Love of God cannot be constituted without love of neighbor, but neither can it be reduced to it.

It is not an exercise of privilege to eschew national news. It’s focus.

“Stop asking God to do what God has asked us to do” (person quoted in Jeremy Richards’ sermon today).

How long can I continue to fellowship with a people who see the Bible as a lesser claimant to the knowledge of God than themselves? NB: I’m not speaking only of the many good people of University Baptist & Brethren Church of whom this is true.

“Be yourself,” they say. “Stop trying to be someone else.” But what if who you are is wicked? But then again, who am I to judge myself? In any case, it seems to me the danger with “do the next right thing” is that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25). If I went with “do the next right thing” unchecked, I’d be lonely, because I’d always choose things I can control. “Do the next right thing” must be defined. And its definition is this: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

C’mon, Enneagram 8! Use your drive for power and control on your own thinking—namely, correct yourself when you are wringing your hands in the face of circumstances you can’t control or people who are speaking or acting in ways you don’t expect. It’s just a variation of the partially reformed perfectionist’s hack: I am not exhibiting self-control if I cannot...

In recent years, Jesus’ frequent use of the future tense in the causal clauses of the Beatitudes (among a few other, subtler evidences) has inclined me to think of them not as a set of timeless aphorisms (e.g., if-this-then-that precepts or visions of human flourishing), but instead more as an historical announcement in direct relation to Jesus’ advent—a sibling to Jesus’ claim in Luke 4:16-21 to being Himself the messianic fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-2, and a cousin to the Songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon slightly earlier in Luke.

Hence, when I’m translating or paraphrasing Matthew 5:3-11, I’m now given to rendering μακάριος, traditionally translated “blessed,” as “fortunate,” “lucky,” or most colloquially, “in for a treat” instead and to making explicit the Jesus-specific, redemptive-historical subtext I sense. Like this:

• [Now that I, Jesus, am here,] the poor in spirit are in for a treat, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
• Those who mourn are fortunate, because now they’ll...

My taste in music is an extension of Dad’s, rooted as it is in pre-1980s rockism and in melody-forward (but not treacly) Western classical music circa 1800–1950. I’m more than okay with that. I feel happy about it, in fact. It gives him and me a relational bridge, a line I have frankly underexploited. It also feels nice to know that a part of me I enjoy comes from somewhere. Is it weird to be thankful for your own taste in music?

For whatever it’s worth, here’s a six-hour playlist of Tchaikovsky recordings I’d love to hear again, harvested from a listening project with Travis. Among the pieces in it that I haven’t yet written about are:

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1870/1880)

Heifetz sure brings the fire, but it’s Julia Fischer—at twenty-two years old—who brings the truest spirit to this happiest of Tchaikovsky’s major works.

Eugene Onegin, Op. 24: “Kuda, kuda vï udalilis” (1879)

Opera is generally not for me. Eugene Onegin one is no exception. But “Kuda, kuda vï udalilis,” Lensky’s famous pre-duel aria, sung here by Sergei Lemeshev, who made the role of Lensky his stock-in-trade, is the exception to the no exception.

The Year 1812, Solemn Overture, Op. 49 (1880)

Antal Doráti and Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra re-recorded 1812 Overture four years after being the first to release a recording of the piece featuring the sound of actual cannon fire and church bells—because to Doráti, the first bells...

During my recent week in downtown Seattle, I watched many scooter riders flout the law by zooming down sidewalks despite the presence of pedestrians—and then heed the law by stopping at pedestrian traffic signals even when no automobile traffic was in sight. Go figure. Might makes right, I guess—and pedestrians frequently lose.

Carla: Sully, like, is stoicism.
Sully: I think I’m more absurdism.

Lord, may everything I do today be done out of a deep-seated, automatic regard for You and those around me as important, desiring Your joy and their prosperity.

May I have the self-control to act spontaneously and the spontaneity to be self-controlled.

Leave the gun, take the granola ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Just listened to: a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 (1878) by Antonio Pappano conducting Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia on Warner Classics (2007). Never before have I so enjoyed the back half of an any classical piece or (jazz, pop, or classical) album whose front half I described to myself while listening as “trashy” and “unmusical.” To be fair to Pappano, I think my problems with the first half are Tchaikovsky’s fault, not Pappano’s, and the latter’s conducting rendered tolerable what under Manfred Honeck was a glowering anti-carnival ride through the unhappy recesses of Tchaikovsky’s heart.

Here’s hoping that somehow that blatty first movement is a grower, because—the other movements! Second: Typically pretty Tchaikovsky (my daughter said was “very nice”) lent operatic, Italianate gravitas by Pappano and his Roman band. Third: Five minutes of charming, sometimes Looney Tunes pizzicato that remains grounded by its serious interpretation. Finale: I laughed out loud euphorically at this vigorous street party.

