make the games mutually and utterly baffling to respective partisans. As a Yank (and a New York Yankees fan at that! Ha!) I do love me some baseball. Some of my best childhood memories. So as a gesture of international harmony I will see if I can find that video and try to fathom what this whole Cricket thing is about.
Baseball seems similar to 'rounders' which we play here at school as children, though baseball has more rules. I think America's failure to play any proper sports (ie, football and cricket) and to invent strange new ones instead was simply a way of making a point to the Brits. Also, it means you get to win all the world championships ;-)
But if you can find a video explaining baseball to cricket fans I will watch it as a gesture of ecumenical reconciliation.
Nothing to do with alcoholic overindulgence..its an incredibly fast team sport of Gaelic Irish origin and has been described as a "bastion of humility"
Quite true. It's a total obsession round these parts. My son played it for a while, but stopped before some part of his body was broken, thankfully. And I still don't understand the rules of that either ...
Yes, cricket was rejected after the American Revolution, although there is still a Philladelphia Cricket club,USA, which I think goes back at least the 18th century.
I watched that video just the other day. Well worth watching for us “colonials.” Being an American born and raised in the UK, I never played cricket or understood the scoring, however the video cleared up lots of confusion. Anyway, thanks for sharing the video.
I admit it, I took the Yanks/Sox rivalry seriously as a kid. Now, I just see it simply as the order of things. Just part of what makes baseball beautiful.
One beautiful thing about baseball is that while corporate baseball is pretty woke - witness "Pride Night" at almost every ballpark during the month of June - the game itself is relentlessly meritocratic. If you perform, it doesn't matter how high or low you were drafted, where you were born, what color you are, or who your parents are. And when I say relentless, I'm being kind. My nephew is in the Dodgers organization, and being a minor league player is as real a maturing rite of passage experience for a young man as we have these days. The competitiveness, and hard work these young guys put in, is really impressive.
BTW, cricket has invaded America, and is being funded at least in part by Silicon Valley
Can you give some thought to the notion of "observer input" into life's events. Do you believe an observer is a mute bystander and the event is not influenced by such observation? I don't just mean the observer has an interpretation; I mean he actually influences the outcome, perhaps to the point where there are, in fact two outcomes?
Couple of reading recommendations, if I may: Charles Taylor, 'Sources of the Self', and a short essay he wrote called 'A Catholic Modernity?', easily found online. The first is a bold attempt to trace how our modern understanding of self evolved historically. The latter has an interesting idea about dividing the world into three: secular humanists (this life is all there is); Neo-Nietzscheans (there is more to life, through death and suffering); and believers in a transcendental good beyond this life. Either of the two groups can gang up against the other on some principle. Taylor's conclusion as a believer was that, bewildered by modernity, we must nonetheless avoid either embracing or rejecting it wholesale but rather 'find our voice from within the achievements of modernity' by making a judgement about what are extensions of the gospel (e.g. human rights), and what are negations of it.
I got to Taylor through philosopher Stephen Toulmin, who in his work Cosmopolis rails against Descartes and Newton for poisoning our minds with modern pathologies, and wants to revive earlier, Renaissance ways of thinking.
Just some ideas readers might be interested in.
Bairstow needs to check the rules of cricket in my opinion. Have a nice summer!
Not exactly a routine, but I try to read for at least 45 min. every morning before work. And I mean books, not web reading or articles. I've been doing it for almost 20 years.
Oh I like this! I would talk to NO ONE until 11, if that were an option, but by the time I hike, meditate, pray and tend to the gardens, it usually IS 11 before I get a full sentence out. Then I work in my studio until I my attention goes to dinner. Post dinner it is back to the gardens with me. My weeds truly are endless also...but I cook with a lot of them, so my definition of weeds probably is different.
Can you cook chamberbitter? Because that is all over my flowerbeds. It’s so hot here I’m sure I’ve lost the weed war. I’m in South Carolina. If I could hike I would viscously attack those awful chamberbitters.
