Alan Jacobs, providing some of the best writing advice you’ll find:

Writing that matters will therefore be in service to something or someone, and in order to serve well, you must undergo training and discipline. You have to learn things. You have to have a full mind as well as a lively heart. First you must develop the expertise of crafting sentences, and this can only be done by, first, reading and reading and reading. There is no other path than hard-earned expertise to producing anything that’s worth the time and attention of readers. Why should anybody care what you think? You must earn their care through especially vivid writing, or especially clear thinking, or especially detailed knowledge — or (ideally) some combination of the above.

I put the last line in bold because it’s such good summary of what makes for great writing. I’ve started to subconsciously assess what I’m reading with these categories in mind. Excellent writing weaves together: 1) great prose; 2) clear thinking; and 3) detailed knowledge of the subject. When I’m reading something and discover that it fails to possess even one of these components, I try to put it down as quickly as possible. Incidentally, this helps to explain why so much theology that I’ve read, though factually correct, receives my readerly judgment in the form of setting the book aside. Would that more theologians married these three things together. There are, to be fair, some (happy) exceptions.

Alastair Roberts, with some very useful reflections on memory:

While many people think about memory as if it were primarily additive, with discrete fact after discrete fact being brought into and retained in our knowledge, memory, at least in my experience, is mostly about the connections between such facts. Memory is about creating meaningful clusters, chains, and networks of details in our knowledge. Having such larger structures and patterns in mind, we will be able to move smoothly between details in our knowledge and even recreate them when they have been partially forgotten.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr offered a complementary perspective to what Roberts outlines here. While many assert that we should “offload” facts to computer databases in order to focus mental energy elsewhere, Carr disagreed. It is, Carr went on to suggest, the store of information that we’ve committed to long-term memory that allows for the sort of connection-making that Roberts commends. Memory is not merely a tool for recalling disparate factoids at whim; Google obviously is much better suited to the task of data-on-demand than any human mind. Rather, memory really is about the link between past and present—whether events or facts or what have you—that can only come to expression in the rational activity of a person. The fruit of memory is in digesting and internalizing what we’ve learned, and in being able to encounter new information with sound judgment and a certain creative receptivity. The internet, meanwhile, is, according to Carr, “a technology of forgetfulness.” It rewards forgetfulness and makes memory seem unnecessary—even unintelligible. We would do well in not forgetting how beneficial memory is as a human practice.

Finished reading: Low Anthropology by David Zahl 📚

A book that hooks you from the start: Zahl is a witty writer, his prose conversational. As it unfolds, Zahl unpacks his understanding of “low anthropology” and you begin to see his penetrating reflections on how fickle and unimpressive we humans can be. By the end, Low Anthropology opens up into a deeply moving reflection on God’s grace, showing (counterintuitively) how a low anthropology is actually the best—really the only—vantage point for catching a glimpse of such mercy in action. I can’t imagine a single person in our culture who wouldn’t benefit from something in these pages.

David Zahl:

Jesus knows that telling people to have faith doesn’t do all that much. He knows that only when we have exhausted our own capacities will we look in faith toward the horizon. Only when we have been unburdened of our illusions about what we feel we “deserve” will we appreciate what we have been given.

In other words, we require a crisis of capacity to direct us “where true joys are to be found.” Jesus confronts us with our limits, not to discourage us but to engineer a situation in which the phrase “what is impossible with man is possible with God” (Luke 18:27) might find traction. Faith in God begins where faith in oneself ends.

David Zahl (channeling his inner Lewis):

In so many ways, the Christian actually seems to remain the same person after conversion. There may be more gratitude, or they might experience victory over some besetting problem, either temporarily or permanently. But they never change to the point where they need God’s grace and forgiveness any less. Many of the nagging foibles that lead a person to Christianity persist even after they become Christian.

David Zahl:

Love is…an area of human operation almost impervious to reason and rationality, as rife with doubleness as any corner of human experience. Perhaps this is why writer Tim Kreider characterizes human beings as “sociopaths for love.” He knows that the desire to love and be loved is the single greatest motivator in human affairs and accounts for a great deal of our most absurd and nonsensical behaviors.

David Zahl:

There is such a thing as authentic authenticity. It is simply not an active attribute; it’s more of a happy accident. You might call it a deeper set of emotional conditions. This kind of authenticity isn’t for sale, and if it were, no one would buy it. They wouldn’t buy it because it flows from defeat and surrender. It’s found on the other side of all attempts to “be” anything other than what we are. The radical acceptance of the accumulations of our lives is born in the giving up, the acknowledgement of the artifice.

Lewis Hyde:

I should now state directly a limitation that has been implicit for some time, that is, that gift exchange is an economy of small groups. When emotional ties are the glue that holds a community together, its size has an upper limit. The kinship network Carol Stack describes in the Flats numbered about a hundred people. A group formed on ties of affection could, perhaps, be as large as a thousand people, but one thousand must begin to approach the limit. Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size. It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law.

This paragraph, like so many in Hyde’s book, is brimming with possible implications and potential lines of inquiry. As a Christian and churchgoer, though, I’m particularly interested in what implications there might be for that unique community we call the church. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how consonant Hyde’s description of the gift community is with the biblical vision of the church. Take, for instance, Paul’s description of the church in 1 Corinthians 12-14: “Gift exchange” would be exactly the right terminology for how Paul envisions Christians relating to one another within the body of Christ. (Of course, there has been fine work done on Paul’s understanding of gift and related notions of reciprocity.) But, as Hyde suggests here, there seems to be “an upper limit” to such communities, seeing as they’re held together by strong emotional ties. Does this mean that a local church cannot carry out its proper functioning beyond a certain size? Is it any coincidence that mega-churches have popped up in the same (American) soil that’s produced so much emphasis on “exchange value”? Indeed, to come at it from another angle: the New Testament often describes the church in familial language, pointing once more to a community bound by ties of affection. Such relational commerce is impossible to engineer through large-scale, top-down manipulation. But that hasn’t stopped many of us from trying…

Night Rain (2008) by Michael Mazur:

Fall Garden - 2 Chairs II (1977) by Michael Mazur: