Eve Tushnet
Probably the first of many posts I’ll be linking from Helen Rittelmeyer’s new blog. Read more
Probably the first of many posts I’ll be linking from Helen Rittelmeyer’s new blog. Read more
Helen Rittelmeyer is back–and she’s upside-down! (And I can make both this cheesy joke and the Men at Work one because she already did it. That’s how it works, right?) Helen Rittelmeyer is writing a fascinating blog and we should all watch her future trollings on these important topics with close attention. Read more
Sheer brilliance, via the Rattus. Read more
You discover that repetition itself, curiously, is not the enemy of spontaneity, but maybe even its enabler. Saying the same prayers again and again, pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith, somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine times in a hundred, and then be transformed, and then have the huge fresh wind blowing through them into... Read more
So now I’ve read the entire Grauniad article from which that Francis Spufford quote was pulled. A couple thoughts: 1. The bit Alan Jacobs quoted was the best bit. 2. The opening is much too long, and seems whiny. Possibly in Britain this comes across as extended self-deprecating humor? 3. Spufford seems to be conflating a few things. When he says that “emotions” are the form and substance of his faith, I think he means both recognition–he recognizes in Christianity... Read more
I review a movie, at AmCon. Read more
Or, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Idiocy! (I mean, I actually love the kitschy glamour of The Mad Carlotta. But I am very glad that the studio did not get their way here.) Via Ratty. Read more
and I like this passage, but I’m mostly posting it because whoa, the guy who wrote the terrific I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination also writes fiction and cultural criticism! Why wasn’t I told. The atheist bus says: “There’s probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life.” All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn’t even have... Read more
A friend of mine, who I’ll call “Dave” (because that was his name) said he would do anything to avoid A-level revision. At one point he infamously found himself weighing the cat, convinced that he would only be able to settle down to work if he had that data to hand. As a result, some 25 years later, the act of procrastination is referred to by my family as “weighing the cat”. Ian Whitten, Sittingbourne, Kent -BBC readers’ tales of... Read more
(All my pets are obsessions.) But no, I’m amazed at how often we cut ourselves off from a way of life which would be immensely fruitful for us, because we don’t identify with something we view as its central metaphor. See previous posts here (top post) and here. Shea: This phenomenon of Evangelicals discovering truths of Catholic theology by accident happens quite often. I have thought more than once that it might be handy to compile a Catholic/Evangelical phrasebook that... Read more
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