I’m in Idaho...and we have entered in to the season of triple digits...I feel the heat with you. I need to look up chamberbitter, I am not familiar with that. I live in the foothills of the western Rockies, so that is where I start my mornings. I collaborated with Nature and spent the past decade building a food forest...so this time of year it is all about preserving food (well...the entire summer is all about preserving food). I’ve just finished a project, and now put all my creative work aside for the moment to preserve food, tincture the vast array of medicinals that grow in the food forest...and pick weeds. I am finally to the point of building paths in my gardens, which until now are just plantain and spurge walkways 😁. Plantain is an amazing medicinal, but I do not need 2000 plantain plants.
SF has a long and interesting history of priest protagonists so I thought I'd try something similar with the fantasy genre. And so I wrote a bit of a portal fantasy about faith and belief, about a man trapped in a different world but refusing to give up.
Hi Paul, you’ve probably already read it but I’m going to put it out here in case anyone hasn’t… Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I’m re-reading after several years and it feels even more resonant. Especially in the time of gardening,
IN THE BEGINNING IS THE RELATION
Buber reminds us to consider the language of ancient people. And gives an example where we as modern people would use the phrase “far away” …
He writes how earlier people’s used relational poetic language:
“The Zulu has a sentence-word that means: “ Where one cries, ‘mother I am lost.’ And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence-word of seven syllables that literally means: They look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire, but neither wishes to do.
In this wholeness persons are still embedded. What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection, but the genuine, original unity, the lived relationship.”
Just a reminder that we are living in a unique moment of epic disconnect. And how the poetic is helping us to remember. I definitely feel this in the liturgical services. Anyways, just sharing some inspiration. Have a good summer with family and friends and thanks for all of your thoughtful reflections on our times.
Thank you for sharing this book, I'll have to read it. "In the beginning is the relation" reminded me of Pope Benedict XVI's book on the creation story, "In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall" where he makes the argument that original sin was a break in relationships. First a break in relationship with God that led to a break in relationship with our fellow man.
I had to pick one thing I’ve learned from Paul it’s that you don’t have to stick with the beliefs you had when you were young and impressionable. As we age we should question our beliefs and see if they hold up. I’ve always been a questioner, but Paul’s example helped me see that I’m not just being contrary or fickle . It’s part of maturity to revise .
Ok, I have a great vacation book for you! If you have any sense at all, you must appreciate the comic genius of Wodehouse (I just read Something New, his first Blandings book, hilarious). Looking for one of his for my yearly summer Wodehouse read, I came across and was scared away from his early book Mike and Psmith - all the American reviewers say they have no idea what’s going on, apparently it’s chock full of cricket terms, which we are constitutionally forbidden from understanding. So have a wonderful break and, as a cricket connaisseur, do what I can’t and enjoy that Wodehouse humor!
“ If you view child sacrifice as a self-limiting anomaly, the trans craze as a phase, and identity politics as a passing fancy, you’ll be tempted to sit back, relax, mind your own business, and wait for the madness to subside. Those tactics will get you nothing but a nonbinary grandchild. I am imploring you to realize that, in the absence of God, the madness is the norm. You cannot wait-and-see your way out of it, you can only repent-and-revival your way out of it. Our godless elite are not leading us into brave new worlds of depravity, they’re taking us back to where we started. ”
Question for Paul and other writers in the salon about your writing process, especially in light of Paul's comments about "technological asceticism" (which I'm trying to practice!) in the re-posted Free Press essay.
What does your writing process look like, and specifically, what tools (hardware and software) are you using? I hate writing on a laptop, for myriad reasons. I enjoy writing longhand, but can't do it for long, and transcribing it into the computer is a pain. I've recently looked into the "Freewrite," and that seems promising (though it irks me they must call it a "smart" typewriter). I'm interested to hear about what Paul and others use. Thanks!
I have to say, it's the laptop all the way for me. Typing is the only thing that can keep up with the speed of my thoughts. I like Word for the actual writing of the manuscript because it is best visually for me and lets everything flow as it should. Scrivener for organizing research and keeping together all the flotsam and jetsam of word "sketches" I create when writing a story.
I do enjoy writing longhand in a notebook sometimes when I'm daydreaming into creation the world of the novel. It accesses a state of playful freedom that I find really useful at that zero draft stage when everything is still coming into being.
