“The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalizes us,” explains Maria Popova. “A full life calls for both — too much control, and we become mummified; too little excitement and pleasurable discombobulation, and we become numb. After all, to be overly bobulated is to be dead inside — to doom oneself to a life devoid of the glorious and ennobling messiness of the human experience.”
She rejoices over a book by Anne Lamott on organizing our chaos with hope.
Patrick Kurp remarks on the careful prose of Abraham Lincoln, whom he calls one of the greatest prose writers among U.S. presidents. And occasionally quite funny.
“In a letter he wrote from Springfield, Ill., to Mrs. Orville H. Browning on Jan. 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln, then a member of the Illinois General Assembly, tells a tall-tale, purportedly true, worthy of Mark Twain. It involves the matchmaking efforts of another friend on behalf of her sister.” Read on.
Everyone loves a good presidential birthday, don’t they? Your social media feeds are loaded with them. Birthday music has been playing non-stop for the whole week. We can get top appliances for 30% off this weekend #stopthemadness!
But let’s not limit our focus to Lincoln, once a licensed bartender, whose birthday is today, or to Washington, who had to borrow money to make it to his inauguration and whose birthday is February 22. Let’s celebrate presidential birthdays all year long. Come on, ring those bells, citizens. Most of the truthful information in this post comes from randomhistory.com.
February holds two more presidential birthdays. William Henry Harrison was born on February 9, 1773. His inaugural address was 100 minutes long, which roughly 0.25% of his entire term in office. He died of pneumonia on his 32nd day as president.
Ronald Reagan was born February 6, 1911. He took up eating jelly beans as a way to stop pipe smoking, and he developed partial hearing loss in one ear one a movie set when a gun was fired next to his ear. Continue reading Happy Birthday, Mr. President
Dorothy Sayers encourages readers to engage the work in their laps, not just kill time with it.
“Pray get rid of the idea that books are each a separate thing, divided from one another and from life. Read each in the light of all the others, especially in the light of books of another kind,” she says.
If you don’t like what you’re reading, think through your reasons. “Does the subject displease you? — and if so, is it by any chance one of those disquieting things that you ‘would rather not know about’, though you really ought not to shirk it? Does the author’s opinion conflict with some cherished opinion of your own? — If so, can you give reasons for your own opinion? (Do try and avoid the criticism that begins: ‘We do not like to think’ this, that or the other; it is often so painfully true that we do not like to think.)”
She also thinks marking up your book is foolish, perhaps because you won’t remember where to find your notes afterwards.
In response to this, Alan Jacobs observes the different occasions for reading and how they aren’t all the same. We read for fun and we read for specific purposes, and not necessarily at the same time.
What many of these people really want, it seems to me — and I base this on decades of talking with folks who are anxious about their reading — is not to read Henry James but to be the kind of person who, when left at loose ends, positively wants to read Henry James, wants to read Henry James so much that he or she will toss aside Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Fifty Shades of Grey without even noticing what they are in order to get to that precious copy of The Ambassadors that someone has inexplicably left at the bottom of a stack.
I think it’s okay not to be that person.
James K. A. Smith spoke to a collection of writers and editors for small journals on his love of magazines and principles for their development.
I believe in magazines. You could even say my devotion to Stoke ‘zine was a kind of “common grace” expression of believing in the sacramental power of the Word. It’s like I had a inchoate sense of the unique grace and influence of a word become flesh.
All of that to say: I believe in what you are doing, and it’s an honor to think with you about this calling to publish our little journals. To be committed to such endeavors is to believe, as Raymond Carver put it, in “small good things.”
. . .
My colleague Fr. Raymond de Souza, editor of Convivium magazine, recalls a conversation he once had with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the founder of First Things: “‘Raymond,” he said, “if you want to advance an idea, write a book. But if you want to change a culture, you need a magazine. Because magazines are literally periodical, they create an ongoing community—readers, writers, editors, benefactors. And only communities can change cultures.”
He offers a few high altitude principles and some practical tips on getting the work done. (via Justin Taylor)
I remember my high school history teacher explaining that though “fundamentalist” was a term of disapproval, all believers held to the fundamentals of the Bible, so we could all be called fundamentalists. That may have been one of the many encouragements I’ve received over the years that has made me comfortable with political and theological labels. I think I’m stepping away from that now.
Dr. Matthew Hall reviews Matthew Sutton’s new history of twentieth century evangelicalism, American Apocalypse. He says evangelicals tried to distinguish themselves from fundamentalists in different ways, but in fact they were more similar than they wanted to admit. “The entire tradition shares a premillennial expectation of an imminent and traumatic second coming of Christ,” Hall writes. Sutton believes that primary context shaped many theological doctrines.
American Apocalypse will make a great many evangelical readers uncomfortable. Because of his extensive work in primary sources, Sutton has—better than anyone else—documented the ways in which some of the most prominent, and beloved, white evangelical and fundamentalist figures were enmeshed within their own cultural context. This enculturation manifested itself routinely in anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and nativism. Whether it’s reading Harold Ockenga’s anti-Semitic assessment of Jews in Hollywood, or the myriad of voices justifying white supremacy and indicting racial intermarriage, Sutton shows how these attitudes weren’t on the fringe of the movement. Rather, they often inhabited its center.
Yesterday I linked to Anthony Sacramone’s announcement of a new edition of the Intercollegiate Review, over at Strange Herring.
Today, entirely by coincidence, he links to my interview at Issues, Etc.
Oh, who am I kidding? He goes into the Norman history of his Sicilian ancestors, and we Sicilians are all about scratching each other’s backs.
That’s a nice photo of me at the top of the blog post, too.
“When it comes to the intellectual life in our day, the fear of error—believing things as true when they are in fact false—far outweighs a desire for truth.”
Watch this lecture from First Things editor R.R. Reno on how critical thinking has become more like criticism as an end to itself.
A former employee of Pastor David Jeremiah’s ministry, Turning Point, has come forward with a report that his employer directed him to buy copies of Jeremiah’s book with his personal American Express card in order to boost market sale numbers. He asked for prepayment before making the purchases.
World has the story. “Tyndale House Publishers lists David Jeremiah as one of its authors. Todd Starowitz, the director of public relations at Tyndale, refused to answer specific questions, but he did issue this statement: ‘Tyndale House Publishers does not contract with anyone or any agency who attempts to manipulate best seller lists.'”
San Francisco’s Borderland Books, which currently makes only $3,000 profit annually, will be closing by the end of March, because the city’s voters passed a minimum wage hike, effectively putting a favorite bookstore out of business. One customer is quoted saying he didn’t think the wage hike would affect certain small businesses. Another said he loved the store and hoped it wouldn’t close.