The Met is running an exhibition entitled Africa & Byzantium, highlighting the often-overlooked artistic and cultural contributions of Africa to the (for most of us, more familiar) Byzantine world.

The National’s new album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, was my wood-cutting soundtrack this afternoon. (My books are slowly migrating home from the office and will require appropriate lodgings.) “Tropic Morning News” had exactly the right energy for that project.

Birthday gift for mom

(Quick aside: Is there another human who could make the face Springsteen is making here and look like a badass rather than an idiot? My assumption is no.)

Finished reading: Esther and Her Elusive God by John Anthony Dunne 📚

A thorough debunking of the mainstream interpretation of Esther. Once you stop assuming Esther and Mordecai are paragons of virtue, and you quit trying to give complicated explanations for the absence of God or religious devotion, things start falling into place. You can read with the grain of the story. My main complaint is that Dunne left himself little space to answer the most interesting question raised by his study: namely, what is the theological significance of the book of Esther’s secularity? He does explore the question briefly in the last few pages, but I would’ve like more. Nevertheless, I do feel emboldened, thanks to Dunne’s work, to depart from the common ways of reading Esther, and to probe more deeply the strangeness of the text as it stands.

John Anthony Dunne, on how the church can embrace the secular story of Esther as Christian Scripture:

It was precisely because God embraced Israel-in-exile, that is to say, Israel in the position of experiencing the curses of the covenant, that God could then likewise embrace the Gentiles (i.e., those outside the covenant). Thus, when we as Christians read the story of Esther in all of its proper secularity, we find God’s embrace of a people assimilated to their pagan context as a result of the exile and those continuing to experience the absence of God as an extension of the covenantal curses. Thus, in Esther we see God embrace Israel-in-exile—those experiencing not the blessings of the covenant but curses, those who had been unfaithful—and all of this ultimately prefigures God’s embrace of the nations. Because God can embrace Israel-in-exile he can also embrace those from the lands of exile.

John Carpenter, on the ways that consumerism has colonized our imagination, and particularly our view of church:

Consumerism provides the interpretative grids through which we see all of life. We accept no fault divorce or “at will employment” for pastors in which they can be fired for any or no reason or the lack of covenant commitment to a particular church as normal because those are the values of consumerism.

To the person shaped by consumerism — which is nearly everyone in our modern society — the church is intuitively approached as a service provider, like the restaurant and the theater. The restaurant provides food; the church provides religious nourishment. The theater provides entertainment; the church provides liturgy. The school provides education; the church specializes in religious curricula. If told to shut down during a pandemic, it insists that its services are essential. It might argue that it is as useful as the grocery store but it rarely argues that it is something that is beyond consumerism, something that cannot be consumed, akin to the family.

Consumerism has, like a wild fire, burned up everything in its path, even the institutions, like the family and the church, we thought, at first, it would serve. Consumerism’s modern-self bends institutions to become “servants of the individual” so that they “cease to be places for the formation of individuals…. They become platforms for performance.” The local church, then, is seen as akin to a community theater: the venue for the consumer to demonstrate his or her piety or aspiring actors to try their talent and for theater-goers/church-attendees to get their entertainment. When they no longer serve the purpose they were bought for, they can be discarded — thus Packard’s waste culture. “Relationships . . . rather than being the basis for an economy, start to become a marketable product.” Even piety, the relationship with God, is marketed as a product with the church being its retail out-let. As David Wells lamented, “In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well.”

Feeling pretty good about this

Cassandra Nelson, describing the high school learning experience of many of the students she encounters—what she terms “The Mysterious Thing That Resembles Learning but Is Not”:

In English classes, it might involve pushing your eyes across words in a way that looks outwardly like reading. But inwardly you are not reading — or at least not for plot, comprehension, pleasure, edification, or any other traditional aim of reading — and you’re also not doing what occasionally happens to even the most devoted reader, where you suddenly realize that your concentration has wandered off and you’d better go back a paragraph or two because you have no clue what you just read. Instead, you’re doing some weird third thing where your focus remains intact, but instead of making sense of every word or letting the images they construct play out as a kind of movie in your mind, you’re deliberately making sense of only some words, the ones that seem important, and more or less ignoring the rest. You’re mining for data, harvesting it in discrete and contextless chunks, which is all you need for multiple-choice tests or a mere regurgitation of keywords. Whatever task would fall just below skimming in the great chain of reading — you’re doing that.

“Nonsense on stilts"—I’ll have to file that phrase away for later.

East’s whole piece is, as always, well worth your time.

David J. Siegel, on the goods to be enjoyed in pulling back, in both long and short spurts, from the frenzy of modern public life:

Respite is a natural adaptive response to a world that is too much with us, as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth put it, a world that might be improved by less (not fewer) of us in it. When people are exhausted, disengagement provides temporary relief from persistent feelings of overwork and a blessed release from our enervating entanglements. What society cannot countenance, it seems, is prolonged disengagement, which tends to be conflated with civic apathy or indifference.

Seldom do we reckon with the costs of civic engagement or even frame that as a problem unto itself. Yet staying abreast of current events under the guise of doing our civic duty produces not just an informed (and occasionally misinformed or disinformed) citizenry but can also result in documented instances of information fatigue syndrome. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found a high likelihood that extreme weather events, which increasingly dominate the international news cycles (as they properly should), have an adverse effect on mental health. The social media from which many of us reflexively gather our news and perspectives increasingly command our attention, virtually eroding opportunities for independent thought. In short, there is much to be anxious about, and moments of Thoreauvian withdrawal, in which we remove ourselves from the grid, might allow for some measure of self-preservation and sanity. […]

It is often only in the interludes that we come to realise just how much our busy lives are an active conspiracy against the very things that supposedly give our existence a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Little interruptions of the usual can be an invitation to pause and reflect, a rare opportunity for the deep noticing and heightened awareness that ritual and routine often obscure.

An underappreciated interpretation of the disengagement phenomenon is that it is what we do – or where we go – to indulge what the literary critic A D Nuttall in Dead from the Waist Down (2003) called ‘the invisible life, the life of the mind’. That language is vanishing from our culture, where the patter and patterns of the corporation increasingly take root; observable outcomes, measurable impact and performative productivity are what count (and are counted), as everyone knows by now. Nevertheless, and much to the chagrin of those who envisage a world where human effort is always and clearly in the service of public priorities, there is no getting around the fact that much of intellectual labour is, at base, a private affair, one that is substantially located in the act (and in times and spaces) of withdrawal.

Withdrawal has an almost universally negative connotation in public life, where it is treated as the ultimate transgression and disdained as retreat or defeat – the very opposite of engagement. However, to withdraw is also, crucially, to repair – both to go to a place and to mend. From this perspective, withdrawal is not merely a defeatist tack; rather, it is, or can be, direct action for a restoration of intellectual life – the kind that is free to ask (to fully engage with) impertinent questions – in settings that have practically banished it, made it inaccessible, or are attempting to monitor and monetise it according to terms not of our choosing.