I do love Scrivener. I've been using it for more than a decade, and it's been such a useful tool. Probably the main thing that keeps me tied to the laptop to be honest. Thanks for your input!
Have a very well-deserved summer, Paul. Thank you for all that you've done here over the last two years.
What I'm interested in lately is the connection between autism and faith. I started a new series on my Substack called "Be Not Conformed" to cover my own experiences at this intersection. I was raised without religion but had a constant yearning toward Christianity. It finally bloomed into my life around 7 years ago. I'm teasing out the ways in which autistic consciousness is, in a way, "primed" for transcendence. https://natashaburge.substack.com/p/burning-out-toward-god
I'm also re-reading Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which I think might just be the most life-affirmingly beautiful summer novel of all time. Utter poetry and joy on every page - highly recommend!
I was recently reading the book "The God of Jesus Christ" by Pope Benedict and I came across this passage:
"What then does 'the name of God' mean? Perhaps it is easiest to grasp what this entails if we look at its opposite. The Revelation of John speaks of the adversary of God, the 'beast'. This beast, the power opposed to God, has no name, but a number. The seer tells us: 'Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.' It is a number, and it makes men numbers. We who lived through the world of concentration camps know what that means. The terror of that world is that it obliterates men's faces. It obliterates their history. It makes man a number, an exchangeable cog in one big machine. He is his function - nothing more. Today, we must fear that the concentration camp was only a prelude and that the universal law of the machine may impose the structure of the concentration camp on the world as a whole. For when functions are all that exist, man, too, is nothing more than his function. The machines that he himself has constructed now impose their own law on him: he must be made readable for the computer, and this can be achieved only when he is translated into numbers. Everything else in man becomes irrelevant. Whatever is not a function is - nothing. The beast is a number, and it makes men numbers. But God has a name, and God calls us by our name. He is a Person, and he seeks the person. He has a face, and he seeks our face. He has a heart, and he seeks our heart. For him, we are not some function in a 'world machinery.' On the contrary, it is precisely those who have no function who are his own. A name allows me to be addressed. A name denotes community. This is why Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of God's name. He does not bring some new word as God's name; he does more than this, since he himself is the face of God. He himself is the name of God. In him, we can address God as 'you', as person, as heart."
The paragraph goes on just a bit more, but that is its essence. When I read it, it felt very resonant with many of the themes shared in The Abbey of Misrule, so I thought it might be worth sharing.
What a great quote. Thanks for sharing. Sounds very Kingnorthian to be sure! I’m going to have to pick up that book. BXVI’s “Introduction to Christianity” had a profound impact on me.
I have not yet read Benedict's Intro to Christianity but it is on the list. I do think you will like 'The God of Jesus Christ.' It is quite short (123 pages) and is and based on various sermons he gave over the years (before becoming Pope). You can tell they came from sermons - they are creative and pack some punch, as you can probably tell from the above excerpt. The edition I have is the 2nd edition from Ignatius Press with a foreword by Leonard DeLorenzo.
Wonderful! I truly believe that Pope Benedict will eventually be named a Doctor of the Church - we are only beginning to grasp his wisdom for our times!
Agreed, his thought is astonishing, and it will be mined for centuries by serious theologians, scholars, and ordinary Christians. If you can, check out the latest issue of Word on Fire's Evangelization and Culture magazine which is completely dedicated to Pope Benedict. The magazine is a work of art in itself, and this issue is no exception. I think you do have to be a monthly contributor to Word on Fire to receive, but you may be able to order single issues.
I did see that. Good to see that yet another lifestyle designation has been coined. This will keep some academics busy for the forseeable future, even if it has no other use.
I thought the really useful thing about that article would be showing it to your teenage kids... see, Taylor Swift is only trying to capture the image that Dad has perfected!
I don't know that I can say I have fully committed enough to be a convert but I have been attending a non-denominational church for about 18 months now. I have recently thought about trying a different church as Is feel as though there may be something missing... I would like to visit an Orthodox or Catholic church - but I live in rural Wales, UK, and my options are limited here! Whereabouts are you based?
The interview with JC the lead actor and the actual agent he plays.. with Jordan Peterson is good.
