This week, all my posts for The American Conservative had a slightly tech-y bent, starting with coverage of a software patents case, then CIA snooping, and wrapping up with a review of Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. (Of course, the best recommendation for Lewis as a writer is how invested he got me in a book about baseball. I still get excited when I spot a mention of Nick Swisher in the sports section.) SCOTUS Debugs Software Patents First,... Read more
— 1 — Scott of Slate Star Codex posted a short story this week which I greatly recommend and do not want to spoil. It’s called “The Study of Anglophysics.” Go enjoy yourselves. — 2 — Scott’s story is science-fictional, but there’s a possible deity lurking in it (of an odd sort). Meanwhile, back here at Patheos, Will Duquette has an interesting essay up on fantasy writing, specifically Christian fantasy. Much fantasy fiction, perhaps counter-intuitively, also assumes the naturalistic view... Read more
Hot on the heels of that excellent NYT piece on the autistic boy whose family learned to communicate with him through Disney, there’s a really wonderful essay up on Medium by Rachel Edidin on storytelling, empathy, and the difficulty of communication. There are a lot of passages I’d be inclined to blockquote, but I’ll stick to just these two: My homework this week has been to look at the very few relationships in which I feel comfortable talking about my feelings—especially... Read more
This month, the saint I drew from Jen Fulwiler’s randomizer was Saint Clare of Montefalco. Since yesterday I linked to the pranks that the Dominicans and Jesuits were playing on each other, I was a little amused to find out that there was a long running squabble about whether St Clare is a saint in the Franciscan or Augustinian tradition. It appears that, when she was younger, she was a third order Franciscan, but, by the time she discerned her... Read more
There are two very amusing April Fools’ Day jokes that I’ve run across that are particularly appropriate to this blog. First, is the story, via New Zealand, about Pope Francis’s decisions to develop the New Ecumenical English Missal Project. Like other surprise announcements of Pope Francis, this one goes totally beyond expectations. In the document entitled (still surprisingly in Latin!) Aprilis Stulte Dies(translation of the Latin here), the pope reveals that a board will oversee a commission of English-language liturgical, linguistic, and musical... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. In this week’s reading, Pope Francis discusses a prideful kind of hope, that redirects and tarnishes our natural desire to serve: We are permeated with vanities of every sort, but the most common type of vainglory among us is defeatism. Vainglorious is the... Read more
— 1 — I keep being pleased by the things I read at Nautilus. Most recently, they had a feature on how light bends and how dogs chase balls through sand and water (and what these two questions have in common). It’s a very lay-friendly explanation, but hard to excerpt, so please click through. — 2 — Fermat’s Principle of Least Time turns up in that Nautilus piece, which I first ran across in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” where xenobiologists... Read more
Here’s the round-up of the posts I’ve done this week at The American Conservative, starting with the most timely one. The Perils of Workplace Purges Two organizations stumbled into controversy this week over employment and gay marriage. World Vision, a Christian organization that provides humanitarian aid, announced it would hire staff in gay marriages (previously, this was a violation of the employee code of conduct) and then, two days later, reversed the decision. Meanwhile, at Mozilla, the open source technology company best known for the Firefox... Read more
This past weekend, I was feeling low, but, very luckily for me, I had tickets to a Capitol Hill Chorale concert that one of my friends was performing in. The concert was titled “Rivers of Delight” and comprised traditional shape note songs, and more modern songs with a link to the shape note tradition. As you might guess from the image above, shape note takes its name from the way the solfege syllables are marked out with distinct shapes on... Read more
In 2014, I’m reading and blogging through Pope Francis/Cardinal Bergoglio’s Open Mind, Faithful Heart: Reflections on Following Jesus. Every Monday, I’ll be writing about the next meditation in the book, so you’re welcome to peruse them all and/or read along. Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, the solemnity in which the Church celebrates Mary’s “Amen” and consent to be part of God’s plan for salvation. But, in our day-to-day lives, we seldom have moments that feel like such obvious invitations to cooperate... Read more
Unequally Yoked
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In