Winter landcape with figures and tents on the ice by Hendrick Avercamp:
Winter Scene on a Canal (c. 1615) by Hendrick Avercamp:
Winter landscape with skaters (c. 1608) by Hendrick Avercamp:
Foray into gardening
Finished reading: The Republic of Grace by Charles Mathewes 📚
A thought-provoking book. Published in 2010, The Republic of Grace is written as an Augustinian reflection on the post-9/11 American political landscape. Mathewes wants to show how various aspects of public life (democratic liberalism, consumer capitalism, etc.) have malformed us, as well as how Christian faith has something unique to offer the pluralized public square. It could superficially seem a bit stuck in a particular moment in American history (e.g., the War on Terror), but it has some very important things to interject into the current discussions around liberalism, post-liberalism, (Christian) nationalism, and so on. To give but one example: Mathewes leverages Augustine to show how political life provides an arena for training in the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) that fits us for heaven. Such thoughts are, to put it mildly, out of sync with much current discourse about what ‘virtues’ are necessary for political life.
a cool picture my sister, Lynne', took of the girls, exploring the creek at Pease Park recently
Currently reading: Strong and Weak by Andy Crouch 📚
Finished reading: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury 📚
Punchy and fun to read. Bradbury’s classic definitely seemed less about censorship and authoritarian repression (à la 1984) on this reading and more about the dangers of a culture awash in media and uninterested in books/reading (à la Brave New World). I came across this anecdote from Bradbury in the late 1950s,
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
From where we sit today, this Beverly Hills woman seems down right quaint. Bradbury died in 2012, but I can imagine that he’d look at American culture in 2024—full of addicts glued to glowing rectangles and utterly oblivious to nature and neighbor—and see a startling bit of progress toward his dystopian vision.
Quote from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (Granger speaking):
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.