Have a nice break!
Is cricket the greatest game of all time?
Baseball.
Now we're getting into what may be the most controversial and important topic ever debated here.
Obviously cricket is better. A match lasts five days, for a start. Proper sportsmanship.
The topic that tears everything apart.
🤣
Baseball is pure poetry, with an occasional bench clearing brawl. The human condition in a nutshell!
Pitcher
His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,
His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.
The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.
Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.
--Robert Francis
Agreed. As an American. BTW what the hell is a “ Googly “?
If you have to ask, you will never understand.
Let this chap show you how to bowl one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googly#/media/File:Reggie_Schwarz_c1905.jpg
I think it’s an English knuckle ball . That’s gotta be it.
David Bentley Hart's essay on this topic is the conclusive word: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/08/a-perfect-game
When Hart is wrong, he is always wrong at great length.
Right or wrong, he is so at great length. Also necessitating many pitstops at the dictionary. In this case, he's right...
And where else can you find an essay on baseball that starts by referencing Heidegger. Kudos!
Ryan, thank you for this. Its over the top absurdity made me laugh. At the same time it is 100% true. -Jack
I kind of thought bourbon was our greatest contribution to civilization.
I do love baseball. I would argue its has remained the closest of the American sports to its respective founding in terms of rules, etiquette, etc. That said, like all American sports it is now infected with what infects us all. The American way is to take something "poetic" and grounding about human competition/athletics and make it stupidly complicated and corrupted for (and because of?) ultimate modern aims that miss the boat entirely about what compels us to it in the first place. In general, we are part of the problem though as viewers/participants. I'll admit "power", glamorous baseball has an allure but we lose and are losing so much with it.
Again, I think baseball has preserved its way better than say the NFL or NBA but it's still depressing to see what it has become compared to ages of old. (Robot assisted umps coming soon is my guess). Just another reflection of us and our world. Give me a low scoring, homerunless game any day with more finesse displayed...this does not "sell" any more. My Eeyore is whiny so I'll end by saying I love the Francis poem Jack and enjoy your respite Paul to its full.
Chris- I can only concur with your assessment. It is sad. I came of age as a baseball fan probably when the shift began in the 1970s. But at least to my young eyes the poetry was still there. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to games with my Dad. It was pure magic. I haven't been to a live game in a while but even 10-15 years ago it was hardly the same. Constant advertising and noisy musical interruptions. Not nearly as joyful.
My hope is that the poetry still survives for some kid going to a game with his Dad like I did. -Jack
Same. Vin Scully calling Dodger games was the soundtrack of my childhood, and I can still remember being in the stands at Dodger Stadium with the bases loaded at the bottom of the seventh, trying to tie it up. I can hear Vin’s tinny radio voice playing out the kitchen windows of every house on my streets if I try.
I found AAA games were still fun in the way the Bigs were when I was a kid, the last time I went to one. (Also, if you want to recapture some of the faded magic, “Facing Nolan” and “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” are both documentaries worth watching.)
Something has gone out of the game. Maybe it's the forced "fun" rather than just watching a great game.
My problem with professional sports is that they have all become extremely and explicitly money-centric. Listen to sports talk radio and when they're not talking about salaries and contracts and caps they're talking about gambling. Can't stand it.
We still have the minor leagues.
Oh no, not the quantification of all things important! And the World Series is 7 games.
Cricket is a fine example of us Brits inventing a game that then Johnny Foreigner goes off and plays much better than we ever could!
Who have been best countries for cricket over last few years? West Indies. Australia. India. etc. Bloody colonials!
I’m beginning to think maybe the Empire wasn’t such a good idea after all!
I just thank God the bloody Yanks never took to it! 😄
But if we hadn't seeded down under with our rejected criminal elements, we would never have got The Ashes. God works in mysterious ways.
fair point! 😁
Everything I know about cricket, I learned from that old Roots Manuva song, "Again and Again" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRxYNTH-5Go)
"With every breath and every noun
We dare not stop burning Babylon down!"
