Brady Bowman

currently listening: Thank God We Left the Garden by Jeffrey Martin

I don’t remember the last time an album captivated my imagination the way this one has. The songs are beautifully subdued; Martin’s voice takes center stage, accompanied only by acoustic (and occasionally classical) guitar. The lyrics are poetic, earnest, and existentially-charged. The title means precisely what you’d think it means, and it offers a thematic through line that binds the entire 11-track album together. In my judgment, Thank God We Left the Garden is a masterpiece.

Currently reading: Terrible Beauty: A Story of Calling, Breaking, and the Unmaking that Made Me by Bryan Halferty 📚

Finished reading: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 📚

A page-turner.

Oliver O’Donovan, on the challenges of actually reckoning with the end of World War II and its complicated legacy:

To remember the end of World War II with historical perspective is to remember the serious initiatives of international law it gave rise to, and to face the painful questions of what has become of them, and what is to become of them. Staged exercises in “remembering” beloved of the ceremonial classes – the journalists, the statesmen and the clergy – may serve only to help us forget the real point. I fear we shall hear a great deal of triumphant reflection on the decisions of 1939 when Britain and France declared war on Germany and (further West) 1941 when the U.S. entered the conflict, while that of August 6th 1945, with all the solemn control that it continues to exercise over our lives, may slip past unnoticed.

Currently reading: The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson 📚

Currently reading: Managing Leadership Anxiety by Steve Cuss 📚

Linking this article (via @ablerism) for later reference: How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance.

To my mind, Michael Sacasas has already provided the perfect rebuttal: Resist the temptation to confuse control for care.

currently listening: Total Cinema by Ken Yates

Rowan Williams:

There seems to be some connection between language and the acknowledgement of a creator; as if the sense of finitude and dependence combined with the sense of not being a determined vehicle of natural processes were inextricably involved in using words in the way we do. To labour the point again, this is not an open-and-shut argument for an extra-mental non-finite reality, but it is a way of identifying where the concepts and images of theology and religious belief touch the basic questions about how we make sense of what we as humans characteristically do.

We speak because we are in search of recognition; we want to be heard and understood. And…this must mean that we want to have opened for us the possibility of new kinds of shared action, ways of ‘going on’ in the company of others. In seeking to be heard and changed by whatever presence it is that does not compete or exclude (i.e. does not behave as if it were another agent or subject like myself), I am also seeking to open myself to a kind of agency that is active beyond the plain realm of specific causal processes. We represent this only with the greatest risk and difficulty and habitually trivialize it by trying to display it as another and more effective causal factor in the world, a power that can override any other power. What we want to say is something more like a claim that there will be, for any imaginable future we could have, a context of ‘grace’, of absolution and renewal for our failures and of growing alignment with such an agency so that we become channels of its absolving and renewing operations.