In a concordant, resolute response to Damon Krukowski’s brief “Revisiting the Pyramid of Inequality that is Streaming Music,” I remind myself that if I want humanity to keep recording music that isn’t of mass appeal—and I do—then assuming I have the means, I must buy records from the recorders and not merely rent them from the tech fiefs.

The kids aren’t the same age as they were before ✏️ 🎤 🎵 (That one’s actually from James.)

I’d change my mind in a heartbeat ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Every day is a revolution. ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Just listened to: a bunch of recordings of Tchaikovsky’s familiar symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet (1870/1880) as my inaugural part of a co-listening project with Travis. Of those, I enjoyed all of the following:

• Bernstein conducts NYPO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score to a 1950s movie.
• Muti conducts Philharmonia and Fischer conducts Budapest as if the composer had written the piece as the score to a 21st-century movie (which is weird in Muti’s case because he made the record in 1977).
• Abbado conducts Berlin as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score of real-life, magical fairy tale.
• Doráti conducts LSO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece so that Rite-of-Spring-era Stravinsky could conduct it (or eat it for breakfast).
• Pappano conducts Santa Cecilia as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as an opera.

Again, all are worth hearing, but I enjoy the Abbado third-best, the Doráti second-best—because it’s just so different and exciting and snarly—and the Pappano the mostest. Because let’s face it: Romeo and Juliet is squarely the sort of story out of which operas are born. The hi-fi recording helps here, too, of course.)

Just re-listened to: Calefax Reed Quintet’s recording (2012) of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741). The only Goldberg variations I need, although I do appreciate Jeffrey, Jonah, and Rube.

Just finished reading: A Failure of Nerve (1997) by Edwin Friedman, which Morgan recommended to me. It’s a partial application of Bowen family systems theory to family and institutional leadership. It was sometimes difficult to wrap my head around. But it seems like it might quietly change my life. I’m not going to summarize it, but I will jot down some of what I think I’m taking from it, the first chunk of which draws some connections with Martin Buber:

To get to I and Thou, you’ve first got to have an I. This is the “self-differentiation” Bowen and Friedman view as paramount. Otherwise, you’ll never get beyond I and It: using, pushing around, or simply passing by other people in your life.

One of the ways to do this, or perhaps better, one of the signs that you have done this, is that you manage your anxiety and reactivity by maintaining some emotional distance from your own thoughts and emotions and the thoughts and emotions of others. Not that you should be unsympathetic to...

It’s part of the routine, now, Éa. I haven’t missed a wibble wibble in a week!

— me

Just listened to: Teeth of Time (2025) by Joshua Burnside at the recommendation of my friend Josh (no relation). Arresting, sometimes brusque, close mic’d shiny-brogue Irish neo-folk to whose genre description we might occasionally add the affixes “glitch” or “-tronica.” Highly recommended.

One niggle: Would it be too much to ask Burnside to endow his songs with proper endings? I acknowledge that the title of the last track is “Nothing Completed” and that there’s a certain formal congruence between that idea and the fact that almost all the tracks here either fade into nothing quickly or come to a sheer, abrupt stop, but if he’s trying to tweak our aesthetic noses with this, he has in my case succeeded.

Just listened to: Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1978) as recorded just this year by the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Parvo Järvi. Other than the bell, this is almost certainly what I’d sound like if I had:

• one electric toothbrush sounding an A4,
• a commission to score a tragedy, and
• a few dozen of me, humming.

Seen from another angle, this is Adagio for Strings, redux, except in the form of a single-chord prolation canon and probably even better suited to accompany Platoon. That Pärt wrote this to grieve to death of a man he’d never met fascinates me.

Just watched: The Great Escaper (2023), written by William Ivory and directed by Oliver Parker. “Sweet without straying into sentimentality,” reads Rotten Tomatoes. “Moving relationship stories,” reads one of the movie’s genre tags on Letterboxd. They’re both right. But where’s blurb that reads: “Never has a cozy movie carried so much potential for human moral development”? A culture grows hale and virtuous if we all watch this film.

Now, none of its lessons are novel:

• Kindness goes a long way—but it often requires courage.
• War is hell.
• Lifelong commitment to another human is heaven.
• Enjoy life.
• Grieve life. (Do not stuff it.)

Yet the lessons came to me in an inspiring, beautiful way that made me cry tears of guilt and gratitude: Guilt for my lack of gratitude (and thus joy) in life, and gratitude for the guilt.

And of course, the other lesson is one about the craft of filmmaking: If you’re directing Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson (may she rest in pace), you’ll probably do just fine if you simply tell your cameraman to just point his camera in their direction and let the film roll.