My husband and I were exposed to a lot of cricket on TV in our hotel room in Barbados in 1996, I think because we simply turned on the box during our afternoon escape from the heat and watched whatever turned up, which was cricket. We could not figure out this game at all and said so to a local bartender, who tried to explain it to us and even drew a diagram on a napkin. In the end, we decided just to drift off into the afternoon nap content to be clueless about this strange British activity, but I will always remember that they took a break in the middle of the match to have tea. Cricket is the most civilized sport on the planet.
Like many things perhaps the answer is to grow up in a cricket-mad family in the era when the test match would be on in the background as if summer music. My dad would explain it all to mini-me who grasped it in a way I’m not sure I’d be able to as maxi-me. It all made complete sense without being complicated…and of course we all learned how to measure out a chain at 22yds, stick three sticks in the grass, balance two twigs on top and off we went. .
But cricket can spread out into an epic campaign, can baseball? Maybe in the playoffs but I think cricket has the advantage here.
If baseball is a battle, cricket is a war. With all the according opportunities for glory and slaughter!
The oblong game is war, but baseball is Attic tragedy. --David Bentley Hart
Test cricket is less like actual war and more like a very long game of chess, played in the outdoors. Literally everything affects the outcome: the bowler's technique, the batter's style, the psychological state of the middle order, whether it is sunny or cloudy, how old the ball is, where the fielders are placed. You name it. add to that the strategic calculations involved in deciding the batting order, whether or not to declare and a thousand other things ... it's like psychological warfare waged by great artists. And it doesn't matter how many unpronounceable words DBH uses to try and prove otherwise.
Of course all of that applies equally to baseball.
Okay. This whole discussion seals my commitment to The Abbey of Misrule!
That said, it’s the Louisville Slugger that sits by the door should weaponry ever be required, not the willow wand…
Playoffs? Of course you mean “postseason!”
I've lived in cricket country a little too long.
"You can talk about anything you like, other than Johnny Bairstow’s disappointing form with both bat and gloves."
I came across a video explaining Cricket to baseball fans and I meant to watch it but haven't. My guess is that there are superficial similarities that make the games mutually and utterly baffling to respective partisans. As a Yank (and a New York Yankees fan at that! Ha!) I do love me some baseball. Some of my best childhood memories. So as a gesture of international harmony I will see if I can find that video and try to fathom what this whole Cricket thing is about.
Here it is. For my fellow Americans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWpbtLIxYBk
Baseball seems similar to 'rounders' which we play here at school as children, though baseball has more rules. I think America's failure to play any proper sports (ie, football and cricket) and to invent strange new ones instead was simply a way of making a point to the Brits. Also, it means you get to win all the world championships ;-)
But if you can find a video explaining baseball to cricket fans I will watch it as a gesture of ecumenical reconciliation.
The Irish also probably invented or revived a whole slew of different sports for the same reason. Thank you British Empire!
I will see what I can find re: Cricket and Baseball.
I've lived in Ireland for nearly ten years and I still don't understand the rules of Gaelic football. They did their job well, those lads!
As you are a naturalized inhabitant of County Galway, Hurling is the sporting game you need to understand!
"Hurling". Is that what your stomach does after too-long an evening at the pub?
Nothing to do with alcoholic overindulgence..its an incredibly fast team sport of Gaelic Irish origin and has been described as a "bastion of humility"
Quite true. It's a total obsession round these parts. My son played it for a while, but stopped before some part of his body was broken, thankfully. And I still don't understand the rules of that either ...
We have Lacrosse and field hockey in the States. That's the best comparison to hurling I can make an American. Maybe that's wide of the mark.
As I understand it, lacrosse and hockey are played close to the ground. Hurling soars high
He needs both in Galway
Yes, cricket was rejected after the American Revolution, although there is still a Philladelphia Cricket club,USA, which I think goes back at least the 18th century.
Hey Jack,
I watched that video just the other day. Well worth watching for us “colonials.” Being an American born and raised in the UK, I never played cricket or understood the scoring, however the video cleared up lots of confusion. Anyway, thanks for sharing the video.
Cheers,
Matt
Red Sox Fan ;)
I admit it, I took the Yanks/Sox rivalry seriously as a kid. Now, I just see it simply as the order of things. Just part of what makes baseball beautiful.
