Kirsten Sanders, on the role that “certainty” plays in Protestant-to-Catholic conversion stories, and why she remains Protestant:

The chief reason I stay a Protestant is not because I think Protestants are “better” and not because I think Protestantism is “truer”. It is, in part, because I think certainty is the wrong question. […]

I do not think church is something we choose. It is, in our baptism, chosen for us. In grace God moves first, and the “yes” of our response is not to a pure doctrine or a truer history, but to a God who in his kindness continues to meet his people in communities that lack all of the certainty and historical claims that would make them valid. I find some comfort in the mess of it all, because this seems to me the kind of thing God does. I am a Protestant because this (gestures wildly) is my ugly mess, and I am bound by my own baptism to it. […]

Religion is so shaky, so rocky, so uncertain- just like a church might be that was founded on the man who had just betrayed his Lord. This does not make it any less true…. That Peter was the “rock” after his unsteady confession means that the strength of the church’s lineage is due to God alone, not to Peter’s own credibility. The source of certainty is, after all, in the God who grants us any grace we might have, to look upon him and live.

Currently Listening: Kid A by Radiohead

So many questions: about cover design and content…

Currently reading: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford 📚

Finished reading: People Skills by Robert Bolton 📚

Lots of common sense wisdom about listening, asserting, and conflict resolution. Wish I would’ve read this a long time ago.

Grabbed coffee this afternoon with an old friend at Houndstooth in the Domain and spent the better part of the hangout discussing Ecclesiocentric Postliberalism. Time well spent in my book.

Last night, Kristyn and I finished Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. For a while now, I’ve admired Berry from afar, as it were—not having interacted with much of his work directly save for a few essays here and there. This documentary proved why so many esteem him so highly. It also stoked in me a greater desire to read more of his work.

Toward the end of the film, Berry delivers these words as the movie splits between shots of him speaking and shots of farmers and the land:

A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its destruction invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, and aspiration. It would reveal the human necessities and the human limits. It would clarify our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It would assure that the necessary restraints be observed, that the necessary work be done, and that it be done well. A healthy farm culture can only be based upon familiarity. It can only grow among the people soundly established upon the land. It would nourish and protect the human intelligence of the land that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of that possibility, as we now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden that possibility, we will lose it altogether. And then we will not only invoke calamity, we will deserve it.