“Baugh Creek, which received many animal packages [beavers, parachuted into remote valleys] from the sky, became so lush and verdant that the greenery clearly stood out from space. A 2018 wildfire torched the surrounding land, but Baugh Creek’s beaver-rich ‘emerald refuge’ resisted the blaze.” A lovely story about how beavers are integral to riparian ecology.
One of the spirits that is present in abundance in American culture just now is nostalgia. “I think nostalgia is deeply pernicious. But I think a connection with history—not just an understanding of history that might help us understand the present better, but a communion with it that makes it feel a part of us and us a part of it—is deeply important to a healthy society, and even to many people’s individual emotional health.” So says Noah Millman in this very helpful post on the importance of history
FIRE, the “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,” is a “free-speech watchdog” of sorts that I didn’t know anything about. I’m not sure I support everything they’re about, but just as there are 2nd Amendment organizations that are strong, this one’s strong on the 1st Amendment. It now has a 2023 Report Card for quite a few universities and colleges. It’s worth reading how they rate institutions; and note that there are a half-dozen “blue light” (they use, red, green, and yellow for the main categories) institutions. I found some of their information quite interesting.
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a documentary on Christian nationalism coming out within a couple of weeks that has Rob Reiner as the executive producer. The doc has been in the works for a couple of years; and various Christians such as David French and Kristin Kobes Du Mez were interviewed for it. Reiner, not a Christian, being the producer has generated a fair amount of criticism, from the both left and right, as Du Mez points out in this piece. If you prefer a podcast take on the documentary, listen to this one by Phil Vischer (of Veggie Tales fame; I’ve not listened to this podcast myself, so. . . .).
For people who’ve been wounded by the church, this essay by Karen Swallow Prior will resonate in significant ways. Some may be “ahead” of her, on the road, and others “behind” or even not yet or never on this particular road. But the description of where she’s at is powerful. “But perhaps we can take turns fighting, hold one another up, rest when we must—and be sure our own oxygen masks are on before we assist others.”
Back to history (well, I’d apologize; but I think history matters enormously). Alan Jacobs always makes me think, whether I agree with him or not. That’s good. In this short parable he makes the point how much we need a long view, a historical view, on any problem we have. Short-term fixes will rarely suffice.
Yes, I have an axe to grind: I’ve long supported public schools as one of the keystones of our democratic republic. Shared education in civics is critical to the functioning of our society. So claimed Thomas Jefferson when he founded the University of Virginia. That foundation is fraying at the edges, in part because of the diversion of taxpayer money to fund private academies. Every study I’ve read on the topic concludes what this essay says: voucher systems do not generate help for very many poor or underprivileged students to attend quality private schools; instead, they mostly fund students of middle or upper class parents who already are sending their children to private schools. Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature is planning to introduce universal vouchers in the 2025 legislature. You’ve been warned.
I pretty regularly read David Brooks, and he has an article in The Atlantic that I just read, in which he attempts to cover a whole lot of ground in service of the idea that negativity can be self-fulfilling, leading to more problems. There’s no doubt truth in that thought. But I found myself frustrated by his use of data in the article, discussing social changes between the 1950s and 1970s and applying them to millennials, who of course weren’t alive for those social changes. And much more. I don’t think Brooks is entirely wrong; but I do think it’s a terribly huge chunk of American social history to bite off and too much is crammed into the nooks and crannies of his thesis. What do you think?
I did not know the meaning of “retcon,” a word I don’t recall every encountering before this review of attempts to reinterpret the George Floyd death and conviction of Derek Chauvin, by means of an apparently badly flawed, very tendentious documentary. Radley Balko, who has looks in-depth at racism and law in the U.S. has the story. He seems to me to have it correctly; he’s a quite careful journalist.