One beautiful thing about baseball is that while corporate baseball is pretty woke - witness "Pride Night" at almost every ballpark during the month of June - the game itself is relentlessly meritocratic. If you perform, it doesn't matter how high or low you were drafted, where you were born, what color you are, or who your parents are. And when I say relentless, I'm being kind. My nephew is in the Dodgers organization, and being a minor league player is as real a maturing rite of passage experience for a young man as we have these days. The competitiveness, and hard work these young guys put in, is really impressive.
BTW, cricket has invaded America, and is being funded at least in part by Silicon Valley
https://www.bbc.com/sport/cricket/66143470
Enjoy yer holliers Paul..
Can you give some thought to the notion of "observer input" into life's events. Do you believe an observer is a mute bystander and the event is not influenced by such observation? I don't just mean the observer has an interpretation; I mean he actually influences the outcome, perhaps to the point where there are, in fact two outcomes?
Couple of reading recommendations, if I may: Charles Taylor, 'Sources of the Self', and a short essay he wrote called 'A Catholic Modernity?', easily found online. The first is a bold attempt to trace how our modern understanding of self evolved historically. The latter has an interesting idea about dividing the world into three: secular humanists (this life is all there is); Neo-Nietzscheans (there is more to life, through death and suffering); and believers in a transcendental good beyond this life. Either of the two groups can gang up against the other on some principle. Taylor's conclusion as a believer was that, bewildered by modernity, we must nonetheless avoid either embracing or rejecting it wholesale but rather 'find our voice from within the achievements of modernity' by making a judgement about what are extensions of the gospel (e.g. human rights), and what are negations of it.
I got to Taylor through philosopher Stephen Toulmin, who in his work Cosmopolis rails against Descartes and Newton for poisoning our minds with modern pathologies, and wants to revive earlier, Renaissance ways of thinking.
Just some ideas readers might be interested in.
Bairstow needs to check the rules of cricket in my opinion. Have a nice summer!
You probably know this already, but Carl Trueman’s instant classic The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self is a great intro to Taylor and our times
Random question. Anybody here have a specific morning routine? What does it look like?
I've only recently developed one.
I wake up at 5am and write until 7am, when my kids get up.
It's not much of a routine, but it ain't so bad either.
Not exactly a routine, but I try to read for at least 45 min. every morning before work. And I mean books, not web reading or articles. I've been doing it for almost 20 years.
5:30 - up
5:35 - sled pull (see #kneesovertoesguy)
5:40 - cold shower (see Wim Hoff)
5:45 - prayer/reading
6:45 - let chickens out
6:50 - watch sunrise w/ wife
7:30(ish) - kids get up, and the day gets going in earnest =)
Sounds lovely.
"To see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever." - Henry David Thoreau
When do you go to bed?
Summer - 9:30-10
Winter - 8-8:30
6A-wake and make coffee
6:10-DailyOffice (prayers and scriptures) ACNA
7:15 walk in the garden and observe the hummingbirds
8-pull weeds(they are endless)
9-talk to husband
Oh I like this! I would talk to NO ONE until 11, if that were an option, but by the time I hike, meditate, pray and tend to the gardens, it usually IS 11 before I get a full sentence out. Then I work in my studio until I my attention goes to dinner. Post dinner it is back to the gardens with me. My weeds truly are endless also...but I cook with a lot of them, so my definition of weeds probably is different.
Can you cook chamberbitter? Because that is all over my flowerbeds. It’s so hot here I’m sure I’ve lost the weed war. I’m in South Carolina. If I could hike I would viscously attack those awful chamberbitters.
Hmmmm...chamber bitters are part of the spurge family, and DO have medicinal uses!
I’m in Idaho...and we have entered in to the season of triple digits...I feel the heat with you. I need to look up chamberbitter, I am not familiar with that. I live in the foothills of the western Rockies, so that is where I start my mornings. I collaborated with Nature and spent the past decade building a food forest...so this time of year it is all about preserving food (well...the entire summer is all about preserving food). I’ve just finished a project, and now put all my creative work aside for the moment to preserve food, tincture the vast array of medicinals that grow in the food forest...and pick weeds. I am finally to the point of building paths in my gardens, which until now are just plantain and spurge walkways 😁. Plantain is an amazing medicinal, but I do not need 2000 plantain plants.
