Gardening and Governing

October 29, 2012 By Joe Carter

Gardening marks, as clearly as any activity, the joining of nature and culture. The gardener makes nothing, but rather gathers what God has made and shapes it into new and pleasing forms. The well-designed garden shows nature more clearly and beautifully than nature can show itself. And this can be a model of politics: people left to their own devices can run riot, make themselves and their environment “ruin’d” and “disorder’d”; properly governed, though, they can flourish, they can become... Read more

Outtakes 10.26.12

October 26, 2012 By Joe Carter

• Even on a blog dedicated to sharing items of interest and quirky reflections on culture, politics, and religion, some thoughts are just too random or half-baked to warrant their own posts. So I thought I’d experiment with compiling that ephemera into a daily post of outtakes. (In case the headline didn’t make that clear, this is going to be that type of post.) • Tweet of the Day: Sci-fi writer John Scalzi, on the news that Penguin Books and... Read more

The Blank Page as a Petri Dish for Thought

October 26, 2012 By Joe Carter

Essayist Arthur Krystal on why writers are often smarter on the page than in conversation: [W]riters don’t have to be brilliant conversationalists; it’s not their job to be smart except, of course, when they write. Hazlitt, that most self-conscious of writers, remarked that he did not see why an author “is bound to talk, any more than he is bound to dance, or ride, or fence better than other people. Reading, study, silence, thought are a bad introduction to loquacity.” Sounds... Read more

Galileo on Human Nature

October 25, 2012 By Joe Carter

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new. From a letter written to Don Virginio Cesarini from Galileo Galilei (1621) Read more

50 Things a Woman Should Be Able To Do

October 25, 2012 By Joe Carter

Last week I posted a list of “50 Things a Man Should Be Able To Do.” In the interest of gender equality I thought I should compile a similar list oriented toward woman. I’m not qualified to compose a complete list myself, of course, so I only came up with 35 and let Eishes Chayil provide the first 15: 1. Identify and choose quality animal and plant based textiles. 2. Select imported foodstuffs. 3. Wake up early, preferably before sunrise. 4. Prepare... Read more

The Solitude of Friendship

October 25, 2012 By Joe Carter

There are so many gems of wisdom in William Deresiewicz’s lecture on “Solitude and Leadership“—delivered to a plebe class at West Point—that it’s difficult to find a single point to excerpt. But his section on introspection and solitude is especially insightful and worthy of reflection: So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going... Read more

Dominance and Cuteness

October 25, 2012 By Joe Carter

From a review of Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting: Ngai positions cuteness as a particular kind of affective response to a lack of agency — in order to judge something cute you first have to feel your own dominance in relation to it. This dominance may take the form of a desire to protect the cute object, as a parent might, or, more darkly, the desire to exert power by hurting or destroying it. These conflicting drives... Read more

The Racialist Churches of Our Presidential Candidates

October 24, 2012 By Joe Carter

Imagine if a presidential candidate were to spend their adult life in a church that had a history of racism. The candidate explains, more-or-less convincingly, that they are neither a racist nor a racialist. In fact, few people believe that the candidate is a racialist, despite the fact that they did not disassociate themselves from their church’s teachings. Imagine also that they looked the other way and feigned ignorance of what their church taught or refused to directly denounce the... Read more

What is a Christian?

October 24, 2012 By Joe Carter

Adrian Warnock argues that we should accept a suitably broad definition of what is a Christian: The belief that Jesus, having died for us, was raised bodily, leaving behind an empty grave and folded grave clothes gave birth to the Church in the first place. Throughout history no major group has used the name “Christian” without believing this. Whether you meet someone who says they are an Eastern Orthodox or a Pentecostal, you will almost certainly find they believe that Jesus... Read more

What Do Saints’ Bones and Duchamp’s Urinal Have in Common?

October 23, 2012 By Joe Carter

Why do art collectors pay millions of dollars for works that have no apparent material value? In a lengthy and rambling essay, Matthew Brown makes a persuasive case that the market for modern art can be traced back to the tradition of relic-adoration: Prior to the Renaissance, and even during it, the supreme objects of popular and official veneration were not works of art: they were the relics of the saints. That is to say, pieces of the saints’ bodies, and objects... Read more