Here and There #44
A potpourri. An interview with Nicholas Wolterstorff, a couple of McSweeney's articles for some comic relief, a wonderful article on nuns and death-row inmates, and some politics.
No apologies. I’ve just been in a state of mind that has made it difficult to write; the incoming information is daily overwhelming. The water under the bridge has been a raging rapids.
Nicholas Wolterstorff was recently interviewed by Pete Wehner. They’re both Christians, and Wolterstorff is a moral philosopher who is retired from Yale Divinity School. If you click through on one link in this batch, it should be this one. It’s that good.
McSweeney’s is a wonderful online magazine of humor (mostly), but often with a serious point. This article on why two-sentence headlines are bad uses a two-sentence headline—and that’s kind of the point. An easy and fun (and thoughtful) read.
Lawrence Wright, who wrote the definitive investigative book on the 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, a book that’s worth your time to read, has a long article in a recent New Yorker on how a small order of Catholic nuns came to visit and then become friends with women on death row in Texas. It’s a challenging, disturbing, and heartening read, in many ways. Reading it may change you. (The link is to a downloadable PDF.)
Can you take another dose of well-placed sarcasm? Here’s another McSweeney’s article, this one on how DOGE is really not uncovering anything that wasn’t already known. Sometimes humor is the best way to tell the truth.
France and the French for a long time have attempted to resist the incursion of foreign words, especially from English, into their language; they want to retain its distinctiveness, believing (rightly, I’m sure) that language is a part of their culture. This same thing is happening in Korea, which now is attempting to push back against incursions from English, Chinese, and Japanese. It’s an interesting issue.
Katherine Stewart, who has written the excellent and disturbing book Money, Lies, and God, has a long essay at The Contrarian on how closely connected the current president’s approach is tied to Christian nationalism. If you’re a Christian, and even if not, you should read her essay. And I recommend subscribing to The Contrarian if you’re a centrist/modestly left-of-center person, as I am (and I’m truly conservative in some ways; but you know how poorly labels convey what we believe nowadays).
Finally, Jonathan Rauch has a very helpful essay that explains the current presidency as a patrimonial approach to government, with shades of authoritarianism thrown in. It’s a quite helpful essay and, apart from my own reading, was recommended to me by several others.