For anyone looking for a bit of fiction on this fine day, I thought I'd share a story I had published last autumn: https://www.mysteriononline.com/2022/10/heretic.html
SF has a long and interesting history of priest protagonists so I thought I'd try something similar with the fantasy genre. And so I wrote a bit of a portal fantasy about faith and belief, about a man trapped in a different world but refusing to give up.
Hi Paul, you’ve probably already read it but I’m going to put it out here in case anyone hasn’t… Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I’m re-reading after several years and it feels even more resonant. Especially in the time of gardening,
IN THE BEGINNING IS THE RELATION
Buber reminds us to consider the language of ancient people. And gives an example where we as modern people would use the phrase “far away” …
He writes how earlier people’s used relational poetic language:
“The Zulu has a sentence-word that means: “ Where one cries, ‘mother I am lost.’ And the Fuegian surpasses our analytical wisdom with a sentence-word of seven syllables that literally means: They look at each other, each waiting for the other to offer to do that which both desire, but neither wishes to do.
In this wholeness persons are still embedded. What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection, but the genuine, original unity, the lived relationship.”
Just a reminder that we are living in a unique moment of epic disconnect. And how the poetic is helping us to remember. I definitely feel this in the liturgical services. Anyways, just sharing some inspiration. Have a good summer with family and friends and thanks for all of your thoughtful reflections on our times.
Thank you for sharing this book, I'll have to read it. "In the beginning is the relation" reminded me of Pope Benedict XVI's book on the creation story, "In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall" where he makes the argument that original sin was a break in relationships. First a break in relationship with God that led to a break in relationship with our fellow man.
I had to pick one thing I’ve learned from Paul it’s that you don’t have to stick with the beliefs you had when you were young and impressionable. As we age we should question our beliefs and see if they hold up. I’ve always been a questioner, but Paul’s example helped me see that I’m not just being contrary or fickle . It’s part of maturity to revise .
Well said. Second on that list is buying into the myth that one must go out 'into the world' in order to do something 'important'.
Ok, I have a great vacation book for you! If you have any sense at all, you must appreciate the comic genius of Wodehouse (I just read Something New, his first Blandings book, hilarious). Looking for one of his for my yearly summer Wodehouse read, I came across and was scared away from his early book Mike and Psmith - all the American reviewers say they have no idea what’s going on, apparently it’s chock full of cricket terms, which we are constitutionally forbidden from understanding. So have a wonderful break and, as a cricket connaisseur, do what I can’t and enjoy that Wodehouse humor!
Ps whatever y’all do, don’t be a normie!
https://gaty.substack.com/p/dont-be-a-normie
“ If you view child sacrifice as a self-limiting anomaly, the trans craze as a phase, and identity politics as a passing fancy, you’ll be tempted to sit back, relax, mind your own business, and wait for the madness to subside. Those tactics will get you nothing but a nonbinary grandchild. I am imploring you to realize that, in the absence of God, the madness is the norm. You cannot wait-and-see your way out of it, you can only repent-and-revival your way out of it. Our godless elite are not leading us into brave new worlds of depravity, they’re taking us back to where we started. ”
Just read your excellent essay. Hadn’t thought about it that way but it’s spot on!
Thank you! Much appreciated!
Excellent essay. Thank you.
Question for Paul and other writers in the salon about your writing process, especially in light of Paul's comments about "technological asceticism" (which I'm trying to practice!) in the re-posted Free Press essay.
What does your writing process look like, and specifically, what tools (hardware and software) are you using? I hate writing on a laptop, for myriad reasons. I enjoy writing longhand, but can't do it for long, and transcribing it into the computer is a pain. I've recently looked into the "Freewrite," and that seems promising (though it irks me they must call it a "smart" typewriter). I'm interested to hear about what Paul and others use. Thanks!
Hi there, great question!
