Why do older people—with almost no exceptions in my experience—call it MACdonalds?

Currently reading: Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls 📚

@KyleEssary would love to see the syllabus for that if you can share

@jabel Lewis and Tolkien were two writers especially attuned to the aliveness of creation as depicted in Scripture. The poetics of the Bible seem to be key in recovering such a vision.

@jabel Yes and amen to that!

@jabel Interesting. On a related note, the increasing popularity of Panpsychism seems to have a similar religious/philosophcal angle to it. (Though the verdict is still out on if it really solves anything...or not).

​I'm new to the ecological literature, but I recently read Jason Hickel's Less Is More and had some similar thoughts to you. As a Christian with a fairly traditional understanding of the God-World relation, I'm hopeful that traditional monotheism need not be jettisoned entirely. I believe (though this belief is regularly tested) that orthodox Christian faith is capacious enough to incorporate the sort of "ecological" insights of late: the inter-connectedness of all reality, reciprocity, and so on.

Currently reading: The Community of the King by Howard A. Snyder 📚

@ReaderJohn you were Reformed for a good stretch before Orthodoxy, yes?

Francis Schaeffer, (unintentionally) providing evangelicals with a diagnostic tool for assessing their political engagement (let the reader understand): "In this war [i.e., the spiritual battle between God/Satan, good/evil], if Christians win a battle by using worldly means, they have really lost. On the other hand, when we seem to lose a battle while waiting on God, in reality we have won. The world may mistakenly say, “They have lost.” But if God’s people seem to be beaten in a specific battle, not because of sin or lack of commitment or lack of prayer or lack of paying a price but because they ha... bbowman.micro.blog

Francis Schaeffer, on the central problem facing the church in every age: "The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus that surrounds us. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not ... bbowman.micro.blog

Francis Schaeffer:

A Christian can never say, “I knew the power of the Holy Spirit yesterday, so today I can be at rest.” It is one of the existential realities of the Christian life to stand before God consciously recognizing our need. […]

Christians must humble themselves to know the sanctifying power of the Holy Spirit. To the extent that we do not humble ourselves, there will be no power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Lord’s work in the Lord’s way is the Lord’s work in the power of the Holy Spirit and not in the power of the flesh.

Currently reading: The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way and No Little People by Francis A. Schaeffer 📚

Finished reading: Uprooted by Grace Olmstead 📚

Enjoyed celebrating with my mom on Thursday at the opening for the ACC Faculty Exhibition

@KyleEssary I have not! I will read with great interest...

@JimRain Yes! Much food for thought.

Tim Keller:

Traditional evangelical churches tend to emphasize personal piety and rarely help believers understand how to maintain and apply their Christian beliefs and practice in the worlds of the arts, business, scholarship, and government. Many churches do not know how to disciple members without essentially pulling them out of their vocations and inviting them to become heavily involved in church activities. In other words, Christian discipleship is interpreted as consisting largely of activities done in the evening or on the weekend.

Tim Keller:

Most American evangelical churches are middle class in their corporate culture. That is, they value privacy, safety, homogeneity, sentimentality, space, order, and control. In contrast, the city is filled with ironic, edgy, diversity-loving people who have a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder. On the whole, they value intensity and access more than comfort and control.

Brad East, on the detrimental effects of the current online writing ecosystem to the actual craft of writing: "Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.) […] [W]e are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social... bbowman.micro.blog

@ReaderJohn very interesting. Perhaps in a similar vein: I've heard Joe Minich talk about the difficulties in defining "modernity" and how one useful way of dating it is to look at when people began to self-describe as "modern."

Tim Keller:

The massive growth and influence of cities in our time confront Christian mission with an enormous challenge. The first problem is one of sheer scale and economics. It is critical that we have Christians and churches wherever there are people, but the people of the world are now moving into the great cities of the world many times faster than the church is. Christian communication and ministry must always be translated into every new language and context, but the Christian church is not responding fast enough to keep up with the rapid population growth in cities.

@ReaderJohn Curious to hear your thoughts as you make your way through. Myth was also quite generative in my thinking a number of years ago; would be interesting to revisit now...

Finished reading: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel 📚 This was my first foray into the “degrowth” realm. And I have to say: Less is More packs a serious punch. As one reviewer put it, “The entire book is a withering—and very persuasive—indictment of capitalism’s generally pernicious impact on, firstly, human society, and, more recently, on the natural environment on which we all ultimately depend.” Capitalism is the boogeyman in Hickel’s story. But it’s not really capitalism per se that’s at issue; rather, it’s the cultural/moral/metaphysical logic of extraction and grow... bbowman.micro.blog

Landscape with a Woodland Pool (c. 1497) by Albrecht Dürer:

Courtyard of the Former Castle in Innsbruck without Clouds (1494) by Albrecht Dürer:

View of the Arco Valley (1495) by Albrecht Dürer:

Currently reading: The Revenge of Conscience by J. Budziszewski 📚

@ablerism interesting! How did you acquire Till We Have? I've heard it's out of print and difficult to procure.

Philip Bess, in an old two-part essay at Public Discourse (here and here), makes the surprising argument that the proposition “human beings should make walkable mixed-use settlements” ought to be considered a hypothetical tenet of the natural law. While making appropriate qualifications (e.g., Bess does no... bbowman.micro.blog

Did this to get the folding table flush with the dining table. Who says medieval history isn’t practical?

Our makeshift table in the living room for dinner/games with family this evening. It passed Lewis’s inspection.

@tinyroofnail #respect

@ReaderJohn I'm an unabashed Prot fwiw. But I confess I have no appetite left for convos on how "personal salvation" (or justification) relates to "gospel" or "kingdom" or what have you. I'm sure it's a useful book. Even so, the debates seem interminable, and each side seems destined to reduce or truncate some aspect of the whole to fit their frame.

@KyleEssary we're on our second read-through as a family

@tinyroofnail sounds like you have a case of helplessness blues

@ablerism such a stimulating book! I read it months ago and it still provokes my subconscious at times...

@JohnBrady enjoy! I shared more than a few block quotes on my recent read through

@JohnBrady this is really some of my first sustained listening to Dylan - have enjoyed it on the first few times through

@tinyroofnail helpful - thanks for sharing! I agree with Alan that the SCT is largely persuasive and yet has had almost no impact. His essay offers what SCT writers often omit: a creative (potential) pathway out of the Technopoly. Would love to hear more in this vein...

@samjc thank you, Sam

@dwalbert good (and terrifying) point. My wife tells me I need to be more optimistic, so...

@dwalbert very true! perhaps we could say that the computer is the crowning metaphor of Technopoly - the realization of a dream that's been in the works for centuries

@ablerism of course! I do this with only my present and future self in mind, but always heartened if it's useful to others.

@danalcantara @mwerickson Amen!

@samjc I came across the Hägglund book at some point and was very interested (at the Austin library). Did you finish it? Would you recommend?

@samjc of course!