Finished reading: The Unbroken Thread by Sohrab Ahmari 📚

I expected a more direct treatment of tradition, whereas Ahmari’s book is really a collection of vignettes from significant figures (e.g., C. S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Howard Thurman, Alexander Solzhenitsyn) that are used to answer the title question of each chapter. (And which, I suppose, when taken together offer a cumulative case for “the wisdom of tradition.") Even so, it was a page-turner. Ahmari’s storytelling ability is impressive.

I’m calling for a moratorium on book subtitles of this ilk: “[Discovering/pursuing/seeking/etc.] ________ in an age of ______.”

Writers and publishers have fallen into a rut with this one. It’s so easy, but don’t reach for it. Resist the urge. Say it a different way. You can do it. I believe in you.

View of Dresden by Moonlight (1839) by J. C. Dahl:

Frederiksborg Castle (1814) by J. C. Dahl:

Currently reading: Reading the Gospels Wisely by Jonathan T. Pennington 📚

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.