I have to say, it's the laptop all the way for me. Typing is the only thing that can keep up with the speed of my thoughts. I like Word for the actual writing of the manuscript because it is best visually for me and lets everything flow as it should. Scrivener for organizing research and keeping together all the flotsam and jetsam of word "sketches" I create when writing a story.
I do enjoy writing longhand in a notebook sometimes when I'm daydreaming into creation the world of the novel. It accesses a state of playful freedom that I find really useful at that zero draft stage when everything is still coming into being.
Hope that helps!
I do love Scrivener. I've been using it for more than a decade, and it's been such a useful tool. Probably the main thing that keeps me tied to the laptop to be honest. Thanks for your input!
Have a very well-deserved summer, Paul. Thank you for all that you've done here over the last two years.
What I'm interested in lately is the connection between autism and faith. I started a new series on my Substack called "Be Not Conformed" to cover my own experiences at this intersection. I was raised without religion but had a constant yearning toward Christianity. It finally bloomed into my life around 7 years ago. I'm teasing out the ways in which autistic consciousness is, in a way, "primed" for transcendence. https://natashaburge.substack.com/p/burning-out-toward-god
I'm also re-reading Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, which I think might just be the most life-affirmingly beautiful summer novel of all time. Utter poetry and joy on every page - highly recommend!
Agree on Dandelion Wine -- wonderful book!
I was recently reading the book "The God of Jesus Christ" by Pope Benedict and I came across this passage:
"What then does 'the name of God' mean? Perhaps it is easiest to grasp what this entails if we look at its opposite. The Revelation of John speaks of the adversary of God, the 'beast'. This beast, the power opposed to God, has no name, but a number. The seer tells us: 'Its number is six hundred and sixty-six.' It is a number, and it makes men numbers. We who lived through the world of concentration camps know what that means. The terror of that world is that it obliterates men's faces. It obliterates their history. It makes man a number, an exchangeable cog in one big machine. He is his function - nothing more. Today, we must fear that the concentration camp was only a prelude and that the universal law of the machine may impose the structure of the concentration camp on the world as a whole. For when functions are all that exist, man, too, is nothing more than his function. The machines that he himself has constructed now impose their own law on him: he must be made readable for the computer, and this can be achieved only when he is translated into numbers. Everything else in man becomes irrelevant. Whatever is not a function is - nothing. The beast is a number, and it makes men numbers. But God has a name, and God calls us by our name. He is a Person, and he seeks the person. He has a face, and he seeks our face. He has a heart, and he seeks our heart. For him, we are not some function in a 'world machinery.' On the contrary, it is precisely those who have no function who are his own. A name allows me to be addressed. A name denotes community. This is why Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of God's name. He does not bring some new word as God's name; he does more than this, since he himself is the face of God. He himself is the name of God. In him, we can address God as 'you', as person, as heart."
The paragraph goes on just a bit more, but that is its essence. When I read it, it felt very resonant with many of the themes shared in The Abbey of Misrule, so I thought it might be worth sharing.
What a great quote. Thanks for sharing. Sounds very Kingnorthian to be sure! I’m going to have to pick up that book. BXVI’s “Introduction to Christianity” had a profound impact on me.
Hi Travis,
I have not yet read Benedict's Intro to Christianity but it is on the list. I do think you will like 'The God of Jesus Christ.' It is quite short (123 pages) and is and based on various sermons he gave over the years (before becoming Pope). You can tell they came from sermons - they are creative and pack some punch, as you can probably tell from the above excerpt. The edition I have is the 2nd edition from Ignatius Press with a foreword by Leonard DeLorenzo.
Wonderful! I truly believe that Pope Benedict will eventually be named a Doctor of the Church - we are only beginning to grasp his wisdom for our times!
Agreed, his thought is astonishing, and it will be mined for centuries by serious theologians, scholars, and ordinary Christians. If you can, check out the latest issue of Word on Fire's Evangelization and Culture magazine which is completely dedicated to Pope Benedict. The magazine is a work of art in itself, and this issue is no exception. I think you do have to be a monthly contributor to Word on Fire to receive, but you may be able to order single issues.
Thanks, Dave - I get their emails and saw that issue featured - I will see if I can get a copy! Totally agree re what you wrote!